cww.blog!

I've been having problems lately with my neighbor's music. He owns the condo under mine, and he has a stereo that he often turns up so loud that I can hear not only the bass but also the words to the music! The floor shakes, the walls rattle, my wine glasses clank together on the stemware rack, my pots vibrate against each other on the pot rack, and the devil on my shoulder wants me to go downstairs and shove his face onto his lit stovetop. If you go try to talk to him about the music, your first impression is that it's going to be a difficult thing to do because the music can be heard from well beyond the bottom of the stairs to the front door. Once you get up there, the barking of his dog doesn't quite overcome the obscenity of his back-woods West Virginia hillbilly accent, so you're forced to try to decipher English words among the din of his music, a dog's bark, and an uneducated accent. Then, when you can finally hear what he's saying, it occurs to you that he's telling you off. This guy seriously needs an anvil dropped on his face, and I really wish it was legal to do so.

This morning at 2:30, I called the Pittsburgh Police. They showed up very quickly, and the volume of his music was soon lowered to a point at which I felt comfortable going to sleep. Mind you, I could still feel the bass in the floor and through the bed. At 11:00 this morning, I awoke to the sound of his bass.

I've told my landlady about this numerous times, and she insists she's talking with my neighbor via email. While she holds no sway over what he does, he did buy his condo from her, so they know each other much better than I know him, and maybe something she says will make his decency axons stop misfiring.

Meanwhile, I have to wonder why I am constantly neighbor to people who like to run their stereos at ridiculously loud levels in the middle of the night? This happened at several places where I lived in Dallas, and something similar happened in Portland. The guy in Portland liked to play video games at all hours with his subwoofer planted firmly against our shared wall. Portland's noise ordinances only allowed the police to respond to a complaint between certain hours at night, and I found this out by calling the police once during the afternoon and having my request rejected. I haven't been able to find a Pittsburgh noise ordinance list on the Internet, so maybe I'll have to discover this one the hard way, too.

Anyway, this guy is a resident in radiology at a hospital near Duquesne University, so he's presumably been through medical school, and he also is presumably intelligent enough to realize people need to live their lives without their walls shaking. Alas, my reasoning must be folly.