Crabby and Pissed

I think I’m actually holding up pretty well considering I got about 3 hours of sleep in my fucking CAR!!! The fire alarm kept going off in the middle of the night (The one for the entire building – extremely fucking loud and annoying).

2:00 a.m. – The nightmare begins; this thing is going off like the shit is about to go down. Normally, with fire alarms, I wait a few minutes to see if it’ll stop before I start taking action to save my life. That wasn’t happening. This thing kept going on for 10 minutes before I said … Ok, I’ll get up and evacuate the building at 2 a.m. in the morning.

So I did. I go outside and there are only 2 other people out there. The ENTIRE building and there’s only 2 people out there (by the way, one of the 2 people was the “naughty, naughty neighbor”). First, I felt a great sense of fulfillment in watching Kevin realize that there are LOUDER and more annoying things than my ‘supposed’ catapult construction. Then I thought to myself, why isn’t anyone else out here – how ANYONE can sleep through that? I don’t know. Fools.

Then … After being informed that this is actually the second installment of “The Fire Alarm … of DEATH” (the first one came at about midnight) I started to wonder how I could have possibly slept through the first (and I presume equally debilitating to the ear) fire alarm. No Recollection. Nothing. Fool.

By this time, the other neighbor had called the 24-hour-property-emergency-people, and let them know what's up and that this isn’t cool. The lady, who answered after the first ring, thought it might help to tell him that it was due to a wiring issue, particularly with ANTS getting stuck inside the wiring. What the fuck? Where are we living? Downtown Amazon?

2:30 a.m. – After bonding over the misfortune of a looming eight-hour workday, The Alarm somehow stopped, and getting another 4 hours of sleep didn’t seem like that bad of a deal for me. So I trotted back upstairs, ears still ringing, and went back to bed.

3:15 a.m. – Wake-Up! and save your cochlea!!! The Third alarm goes off, and this is the mother of all Fire Alarms, Ever. I must have waited for 15 or 20 minutes for someone or something to suck the ANTS out of the wires but it wasn’t happening. In hindsight, I should have just bailed ship right then because my ears are still ringing as I write this.

After my 20-minute grace period, I put on some more public-appropriate night gear (you'll see why), took my pillows, my cover and stormed out of the building. There were no residents outside the building. Again, I now know, that they know better than to stand in the rain because of ANTS. Although, I think I would rather get wet and still keep my hearing ability, I can’t even describe how bad that sound was. Well, I get outside and there it was ... My 1996 Nissan-Sealy-Posturpedic-quasi-mattress-car-thing.

Eventually, I did set up shop in the Nissan. I Moved the front seats all the way to the dashboard, and then reclined the driver seat all the way to the backseat, which puts me in a diagonal position in the car (head on backseat, legs on driver seat) and gives me somewhere to put my legs!!!

My triumph of finding a good parking spot earlier that day came back to haunt me. My car was right in front of the building, so I could still sort of hear the bullshit, and if I tried hard, I could look up and see the emergency lights flash.

The mother of all alarms must have gone on for AT LEAST one hour, possibly more. No 24-hour-emergency-lady, or nothing could stop it … no one came out of the building, it was really quite something.

4:30 a.m. – After overcoming the background noise comparable to one to be heard at the end of days (and a slightly annoying rain splatter on my car) I slowly begin to fall asleep and then …

BANG!

Motherfucker is parallel parking his car in front of mine and gives my front bumper some serious heat. Not that I would normally care, that’s what bumpers are for, but the fact that I was in the car was what made it worse. Wait … no, actually it was the fact that he got out of the car, realized his car was glued to mine, got back in the car to remedy the situation and then …

BANG!

Backs up into my bumper AGAIN, and then slowly moved his car forward. I take solace in the fact that I scared the shit out of him when he saw me get up (Exorcist Style - One Motion) and just stare out of my windshield. I wonder what he was thinking - he'd probably write it off as a dream.

(Fire alarm is still going on at this time)

I think out of sheer despair, agony and hopelessness for my human condition, I eventually “fall asleep” and here I am. Well Ladies and Gentlemen, there it was, fresh in my sleepless mind: The Night from Hell.

Note: I can't believe this all happened to me in one night which ironically started out with both my internet and cell-phone not functioning (separate carriers for both).