so as you probably all know by now, i harbor resentment for my neighbors. perhaps it’s because i’m too old for my environment, but i don’t really know what i’m supposed to do about that, i was here first.

there’s a gaggle of guys 21 and under in this building. although there’s only a couple/few years between us, we’re worlds apart. i may as well be 60 years old. there’s an apartment of nerds down the hallway, they don’t know they’re nerds but they are. when you smoke a cigar on the front stoop every sunday & wear studded belts and listen to blink128, and happen to also be a republican seemingly only for the sake of starting inane arguments, you are a nerd. retract & edit: you are a tool. but they don’t really bother me unless i see them, which isn’t so often. we don’t share walls, thank goodness. some nights they have all their lame friends over in their tank tops, and on fun nights like last night, they all smash glass bottles and piss out the top floor windows. they draw pictures of dicks and tape them onto the front of THEIR OWN FRONT DOOR. other times, they post passive aggressive notes all over the hallways.

last night, one of them had a liquid courage conversation with a girl outside in the nook outside my front door. i was in my living room on the other side of that wall working, and the walls in this place are paper thin. the root of all my residence problems. and i’ll skip the dialogue, but i could hear every blessed word. i was sitting at my table, thinking GO FOR IT NEIGHBOR! (he didn’t, totally missed the boat) o-m-g. i can never believe my ears around here, really.

it’s really the guys upstairs. i curse them with every step i hear them take. i spend most of my day cursing them. but seriously. jason lives above me, and spends his day smoking cigarettes in his blue bathrobe. hey jason! no one wants to see you in your bathrobe. i’m serious. i’ve learned that we have the same school schedule because we come in & out of the building at similar times, so it seems like we always end up inside at the same time. and i’ve learned that jason spends the other part of his day smoking his bong— i assume this based on periodic spells of coughing & hacking & hawking loogies. i don’t actually even know if he smokes pot (he does), but this is what i’ve deduced. yes, i can hear this all through the ceiling.

i have never actually formally met jason. i mean we’ve said hello in passing, but i’m not interested. i know his name is jason, because one day i was coming back into the building, and a woman waiting in the parking lot asked me if i knew jason. i said no.

jason has not always lived above me, he’s subletting this semester from dan— an angel in comparison. so nice and handsome, really just quiet(er). he is in spain or somewhere. dan, if you’re reading this (not a chance): I MISS YOU.

the woman told me that she was jason’s mother, she told me which apartment he lived in and i said, oh, he lives above me. and she laughed and said, “well he’s the one making all the noise!” and i gave the woman a tight-lipped smile and opened the door for her. in my mind i thought “you have no idea. did you raise jason in a barn?”

jason listens to lame music. and he listens to it loud. he listens to dispatch, and all the worst beatles songs; he listened to “rock the boat” one day three times in a row; i mean i listen lame shit too, but not exclusively. he turns it up so he can hear it outside below while he smokes so many cigarettes. jason smokes so many cigarettes, that i’ve grown certain that he just keeps smoking them, hoping that the next one will finally make him the badass he thinks he is when he’s outside, in the day time, in his fucking bathrobe. navy terrycloth has never looked more unbecoming.

jason also has a soul patch. if you don’t know what that is, you are lucky.

i stay up late. i always have, i probably always will. often times i wish i wouldn’t, but since i do, i think of my favorite hours as the usually silent ones, long after midnight. well jason apparently likes those hours too. perfect. jason makes a loud bang, every morning at 4:30am. even when i’m asleep, it wakes me up. even when i wear ear plugs. —whatever, yeah i wear earplugs. i have irrational insensitivity to noise, i can’t control it, you have no idea.— and then he bangs around throughout the rest of the early morning. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, JASON? when i’m awake at that time, i’m reading or writing, or watching a full season of something. not throwing things on the floor.

for a while i was certain that jason must be playing wii, or something idiotic. then my list grew: jumping jacks, bouncing a super ball, lifting 5-10 pound weights and then dropping them because he can’t handle it, falling asleep with open books & letting them land on the ground, playing tag with himself, and the list goes on. i figure the 4:30am leap and land out of bed must be from a small bladder, and then he can’t fall back asleep so he paces with steel-toed boots on until he gets tired. one night i’m nearly certain he was playing a hand drum. he was probably just jamming to his guster cd.

i don’t really have anything else to say, which is probably better. i know people say, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” which i do sometimes agree with, but sometimes, even if you don’t have anything nice to say, you’ve just gotta get it out. i have been internalizing my disdain for the person who lives above me, and it’s unhealthy. i have burdened myself, and jason— a near total stranger, with the bad energy above my head; bad energy where i sleep; loud thumps in the night that stomp out my dreams. i think i need to feng shui this joint.