It Never Fails…

I’d been asleep for an hour last night. That in itself is a feat, with all the people wandering around on a Friday night, (weekends sleeping here is a tough thing) when I woke to the sound of something… my head registered it as a car coughing a few times while trying to start, then there were two loud BOOMS. 
I knew that sound. That was the sound of a gun. 

My guess is that it was something over a .40 caliber but couldn’t be more specific. It was close, too close. I rolled out of bed onto the floor and waited to see if there were more to come.

In the 5 to 10 seconds of silence that followed I wondered what the hell was going on. A minute later when I heard doors slamming all around the apartment complex I cautiously got up from the floor. I padded quietly to the nearest window and peered out. All the while thinking I was acting like an old person.

I could hear other occupants of the complex shouting and talking outside.

After a few minutes the sirens started and familiar blue & red lights were playing across the walls of my apartment. More people were joining the growing babble in the parking lot and on the sidewalks downstairs.

I decided to stay out of it, and went back to bed. Lying in bed with the strobing lights adding to the already too bright “Security Lights” shining on the walls through the window blinds, I realized I wasn’t going to get back to sleep anytime soon.

Car alarms started going off and I was out of bed again. 

The car alarms probably went off because someone leaned against or bumped some of the cars in the parking lot. 

Ok, time to go to the head. In the bathroom next door, the guy who lives there is taking a leak and talking on the phone. 

I wonder if he knows that I can hear every word he says in his bathroom? I can tell you his bathroom is the scene of an enviable amount of sex or a less enviable amount of masturbation, complete with some rather filthy dialog.

Anyhow, he’s on the phone talking to someone about the shooting and says, “There are cops everywhere, yeah I’ll be right over.” He didn’t, as far as I can tell come home last night. I’m guessing he probably took the opportunity to sully someone else’s bathroom.

I know I’m not going to get to sleep until all this dies down. I go to the cabinet and make myself a stiff drink. It’s 10:40 PM.

By 1:00 AM folks have gotten bored with their conversations in the parking lot and are finally returning to their apartments with all the attendant door slamming. 

I have to get up in 2 hours to go to work. If I wasn’t expected to be nice and patient on the phone I could actually work on that amount of sleep.

But as I consider it and weigh that I’m supposed to be empathetic to a substantial number of pathetic, perpetual, “victims”, I decide I’m not going to go in to work. 

Don’t get me wrong, I do talk to some really nice people, the problem is that they are in the minority and a larger number of people I talk to are the self appointed “Victim” class.

Yeah, they have a disease. Yeah, it sucks, but I personally know many people with the same disease and they’re not “Victims” they deal with it and get on with their lives. 

They’re good folks and their disease, like their sexuality or color of their skin simply IS. Their examples are in part why I thought working for this company would work for me. It never occurred to me that there might be a large percentage of the “Victim, Poor Me, Give me whatever I want” group. 

My bad, I know human nature better than that. Somehow I thought that a life threatening illness would galvanize them to be better people. Ah well, lesson learned. It has made me appreciate the people I know who are better people more.

I’ll read about the gunshots in the morning. Whoever did whatever, is of no consequence to me. But I am not going in to work. I just can’t muster even a simulation of empathy for the constant barrage of whiny people. 

As I lay there in the prison-like, lighting seeping through the window shades. I consider that my lease is coming to an end in June. If I don’t find another job by then I’m thinking I’ll at least find a new apartment. One hopefully that doesn’t have Shoji screen thin walls.

Finally I sleep…