The Perils of Playing Loud Music When Your Upstairs Neighbor Is An Editor

Her horror writing clients can give her ideas!

I haven’t had a very good day.

In fact, I haven’t had a very good month.

The month is only five days old, so I shouldn’t have much to complain about, but July was no prize either.

But if you’ve read any of my work, you know I tend to wallow in gratitude, always looking on the bright side. Things could be worse is my motto.

So, with this country sinking lower by the minute, the unemployment insurance gone the way of buggy whips, the back-to-school crisis is not what Disney character your child wants on her backpack but whether her teacher will give your family a killer case of the virus, and odds on your relationship surviving another lockdown sinking by the minute as another lockdown looming as the only real cure for our pandemic woes, what do I have to complain about?

And you’re absolutely right.

My complaints are minor by comparison. No matter what they are, short of a bad case of COVID-19.

But my downstairs neighbor has been playing his rock music at 50 decibels above the recommended level for psychological torture for the last three hours. I’ve tried working in every room of my small three-room apartment and, by now, the bass is vibrating from my toes to my self-inflicted bad haircut.

Why don’t I march downstairs and pound on his door like the badass you all think I am?

First, cases are spiking in my once-low numbered city, and I’m trying to stay inside as much as possible, and, second, basically, he’s a good guy. Thoughtless at times, but still an ideal neighbor.

We’re all suffering in some way, and he doesn’t get to see his teenage son and is losing his small businesses, so on days when he plays his music too loud, I suck it up. BFD, I tell myself. It could be worse. So much worse. Which is the truth.

And a little back story on this guy. We’ve both lived in this building for a very long time. I’d been here for maybe seven years when he moved in. The previous tenants in his apartment had been nightmares. I hadn’t met him yet, and one evening I was eating my dinner, and suddenly something went down the wrong pipe.

That’s the medical term for aspirating my food. So I was standing over my sink, coughing, crying, gagging, choking, and making disgusting noises when I heard a knock on my door. An insistent one that I had to answer. I was in such distress that when I answered the knock, I couldn’t even say hello.

It was my neighbor, half my age, who introduced himself with a bottle of water and asked if I needed help. He heard me and was worried. How can you not love a guy like that?

So twenty or so years later we’re friends. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I have to text him to turn down his music. But during the pandemic, I put up with it because in my book, he can do no wrong. And, it’s the pandemic and we’re all stuck inside.

But today? JFC.

To give you a taste of my life lately, bedeviled by death by a thousand cuts, my computer crashed last week and took with it a year’s worth of Excel sheets and two day’s worth of client work. Don’t talk to me about back up. I have back up up the wazoo, but when I downloaded the files, the programs tell me they are corrupted. Don’t ask. Ended up buying a new computer, and then, oh, forget about it.

It’s been going that way.

So when I put my digital life back together, dealt with tech support, redid all the client work, made peace with lost work, and told myself, “It could be worse, you could live in Beirut, his music started. Let’s say, it just wasn’t the day for it.

One thing this pandemic has brought home to me is the reality of death. Not that I haven’t considered the possibility before, but there’s just something about being afraid to see your daughter because she might infect you with a deadly virus to bring home the fact that the Grim Reaper could be hanging out in your ‘hood.

And so, anything that puts a damper on my day is likely to get up in my business. As I explained with my tech problems, it’s been happening a lot lately, calling on my ability to center myself more than I’d like. In other words, I was down to my last nerve as my daughter likes to say, when the cacophony started downstairs.

I just have to say, it’s a good thing he knocked on my door with that water bottle and show of good faith lo those many years ago. Because for the last week I have been working on editing a book of horror short stories for a client of mine. I’ve been editing them and editing them and editing them because my blankety-blank computer kept eating them alive.

So today, determined to finish them on my new-used computer, I was once more interrupted, this time by death metal or whatever his music is called.

This time, instead of biting my tongue and thinking positive thoughts, my mind ran to all the ways I could seriously fu*k up his life, taking a cue from the nefarious characters I’ve been living with for the past week, courtesy of my client. Should I give him an eating disorder that will send him to hell? A virtual reality addiction that will ruin his life? Send him to an adoptive family that will send him to the bottom of a barrel of a scary chemical?

Horror is not my genre of choice, but I’ve always loved working on this client’s stories and, this time, perhaps fueled by his own frustrations with the virus, he’s really gone over to the dark side in his plotting and characters.

I have to say, though, when you have a testy neighbor editing horror stories, and resentful of anything that puts a dent in her enjoyment of her limited time left on earth, you want to make sure you don’t bother her when some client with a diabolical turn of mind could be putting thoughts in her head.

Just sayin’.

Heh heh heh.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading.