i can't find the words

We’ll ignore this unpleasant reality for now. Happy thoughts, yes?

—

If you’ve seen my apartment (or pictures of it), you know (or have some inkling) that I have a gigantic wall. A quick estimate tells me it’s at least 12 feet high (up to maybe 15 in places) and 48 feet long. And insted of being a nifty brick wall, it’s drywall painted, oh, Pantone 468. Which is to say it’s a giant beige slab.

I’m not so good at decorating. You could come over today and get the impression that, although I am very much moved in, I haven’t been here very long. The lack of lamps and rugs and tchotchkes and things hanging on the wall belies that I’ve lived here 16 months. Don’t get me wrong — I’d love to have the apartment look a little more permanent, but I have no confidence in my interior-design abilities. Which is why I generally only get this sort of thing accomplished when my mom is visiting.

(To wit, the first three months I lived in Jacksonville, my living-room setup consisted of: an aquarium, an aquarium stand, a folding chair and my TV (which sat on the floor). But my parents came to town one weekend, and I bought: a couch, a recliner, a large rug, a TV stand, a coffee table, a kitchen table with chairs, a little cart for the kitchen and a dresser.)

Getting back to the enormous bare wall, I’ve already decided that the easiest thing to do is get one giant piece of art. Unrealistic, I know. Such large art is expensive and hard to come by, and I’m maybe a little picky. But I nearly jumped out of bed a few hours ago when I saw this 5'x10' objet in my Harper’s:

!!!!!

Now: How to procure $250,000?

… and I buy one pretty much every week.

My downstairs neighbor, I don’t know whether he’s new or whether he just has a loud alarm clock. What I do know is that he’s been waking me up almost every day for the past three weeks, and that godforsaken alarm is set for 6 a.m., which is several hours closer to my bedtime than to any time I’d ever want to be getting out of bed.

Let me explain: There’s this large black pipe that runs through my bedroom. It mostly drains rain from the roof, though it also serves as an surprisingly echo-y tube for pigeons to coo down into. And now, for my neighbor’s clock to clang up into. As noisy as it is, and as clearly as I can hear it, I may as well get rid of my own alarm.

It’s not just that the alarm is loud — I can fall back asleep after an accidental awakening. Another problem is that it keeps ringing, like this:

RINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRI
NGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRING

30 seconds later:
RINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRI
NGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRING

30 seconds later:
RINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRI
NGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRING

30 seconds later:
RINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRI
NGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRING

Et cetera.

So it’s loud, and it rings until turned off. Two strikes. But No. 3, No. 3 is the real problem: My neighbor is OK with sleeping through it for hours at a time. That alarm — which, remember, is set for 6 on the dot — is sometimes still jangling away at 9. I don’t get it.

Somehow, I managed to deal with this until Wednesday. Wednesday, though, I was not in a patient mood. I’d had trouble falling asleep in the first place, my ear hurt and it must’ve been 90 degrees in my apartment. I needed to be asleep. And that alarm, that blasted alarm, kept me up from 6 to 8. That point of frustration where you’re just about to give up and start crying, that’s where I was. So I stumbled out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and walked down a flight of stairs and knocked on the guy’s door.

The alarm? It immediately stopped.

I waited, and could hear someone walk up to the door. He looked at me in the eyehole awhile, and decided to talk through the door instead of cracking it open.

HE: Who is it?

ME: Can you just move that thing away from the pipe? It wakes me up every day.

HE: …

ME: Thanks.

Problem: solved.

—

The very next day, I woke up at 6 a.m. To an alarm that just. would. not. stop. For a second, I thought about going downstairs again, but moving to my couch for the rest of the night seemed so much easier.