In The Night

I’ve been sleeping with the windows open and paying the price. I’m reminded how whoever wrote In The Still of The Night must have had central air. The still of the night is not really so still. Life goes on with or with out natural light to shine the way just because its night time or three in the morning, life does not stop. Cars don’t stop cruising past, cops and ambulances and fire trucks run their sirens, assholes play their stereos too loud as they drive past. Birds make a lot of noise at night too.

The drug dealer and his friends make a big show of turning their lights off and shutting the doors but it doesn’t make their dogs bark less or end the parade of people who still drop by to “visit”. I think they officially close down at about midnight but I shut down at eleven. That leaves a whole hour of noise making and stereo blasting discrepancy in our sleep cycles. Sometimes they just sit outside and talk and talk and talk loudly enough for me to hear them but not loud enough for me to understand them. Bastards. If I am going to have to be party to their conversations, I want to be able to eaves drop.

Occasionally an argument will break out and they will achieve real volume but these get broken up quickly - in their defense they try to limit the screaming fights to the day light hours – Good Neighbors limit their shrieking profanities at each other to The Family Hour. Where is the FRC when I need them?

Last night I was woken up at some point, actually several times, Thank you Kitty! . I try not to check the clock. My rational being that if I know what time it is that I am lying there awake – I am awake and if I don’t know what time it is I am not really “awake”. Once I have looked at the clock, it’s all over. I am really awake at that hour and I can spend the next X amount of hours thinking about it and I know what time my alarm goes off and I end up laying their depressed because I’m only going to get X amount of sleep and work is going to suck starting at about 2:30pm when I am, too tired to do anything but I have to do something...

I have tried to fix this problem by never looking at the clock when I get woken up Thank you Kitty for knocking the phone off the table! Love it!. It also helps me fool myself into believing that I’m not really awake and that I went right back to sleep after not really being awake but occasionally, it happens and once that happens I know want time it is I and I morph into a clock watcher and I will wake up ever ten minutes to make sure I didn’t accidentally sleep though my alarm.

I was not “woken up” first by Kitty playing with the phone and then by either a baby crying or the feral cats fighting outside. The noise seemed to go on too long to be cats fighting but it seemed too high pitched to be a baby’s cry. Whatever it was it took place right under my window and was endless. The drug dealer is sleeping with his windows open too and one of those open windows may be a bedroom, so it could have been a restive baby or it could have been the cats - they’re fixed not lobotomized