Everyone should have my problems

I'm thinking about moving. Anyone know of a place / a person here in NYC in need of a housemate? I'd be a good one. The issue revolves around the families who live above me. They don't seem to realize how audible everything they do is. Plus, they have the entire upstairs, and know each other, it seems, and as a result they don't have any reason to keep their doors closed as they play music or permit their children to, like, ride Big Wheels down the hallway. They don't have the same consciousness of the noise they make that, for example, I have. When I come home at 1 or 2 a.m., I remove my shoes. (People live below me, as well, you see.) I ease doors closed. I tiptoe. I listen to all of my music on my headphones, which are changing the silhouette of my face I wear them so often. In general I am considerate as all get-out. The Upstairs People? No. Not hardly. Still I hear them tromp around: it's 12:08 a.m.

Two aspects especially affect the scale of this matter's impact on me. One, there's very little stasis up there. Take me. I start occupy a room and make noise only when I'm a) getting settled or b) getting up. For large periods of time, for the vast duration of my occupancy of a room, I make no noise. I'm occupied, doing things, busy doing quiet things. The UP don't do that. There's constant noise. Furniture-sliding-type scraping sounds. Footsteps all the time. Faster kid-footsteps, also occurring frequently. And two, the walls are very thin and I live right off the stairwell. So I'm not only getting bass through my ceiling, I'm also getting treble through my un-weather-stripped door and four walls.

Is it wrong to take solace in a double vodka tonic? I've gone so long without. Today I finally went in for some v., Svedka v. from Sweden. Normally I go with the Comrade, which is to say Stolichnaya, "my family label." (By practice, not by actual familial or business-related connections.)

Honestly, most of my frustration on this noise issue stems from the fact that I allow myself to get so bent out of shape about it. Without adequate silence I can't think straight, because I'm afflicted with this like syndrome of automatically visualizing whatever it is I hear. I can't not visualize it. So I can't write when I hear noises I can't see the sources of. (This is why I can write, and write quite productively, in cafes: all of the bustling cafe-noise has an identifiable source.) And when I can't write well, mercy does a red curtain ever descend on my vision. Those of you who know me would be surprised at some of the bleak visions I've entertained when unable to write due to inconsiderate noise. But as I was saying a good amount of my frustration can be chalked up to my guilt that I can't just deal with said noise, that I can't endure it and work through it, that I can't be better than it. Today I did the smart thing and said Screw you guys, I'm going to my favorite cafe/wine bar (which is actually really funny to say in Cartman from South Park's voice). But I shouldn't have to screw out of here whenever the UP are home. I shouldn't be so thrown off track. Music helps, especially narcotic-type guitar fuzz albums like those of, oh, Sonic Youth and certainly recently My Bloody Valentine. And I suppose deep breaths will help as well. And what else? Oh yeah: moving.

But as the post title says, everyone should have my problems. I've got a tall icy magical beverage, wrote a prose poem involving my dead grandmother and Galactus Devourer of Worlds from Marvel Comics fame, and also wrote 4,000+ words of Good Ground. Themes begin to cohere, even if the plot is still inchoate. I keep thinking of metaphors for describing my conception of the plot, but I keep discarding those metaphors. Nothing sounds quite right. It's rather fascinating though to watch, the novel. It's - ooh! - like watching a planet coalesce from a cloud of dust and gas: I know that it will, cohere that is, but I don't know which regions of dust or gas will cohere first. Everything's aswirl.

By the way, it's alright to leave comments. Who knows, maybe I have no readers and therefore no potential commentators. But I suspect not. Feel welcome to contribute, here, fellows! I don't do this for my health. I do it at least in part for your health: go listen to Stars's song "Calendar Girl" - which was the song of the last "Name That Tune" post, which no one even tried to name. S'alright. You'll get 'em next time, Champ! Ace! Cap'n! Tiger! Sport!