The violence of summer

“Why do we keep shrieking when we mean soft things? We should be whispering all the time.”

-Magnetic Fields, 100.000 Fireflies

The couple that lives downstairs from me is infiltrating the rest of my life, both waking and asleep. They continue to have yelling matches, throwing competitions, and God-knows what other forms of violence at any hour of the day or night. On Saturday morning, they woke me up at 8. Monday morning I got a 4am wake-up call. But it could be two in the afternoon for all they care.

I’m somewhere past the point of this being about my annoyance with their total lack of concern for the people around them. I’m becoming worried that one or both of them is going to get hurt, and I don’t just mean emotionally. I heard her yell “you can’t even throw things right!” one time. And this weekend there was a hallway shout out about a knife. There’s also a lot of swearing involved. Don’t ask me why they don’t just break up, because I wonder that ALL the time.

Because of them, I’ve become sensitive to the other violence around me, on the streets, everywhere. Sunday night, as I walked out of Eduardo’s Italian Restaurant, I saw someone shove a drunk young man so that he toppled into the street, like a pile of newspapers. “Are we joking?” I said, shocked. I couldn’t help but say it out loud. The two girls standing with the pusher guy giggled and made weak disapproving comments. They all thought it was hilarious.

Earlier that day in Carre Saint Louis, the bums were swarming over the beautiful ladies, serenading them and otherwise trying to start up conversations. The man in the photo with Amy was so beat up, his knee was protruding at a strange angle. I think he was missing his front teeth. He was trying to play guitar with her, but he would lose his train of thought in the middle of a sentence and somehow seemed to require her to do or say what he wanted. To me, he seemed to have the exact sense of self-centered entitlement that drunk men at bars and dance clubs have. As though all women should be available to listen to them and dance with them, because that’s what they want, and if the woman isn’t interested, she’s a bitch. Amy seemed alright with him, though. Sometimes I'm too protective.


“There’s a plane flying over my head, so you may not be able to hear everything I’m saying right now”, the man said to Amy. I wanted to point out to him that it was flying over all our heads, not just his.

Is it clear that I don’t think of aggressiveness exclusively in physical terms? People who invade your space and expect things from you make me feel just as threatened. Loud people. People who leave anonymous personal insults on blogs. People who accuse you. People who make underhanded comments. People who break your heart and then act like they had nothing to do with it. People who become instantly defensive and retaliatory.

I definitely acknowledge having acted in the all the above ways at times. If you think I make your life difficult now, you should have met me when I was 16. I have my own history of violence, and I guess that made me more reactive than others. I learned to protect myself (and others) in my own way, but I suppose the fear is latent in me, that somehow, someday, the violence will come back and I’ll be powerless against it. The downstairs couple is reminding me of that constantly, in a very uncomfortable way. I'm no hippie; I believe violence has a place in fiction and in real life, but I was sort of hoping that we could all do our best to try to make it easy instead of hard.