Neighbors

Every time the dog next door barks I ring a large bell.  I keep it on the end table next to my couch so it's always right there.  I think it's an old railroad conductor's bell -- it's pretty big and it's loud.  The dog barks and I ring the bell a few times.  Every time I ring the bell my neighbors on the other side pound on the wall and shout at me.  They can't hear the dog but they can sure as hell hear my bell.

Pounding on the wall and shouting doesn't do anything though.  I know firsthand.  I tried it with the people with the dog next door and nothing ever happened except they gave me dirty looks when I carried my laundry past their door.  The bell doesn't work either, at least if you define "working" as "make the dog stop barking," but they have stopped giving me dirty looks.  They don't bother anymore.  They look groggy all the time because they don't sleep well, with all my bell ringing.

Every time I ring the large bell when the dog next door barks the dog upstairs barks.  It's usually a pretty quiet dog.  I only hear it bark when I ring the bell.  The upstairs dog doesn't bother me that much.  The ceilings and floors seem to be sound-proofed better than the walls and it isn't such a loud dog anyway.  But the dog next door hears the barking and that makes it bark again and so I have to ring my bell again until it stops.  The people upstairs stomp on their floor sometimes when I'm ringing my bell and their dog is barking but they're not home a lot and when they are home they're usually having enough trouble shutting up their own dog that they don't even have the luxury of worrying about the bell.

My shower leaks.  When I take a shower it leaks black, mold-smelling water down into the bathroom of my downstairs neighbor.  My downstairs neighbor spends most of my showers in his bathroom mopping up water (I imagine) and pounding on his ceiling with a broomstick until I turn the water off.  The leak is on my end so they'd have to come in my apartment to fix it but whenever the maintenance guy knocks I turn everything off and pretend I'm not home.  For a while now.  So now every time I take a shower my downstairs neighbor leaves his trash bags outside my door.

That's how the bugs got in.  From my downstairs neighbor's trash.  The whole building's got them now.  Big ugly black things that make a screaming noise when you come near them with the Raid can.  They came into my apartment through my downstairs neighbor's trash and after a few days I managed to chase them all into the vents which I then blocked up with paper towels.  So now the bugs crawl through the vents and drop down into other people's apartments and land in their hair and food and stuff.  Every once in a while a bug will get through the paper towels back into my apartment but for the most part I don't have to deal with them anymore.  The dogs don't like the bugs.  They're the cause of a lot of barking.

Someone dropped a can of paint on me yesterday when I was bringing my clothes back from the laundromat.  Not the can itself, just the paint.  I didn't see who it was.  Someone who lives on a higher floor.  Covered me and most of my clean clothes in green.  I took a nice, long, hot shower after that.

Someone said to me once, that the hurt in the world is a fixed amount, and you can't subtract from it, but you can take as much hurt as you can bear for yourself, and wrestle it to the ground and cover it up, and hold it down tight so it can't get out and no one knows it's there and it can't hurt anybody else but you.  Until you die and all the hurt you held spills out into all the people who loved you.  But fuck that, I'd rather ring my bell.  We got stuck with this shitty universe, so we should at least be able to register our complaints.  I'll ring my bell until God hears it and stomps this awful building like an anthill and snuffs this planet out between his fingers like a weak match.