Justifiable Complaining

We live in a nice flat. It's got plenty of space and big windows that look out onto the drying green. We can walk to our allotment and to the library and there's a bus stop right at the end of the drive. We usually like living here a lot, but occasionally we have experiences in which we're jolted awake by our next door neighbor arriving home at 2:00 a.m. with 7 of his closest friends and a case of alcohol. It then sounds like they begin rearranging the furniture above us and reciting all the expletives they know at top volume. Steve's a heavier sleeper than I am, so it takes him longer to wake up during our neighbor's parties and, usually, while my head is starting to explode, Steve is still half asleep and giving me a patient tutorial on proper earplug usage and singing little half songs about ducks. (Sometimes I think Steve is having a really rockin' time every night in his sleep if his half-conscious mumblings are any indication.) Then he wakes up all the way, acknowledges that the neighbor must be taken down, and calls the police. THEN we lie awake, asking one another if that new sound we hear is the police arriving. It's important to anticipate their arrival (sometimes I go downstairs and sit on the kitchen sink, so I can see down into the parking lot and watch for them), because before coming up to shut down the furniture rearranging party, they will buzz our flat to let them in the security door. And the buzzer will wake up the rest of the building, because it was installed for an 800-year-old woman and sounds like a tornado siren. THEN Steve crouches at the mail slot in the door so he can hear the conversation between the police and the neighbor. And then we go back to bed and say things to each other like, "I want them all taken down to the police station and shot." Even though our normal conversation to one another is, "I like puppies." And "Rainbows are nice."

Last night I had to call the police twice, because the neighbor did not shut down his party after the first police visit. It was someone's birthday, you see, which is a two-police-visit kind of celebration.

And that is why I'm too tired to shred up the 10 lbs of zucchini sitting on my kitchen counter. Instead, I'm going to light the vegetables on fire and shove them through our neighbor's mail slot.