Scenes From The Sidewalk

At 5:45 AM this morning, I woke up for reasons (at that moment) unknown.

 

A word of background is in order: I sleep like the dead. What with the fans both running on high, and the noises from the street that last most of the night, I've gone back to my habit of sleeping with my earplugs in. The other day, Jay--my plumber's kid--showed up while LJ and I were still asleep. About an hour later, I woke up and went into the room he was working on and startled him. "I was outside yellin' and screamin' and your neighbors were lookin' at me--I have a whistle that could make your ears bleed, and you SLEPT through that??" he asked.

 

But this morning, earplugs and all, I woke up a good 25 minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off. Now THAT, in and of itself, is a horror nearly too great to bear. Those last few minutes are sacred, and so I was not kindly disposed toward whatever woke me. I pulled out my earplugs to hear better.

 

Then I got up and looked out the bedroom window to watch, because there was clearly about to be an ass-whuppin' administered.

 

I could only hear bits of what was being said--the fan was running behind me, and if I turned it off I was going to wake LJ--but it was clear that the female, who was wielding a 40-oz beer bottle, felt herself to have been wronged by the male half of the argument. Apparently she, too, is ignorant of the theorem: If you don't think you want to know, don't ask. She, from what I could gather, had found evidence of some other woman in the male's room. She accused him of fucking someone else; he didn't deny it; and the beer-bottle was launched in a rather tight arc in the general direction of the male.

 

Now all of this would have been an entertaining diversion, even despite the earliness of the hour, but for one important factor:

 

All this yelling, cussing, bitching, threatening, and bottle-throwing was taking place within inches of our beloved Tahoe. I watched for a minute and saw no improvement--the girl, especially, looked like she was about to become overly-familiar with the truck. So I did what anyone else would have done: I woke LJ. "Um, babe? There's some drama going on over by our car--you might wanna get up and look at this..."

 

He mumbled, got up, watched out the window for a few minutes--mumbled something else, then crawled back into the blankets. The argument, though--that went on for another fifteen-twenty minutes, til I was leaving for work.  Finally the girl walked back to wherever she came from, and the guy was working the spot  as I walked to the bus. The car was fine, anyway.