Ring-a-Ding Begone

City living is apt to impose a host of minor ills upon us, the death of a thousand cuts as one petty annoyance follows another. Since we all have our peeves, buttons, and sore spots, ruffled pinfeathers is the price we pay—other than surreal housing costs—for life where the elite meet, where it never sleeps, where everything's up to date and they've gone about as far as they can go.

It would be only a matter of a moment to cobble together a list of the most egregious of urban sonic offenders: car alarms, helicopters, sirens, cell-phone screamers, trucks in reverse gear, jackhammers, table saws, car stereos pounding hip-hop. San Francisco living poses its own set of minor audio irritations, particularly given the close-packed back yards common to houses here. Booze- and drug-soaked parties that begin at 11:00 PM and continue past 2:00 AM. Smokers who occupy themselves during their back-porch banishment by calling everybody in their address book and yakking at full volume. Precious old queens cooing to their poodles at the top of their lungs. Dogs yapping. Kids screaming and playing. Yes, even in the Castro where the occasional breeding stock slips past the Lavender Gates.

For me the number-one audio bother is that scourge of civilization, that dastardly assault on aural tranquility, that hell-spawned contraption that offends the senses at such an egregious level that the mere purchase of such should be accompanied by a stiff fine and, should repentance be lacking, a lengthy jail term, preferably in a maximum-security joint with a 24/7 lockdown, and yes I'm perfectly aware that this is a run-on sentence but sometimes you've just gotta make your point, dammit.

I refer, of course, to wind chimes.

It's beyond me how anybody with an intact pair of ears or half a mind could possibly want the miserable puking pudknocking things. When one's marbles are intact one does not invite being mugged by high-frequency rattling and thrashing every time a breeze blows. In our windy seaside city, that means a near-constant barrage of clanking, clinking, banging, thwocking, and dinging.

There is only one reason to hang up a wind chime, and that's to annoy the hell out of your neighbors. At least that's my conclusion, based on a near-epidemic of wind-chiming in my neighborhood. I'm on a crusade to expunge each and every one of the vile irritants. Consider the house immediately behind mine, until recently undergoing a year-long restoration that imposed a nonstop barrage of construction noise. I was just settling back into some semblance of sonic normality when the new owner decided that a massive metal wind chime would be just the thing for her brand-new back stairway. The wind blew and bing bong rattle dingaling clank bang clunk, loud enough to wake the dead, loud enough to kill a bowl of goldfish, loud enough to deafen a puppy. I wrote her a friendly note on a fetchingly attractive greeting card, asking in honeyed and subtly grovelling tones to please consider, oh please please please take down the wind chime. She did. So I didn't have to go over there and shoot her.

Then came the real challenge. My next door neighbor is the wind-chime queen from hell. She's a charming person and an excellent neighbor in all respects, save her ridiculous mania for home improvement with its attendant banging and thwocking, and save her unfathomable lust for wind chimes. It's been something of a running issue between us. I'm aware that I am stretching her patience with the stereo in my home office, located in the back of my house and almost adjacent to her bedroom window. I am very careful to use headphones in the evening when I'm in the office, or else I migrate into my living room with its much larger sound system and improved insulation. I figure we're about even when it comes to sonic irritations.

At least we were. But over the past few days she saw fit to re-hang a particularly obnoxious wind chime that had caused me no end of aggravation for some years running.

So out came the box of pretty note cards and a properly heartfelt request. I don't know if it will work. By this point she might want to tell me to stick it. But I've got to try. This torture must end.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say "one day at a time." When it comes to wind chimes, I march to the tune of "one takedown at a time."

Wind chimes MUST be wiped out. The very fabric of our civilization is at stake. Perhaps it's time for the Supreme Court to become involved. After all, they're all through with the Obamacare stuff. Now it's time for them to take on something really important!

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