Ear Window

There's this guy who plays his electric guitar as though no one lives around him and that his room is sound proofed and padded to keep the trashy sounds he creates as if he's Slash or Jimmy Page. He goes on for hours on end playing just about the same song he's trying to perfect week after week. I could only picture a frustrated kid who looks like he sucks at everything else and has no life besides being inconsiderate and irresponsible and disillusioned.

A few windows down a middle-aged woman jabbers her heart out in the morning when she wakes to share her gossip of the day with the world. Not wanting to keep anything secret she carries on as though the person on the other side can't hear her in her overbearing tone of voice dissing a third party who must have rubbed her up the wrong way. Like the one-prick-band who crunches an awful tune she hangs on the phone for her dear life the entire morning relating someone else's life story.

And farther up the back lane, a family comes back home at one in the morning, chats at the top of their voices, cackles like banshees and plays loud music from their CDs until two or when they run out of things to say. They go about this ritual almost every night or every other night like that bastard kid and that loquacious crone oblivious to the fact that other people in the back rooms that face the lane together might be sleeping. Even in deep slumber they are able to shake me up and spare not a moment to irritate the hell out of me.

As I sit and wonder what I could do to make them pay for what their inconsiderateness I cracked my fingers to the bones and plot out a list of things I could do to make life miserable for them. Even death if necessary. I could write a nasty letter to each and every one of them as the first step to the execution. Then I would begin by damaging small insignificant things like their cars, roof tiles, windows, lawn or dump some deteriorating carcasses, putrid organic matters or despicable wastes to their homes. Or I could wait for them to leave the house and track them down to scare the shit out of them in the darkness.

Maybe I could play them all up and get them to kill each other instead. I could imitate their jarring sounds and amplify them in the night to drive them to the edge of insanity. That way I will have my hands clean from man handling any of these awful creatures myself. Out of disgust for one another they might just hack each other to death if the push comes to shove, and I will make sure of that. I can make sure of that!

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, this is my Ear Window so to speak. I don’t see them, I don’t know who they are but I know they are exasperating as hell. And to me, people like that should be taught a lesson or two so they’ll learn. As I sit here sharpening the machete I’m thinking of doing it the best way I know how, instant death.