I have had it. They have had plenty of time to mend their ways, and they have not only ignored all the chances I have given them to avoid the heavy hammer of justice, they have increased their attacks on my person and thus have given me no choice but to deliver swift, brutal, damning justice on their benighted heads by the most soul-wrackingly punitive measure available to me.

I’m going to bitch about them on a blog that literally mulitples of people read.

May whatever God will have such miserable wretches in his flock take undeserved mercy on their shriveled, malignant souls.

Who am I talking about? Hmmm….. I got so into my purple prose that I forgot.

Oh right! The people working destruction and construction next door to the apartment complex in which I dwell like an urban hermit.

I am a fairly mellow guy, all considered. I am not the type to get bent out of shape about a little neighborhood ruckus. I am no NIMBY, going off like a sack of wet fireworks every time anything, however slight, deviates from the increasingly taut and strident vision of The Perfect Suburbia I Deserve God Dammit should happen to occur. I grew up in a busy residential neighborhood with people mowing lawns, kids playing in big groups, people doing a little carpentry in the back yard, and the usual hubbub of modern urban life does not phase me a bit.

And I know the world can’t very well bend itself around the convenience of us day sleepers. It’s a nine to five world and it’s going to stay that way for a long time. My own unstuck-in-time existence might run to a far more baroque and syncopated beat, but I can hardly get mad at everyone doing what everyone is doing. If you catch my drift.

But god dammit, this is getting freaking ridiculous.

I mean, for one thing, these assholes have been at it for two weeks now. It started with a single day of truly horrifying loud crunching sounds separated by high pitched squealing, like an angry giant beaver was ripping apart sequoias in a maple syrup fueled rage in a box canyon. This was the demolition process of one of the nearby homes.

“Wow, that was nasty. ” I thought. “But life goes on, and stuff’s gotta get done, and some of that stuff is just plain gonna be loud. At least it’s over now. ”

Oh, such innocence. I tremble with rage to think of how that dear sweet man of long ago’s naive faith has been violated!

Next day, the noises kept going. Now it was different, though. The loud horrifying crunches were replaced by extremely loud metallic rattling sounds at random moments. The high pitched demonic squealing remained, however, because honestly, when you have a hit like that, you just run with it.

Also, now a liberal dollop of other sounds was mixed in, such as loud crashing sounds as of someone dumping a load of ore processing castoffs and broken guitar necks into a quarry, or the sudden alarming high intensity vibrating sound of some piece of heavy machinery that I assume rapes Smurfs or something, and just for fun, bursts of swearing in Cantonese.

Well, I think it’s swearing. Honestly, anything said in Cantonese sounds like swearing to me. They could be shouting love poetry at each other, I wouldn’t know.

And the thing is, these noises have been going on for two freaking weeks.

And the god damned noises never change. It’s always the same collection of psychological warfare tools. This suggests to me that these people are in absolutely no hurry to get their work done and cease their audio assault on my peaceful slice of suburban quietude.

I have even found myself entertaining wild fantasies that they are actually using the noise to attempt to extort a bribe from us nerve-wracked residents.

“No offers yet? OK, let’s start using the machine that sounds like oil drums half-full of metal wind chimes rolling around in the drum of a cement mixer!”

You know you are on your last half a nerve when stuff like that starts seeming plausible.

Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it. They do their work during regular business hours, when most people are at work, and so I can’t make a noise complaint. All I can do is endure, try to keep all my straws and marbles, and bitch about it on the Internet.

Thank you, Internet. I feel a little better now.