Since last July neighbors and I have been forced to deal with an intractable problem. A man who lives just across the intersection acquired a professional-grade karaoke system and has held approximately 35 blindingly loud parties in a doorless garage. His music can often be heard five blocks away; this close it’s like a jackhammer to the brain. <\/p>\n
When asked to turn the music down, the man smiles, nods — and goes right on doing exactly what he wants to do. Sometimes he responds by turning the volume up<\/i>. The police come out. They make him lower the noise to something more tolerable (but still plainly audible inside our houses). He keeps it low for an hour or two. But his next party goes on at full blast.<\/p>\n
I’ve never called the cops on him. Not my style. Others have done the calling. But I talked to him three times and when that failed, I got his landlady to chat with him. That — and winter weather — gave peace-loving neighbors a small break. For a few months we had to put up with “only” two parties a month, not the two a week we endured last summer.<\/p>\n
Then suddenly this week we had springlike weather — and he threw three parties-from-hell in four days. The first brought two calls to the police. The next two featured lower volumes of music — but a crowd of people dancing and shouting in the street.<\/p>\n
This emphatic return of jackhammer music and unneighborly behavior triggered a community crisis — and an awakening.<\/p>\n
And the whole process feels like something freedomistas, or could-be-freedomistas, are going through in the wider world.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
People in this neighborhood pretty much keep to themselves. I’ve learned just this week that all last summer people were thinking pretty much what I was: “This is godawful. But surely it’ll be only temporary.” <\/p>\n
Then we moved on to, “I can’t stand this one more minute. But nobody else seems to mind. Maybe I’m just some grouchy old weirdo.” <\/p>\n
We would jam in our earplugs or crank up our own music and spend his party evenings gritting our teeth and fantasizing about clever, bold, devious — and entirely unrealistic — ways we’d get that bastard. We felt impotent. Our lack of ability to change the situation enraged us perhaps more than the actual noise did.<\/p>\n
The first sign I saw that others were suffering came when one of the tenants in Mr. Karaoke’s building heard one of my requests for quiet, came to my house a few days later, and begged me to call the police. He said he didn’t have a phone, but also that he was too scared<\/i> to call on a nearby pay-phone — that he feared Mr. K and his friends would punish him. (This despite the fact that Mr. K has never threatened violence to anybody.) Too scared<\/i>.<\/p>\n
He’s the one who told me the police had already been out several times. So others are<\/i> upset. But who are they? Where are they? <\/p>\n
Realizing I was no longer just speaking for myself finally gave me more gumption, more motivation. That’s when I got the landlady to buy us that (unfortunately temporary) reprieve.<\/p>\n
Then came false hope. When a week would go by without a party, we’d all breathe a sigh of relief and think, “Thank God. Maybe it’s over now.”<\/p>\n
Because we were in this state of hopeful denial, this week’s three noise-fests just devastated us. We finally had to face the fact that absolutely nothing had been solved and that as we looked with anticipation toward the coming months of better weather we’d also have to cringe with dread, knowing that every pleasant day might be turned hellish by this one man.<\/p>\n
I know this thought process was common because this week’s return of chaos finally<\/i> got neighbors talking with each other. Our angry, frustrated thoughts poured out. We belatedly realized that we were well-and-truly stuck with this situation and neither the police nor the landlady, despite all their visits to and talks with the culprit, were going to save us. We would have to come up with our own plan. We would have to stomp our own snakes.<\/p>\n
But even after being smacked in the face with reality and making the first tentative beginnings of an organization, we weren’t quite ready to believe that we had exhausted all the possibilities of the “people in charge.”<\/p>\n
And as it turned out, “people in charge” really did have one more part to play — even though I’m pretty sure it will end up being the part that goes: “Well, we really couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we hadn’t tried every, single last means of working within the system. Now we really<\/i> know we’ll have to take care of it, ourselves alone.”<\/p>\n
This whole thought\/action process sounds ridiculously — and sadly — familiar doesn’t it?<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
More tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since last July neighbors and I have been forced to deal with an intractable problem. A man who lives just across the intersection acquired a professional-grade karaoke system and has held approximately 35 blindingly loud parties in a doorless garage. His music can often be heard five blocks away; this close it’s like a jackhammer to the brain. When asked to turn the music down, the man smiles, nods — and goes right on doing exactly what he wants to do. Sometimes he responds by turning the volume up. The police come out. They make him lower the noise to…<\/p>\n