No, I'm talking about spring and summer and fall. I'm talking about sitting in one's driveway after returning home at 10, 11, 12 at night and letting the motor run for, say, half an hour. Sometimes it's 2am. I've been woken from a dead sleep by an idling engine. I'm sorry, but what the hell is that about?
It's not like I've never lived in a city and I just can't handle the noise. I've lived in the French Quarter, smack across the street from the cop shop that liked to wait to turn on their sirens at 4am until they were right in the middle of the intersection outside my bedroom window. I've lived in Denver and San Diego, for chrissakes. I can handle a little ambient city noise.
But for some reason, the one thing I cannot stand is an idling engine. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the anticipation. You keep waiting for the rev, for the eventual takeoff that follows the drone. And it never comes. Like a stifled yawn, you're left irritatingly unsatisfied.
My neighbors, of course, are the worst offenders. The ones to the right (with the driveway right outside my bedroom window) will arrive at 1am in the warmer months, turn up their ridiculously tuned stereos, and let the music and the engines blare for a good hour or more, while they talk and drink and smoke and sell drugs and god knows what. (This is the same building whose tenants will take to sledding down their personal, 2-foot-wide ice floe at 3 or 4 in the morning, laughing and shouting and whooping it up far too early on a wintry weekday...)
To my left (or, more technically, right behind my kitchen wall), are the motorcycle enthusiasts. Oh, how I loathe them. Princess Pink and Mr. Green. Yes, these nicknames refer directly to their choices of cycle and matching gear color. Of course, to be accurate, it should really be Mr. Neon Green. I'm sorry, do I sound bitter and judgmental?
Hmm, perhaps it's due to the fact that I have to listen to them idle in our building's driveway for a solid half-hour every time they return home. Um, what the hell? You warm the engine up before you go for a ride, not after. (But then, you don't warm it up at all in this heat...) What, pray tell, is the purpose? And must you blast that godawful southern rap while you do it?
I've never been a fan of motorcycles. True, I own a moped. But I only work on it during daylight hours and I kill the engine the moment I reach the driveway. There is no needless revving of motors, no irritating idle. I have more respect for my neighbors than that.
And maybe that's what it all comes down to. Maybe, having grown up in the west, where the expansion was vast and the crowding of the metropolitan areas was slow, I feel bad about encroaching on my neighbors' auditory space. And maybe, having been crowded into the tiny sardine can of the original 13 for well over a century, Easterners just don't give a shit anymore.
Or maybe I'm just getting old...
