Why I am tired today.

Last night, Annie and I went to bed around midnight, hoping for a nice full night of sleep. Instead, we were both woken up at 3:30 AM by the pounding bass of the metal music our downstairs neighbors were playing.

Now, you have to understand, our neighbors play loud music all the time, but usually, it’s at reasonable hours, and we’ve only had to go ask them to turn it down because we’re trying to sleep a handful of times over the last couple years.

The music last night was different. First of all, it was silent in the house until 3:30 AM. Secondly, the music was much louder than it has ever been. The windows were rattling in their frames, and the floor was shaking. And finally, they were standing outside screaming at each other. Not angry screaming, it was more like trying-to-hear-each-other-over-the-noise-screaming. Annie and I are both pretty heavy sleepers, and it woke us both up out of solid sleep. It wasn’t like we had just drifted off, either, we’d both been asleep for a few hours.

Annie went downstairs to ask them to turn it down. Through the floor, I could only hear the music for the first few minutes, until she started knocking louder. Then louder. Then pounding on the door. Then kicking the door. No one answered the door. Finally, someone turned the music down (to the point where it was merely enough to clearly hear through the floor), at which point, they must have heard her, because a second later, I heard her shouting “IT’S TUESDAY NIGHT!”

When she came back upstairs, she said that the guy who finally answered the door didn’t even live there, and after she yelled at him, he just got in his car and left.

The music stayed on, and loud enough to keep me awake for another hour, cursing their names, and thinking about calling the police, but never quite loud enough to make me get out of bed and go down there to complain again.