Things Which are Too Loud in Steelton

Here is a partial list of things which are too loud in Steelton, Pennsylvania.

1. COPS

With alarming regularity, I hear like ten cop cars going off at once. Maybe it's a speed trap. Or a drunk trap.

But do you really need ten cop cars at once? In Steelton? Really?

Who is it? Osama Bin Laden?

Just kidding. Actually many Steelton cops are good looking blokes.

And they've been sweethearts to me when I crazily thought somebody was in my house.

I remember the one lady cop surreptitiously pointed to my lounge pants (hey! it was two in the morning!) because there were all these goofy yellow Smileys all over them and it says under each one, "I HAVE ISSUES."

I think they know now that I am "special."

Probably when they drive by my house, they say, "Hey that special guy lives there."

And other cop probably says, "Yes. Yes he is. Very."

That's me all over.

Very.



2. YOUNG PEOPLE.

I get it.

You're young.

Your lungs are hale. You see your friend at the other end of the street, about six hundred feet away, so what do you do?

YOU SCREAM AT HIM: "HEY, DAWG, WHAT IT IS??"

This is so unnecessary.

You have a cell phone.

So does he.

The appropriate etiquette is to use that phone and express your joyful sighting of him by bouncing the signal off a satellite circling the earth.

Didn't you see 2001?

We have EVOLVED.

Millennium came and went.

Try to act like you live in the 21st century.

What do you think you have all those rollover minutes for anyway?

Are you going to call your Mother?

I didn't think so.


3. HAPPY PEOPLE

Happy people are always noisy.

Give me depressed neighbors any day.

I'm sorry that you are in an emotional or spiritual state which requires you to make such acoustical exertions as squealing and tittering, and that your body must work so much harder for the production of these decibels.

Extreme happiness always sounds almost painful to impartial observers.

PLEASE KEEP IT TO YOURSELF!



4. GARBAGEMEN


We get it.

It sucks to have to get up that early, to be out in the subzero temperatures, and to have to see things like dead pigeons with coffee grounds and condoms all over them.

If you painted those images on canvases as large as Rosenquist paintings, you would be millionaires.

Gagosian personnel would tie your tie for you at the vernissage.

But your lot is to see the surreal genius of refuse wasted day after day.

Maybe this aesthetic tragedy is the source of your great misery.

Because miserable you are. I can hear it in the way you bang the cans around, and how you curse the heavens.

But does your misery really need company?

And can't you curse the heavens just a little bit more quietly?

Heaven isn't deaf.

It just doesn't give a shit.


5. STREET SWEEPERS


The streets are dirty.

They're supposed to be dirty.

They're streets.

I have lived here over four years.

And I have never once seen anybody eating their dinner off them.

Nor even changing a baby on one.

What don't you know about the street that I can tell you?

It's a vile thing.

We walk on it.

And I am probably paying for you to clean a vile thing which remains vile.

This is like Scientology or something.

Next.


6. BIRDS

Of all the creatures God invented, birds clearly have the most self-regard.

They are terribly conceited creatures.

They feel the need to talk constantly.

And nobody is listening.

Not even other birds.

But does that stop them?

No.

Cats are pro-silence.

Song or psalm or tweet, they don't care.

It all tastes the same.


7. AIRPLANES, JETS, HELICOPTERS, ETC.

Can't they invent a device that makes the sounds of planes come out as musical or relaxing sounds?

Like maybe the sound would be converted to the sound of gentle wind chimes or a Joni Mitchell song.

The New Physics should be able to accomplish that.

That would be such an improvement in the sonic landscape.

At evening, one could watch a big ole jet airliner making its way into the sunset at the same time it was singing to let us know that "they took all the trees and put them in a tree museum."

Thazza nize.