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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

We Like the Cars, the Cars That Go Boom


A re-worked re-post, in honor of summer and open windows everywhere...

I awoke the other night, fuzzy visions in my head of a large two-legged reptile, possibly of Japanese extraction, stomping down the middle of Washington and heading in my direction.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Awfully rhythmic for a reptile, thought I.

It was as I gained reluctant consciousness that I realized this was not imminent doom but the stereo system of someone who, loudly and proudly, was keen to demonstrate how little he thought of conventional sleep patterns.


Ha ha!  I laugh at your sleepy-time mattress-ness!

These jacked-up nincompoops don’t come around often enough to cause me to update my dreams to include moving out of the city – there are, after all, problems wherever you go – but it does cause me to think vengeful thoughts.

I lie in bed fantasizing about how I will single-handedly stop these scoffers of social contracts and the methods that I will employ.

I envision large buckets of cold water flung towards their cars from the slingshot I shall have installed on the roof of my house. Mild, yes; but I like to start slow. If we leap directly to the fantasy where I spring out from behind large-ish bushes, flinging ninja stars, we’ve painted ourselves into a retribution corner.

Alternatively, I see myself jumping into my car, lights off, trailing them to their own homes. Once there, I give them some time to fall asleep, whereupon I scale the side of their building (ropes? suction cups? I haven’t worked this out yet), and then slip their hands into bowls of warm water.

Wake me up, will you? There you go: you peed yourself. I hope you're happy.

I hope you’ve learned your lesson.

There’s also the one where I just give in completely and set up a lawn chair in the middle of the street and hold up score cards, rating the soon-to-be-deaf based on choice of artist, stereo system, and whether or not it rattles the vehicle’s undercarriage.

For now, however, I judge it best to just go back to sleep.

I’m saving my devious mind for bigger things.

34 comments:

That gentleman's lady said...

Get 'em Pearl!!!

After reading this, I think you are the perfect person to take care of the large trucks that come tearing down the hill, horns blaring..

TexWisGirl said...

night-time: boom cars
day-time: ice cream trucks.

uh-oh...

Simply Suthern said...

I would think you would hot wire the car and park it a couple miles away sans boombox.

Shelly said...

Perhaps you could introduce your ice cream man from yesterday's post to these folks...

CarrieBoo said...

Boom cars and ice cream trucks unite? Aaaaaargh!

That would be a good superhero skill, actually. If you could attack the baddies (or anyone you didn't like) by making them pee on themselves.

Notes From ABroad said...

This was so good, twice !
I am now in the land of Horn Honkers. There is nothing they like better than honking. Unless it is yelling on a cell phone while honking.
My bedroom is at the back of the building on a quiet courtyard, otherwise, I would be in a nice white room with soft padded walls.
love you. C

Anonymous said...

Oh Pearl..you can't get away from them. We are in the suburbs and they come around our street day and night thud thud thud thud but what's worse, our neighbour is 40 something going on 12 and has her music up so loud both inside the house and outside that we get the thud thud thud all weekend long day and night 24/7 thud thud thud (pulls imaginary pin, tosses grenade). We need to put our heads together and come up with a satisfying and effective way to deal with these nimrods.

Sioux Roslawski said...

This brought that WHAM song to mind (I think it was George Michael's voice singing lead): "Wake me up, and then you'll go, go (pee)..."

Pearl said...

We are a loud, loud group, we humans. I've become rather good at tuning people/cars/traffic out, but there's always that moment, when I hear the BOOM BOOM BOOM coming down the street where I marvel at the sonic push of it all.

Plus, I like to think of dinosaurs/monsters walking down the middle of the street. Makes me smile to imagine how much that would shake things up. :-)

raydenzel1 said...

great
now I will be hearing cries of Ga-zilla all day in my crowed little brain!

Anonymous said...

How about you naked on the roof of your house with a sniper rifle???

Chantel said...

I once sat in a lawn chair on the side of the road and pointed a hairdryer at passing cars.

There was much tequila involved. But wouldn't you know, they did in fact, slow down.

Joyful Things said...

I often turn my car stereo too loud but in my defence sometimes the song is so good that loud is warranted. And, if the music is loud enough, people can't hear me singing (which between you and I is rather off-putting, maybe more so than the boom boom boom of the bass!) So from all of us middle of the night loud radio listeners "sorry........"

Douglas said...

My first 9 years of life were spent in a house a block and a half from the train tracks. I slept through a lot of noise.

Still, it was good noise and not the sound of Rap Music (an oxymoron?) played at ear splitting decibels from a gaudy compact car.

They even bug me at traffic lights... making me contemplate homicide and whether my peers on a jury might deem it "justifiable."

esbboston said...

Combining several of your ideas, and then adding refrigeration which means taking away heat, I think a very large projectile of urine frozen delivered by trebuchet would be Marvel-ous. Whether or not you choose a ninja star shape or just go s-fear-ical with the icicle is up to you, but the sphere is probably a better choice aerodynamicaLLy when shot slungly. Just be thinking up a super hero name for yourself.

Belle said...

I also hate that "boom boom" coming from cars. Our bedroom is in the back of the house so luckily I never hear anything. Anyway, Canadians are so uptight about noise that if a neighbor did that the police would be at his house in a nano-second. I guess your people aren't neighbors though, just passers-by. How nice of them! I actually think they think they are cool, when everyone really hates them.

Joanna Jenkins said...

Hope you had a relaxing weekend, Pearl.

xo jj

Ms Sparrow said...

OK, I grant you that booming car stereos are crazy-making! But, have you ever had to contend with a wild turkey going "gobble gobble" outside your bedroom window at 5:00 in the morning? It's "gobble-gobble" over and over again and it's LOUD!

Bill Lisleman said...

Pearl, you will be ready if any of those Japanese radioactive dinosaurs active. You could be our part-time (there are budget issues) early warning system.

esbboston said...

The most ridiculous part of your dream is to believe that GodziLLa would come to Minnesota, because he is most likely cold blooded. He would move slower and therefore be much easier to defeat.

fishducky said...

Why is it that those idiots--I mean, nice young people--insist on leaving their windows down, so that when we're side by side at a stoplight, we old geezers--I mean senior citizens--pop an aneurysm because of the crappy unbearable noise--I mean rap music--emanating from their car?

ThreeOldKeys said...

Allow me to attempt an illustration of your sudden awakening and return to sleep as Boomer drives by:

1. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

2. zzzzBBBzzzBBBzzBBBzzBBBzz...??

3. BBB BBB BBB BBB BBB BBb bbb

4. bbbzzzbbzzzzzbzzzzzzzzz

Tom G. said...

I suppose the police frown upon high powered rifles in these parts. Pity, it could be so effective.

SOL's view said...

Ah there you go. I always thought it was cold water.

The slingshot is similar to something I had planned - a vibration sensitive trigger on a catapult on the front lawn that flung white paint or some sort of sticky goo.

Still, I dream that maybe one day us madmen will unite for a retribution style fallout never before seen by common man... Hollywood will make a movie.

:)

Gigi said...

Now that we have the retribution of the midnight boomers squared away, let's work on those jerks that sit beside you at the longest light in the whole state with that junk going on.

My current plan of attack is to sit a glare at them. So far it doesn't seem to be working. I need to either work on my glare or come up with an alternative. Any suggestions?

savannah said...

i'm so spoiled, sugar. it's so damn hot here and figgin HUMID that the windows are never open. when they ARE open for 4 days in the spring, no one even drives down the street with their car windows open! gotta love the dirty south! or maybe, i just tune the crap out now...or i'm deaf after raising 4 teenagers during the punk years xoxoxox

Unknown said...

OH, you are brilliantly devious!

esbboston said...

[While studying about underwater hydrothermal vents, I came across this GodziLLa reference.]

Some hydrothermal vents form roughly cylindrical chimney structures. These form from minerals that are dissolved in the vent fluid. When the super-heated water contacts the near-freezing sea water, the minerals precipitate out to form particles which add to the height of the stacks. Some of these chimney structures can reach heights of 60 m. An example of such a towering vent was "Godzilla", a structure in the Pacific Ocean near Oregon that rose to 40 m before it fell over.

Linda O'Connell said...

Oh yeah! Retribution.

Mr. Charleston said...

I like the score card idea. I'll bet you give the good humor man a 10.

Anonymous said...

As a child, when one of these cars would drive past the home I lived in then, I thought it was my heart trying to communicate with me.

the walking man said...

NOTE: I do not recommend this for you Pearl.


Last year in the middle of the day one of these 50,000 megawatt fools parked in front of the slum house next door to my estate and woke me from my mid day nap.

Trust me a heavily bearded fat man standing in his underwear in the middle of his finally manicured lawn yelling at the miscreants to TURN THAT SHIT UP BECAUSE MY WINDOWS WERE ONLY RATTLING AND NOT CRACKING! Was actually enough to let them know I am more insane than the volume they play there crap at.

AHHH sweet and blessed silence.

mo.stoneskin said...

And you got back to sleep? I envy you. I spent the next twelve hours contemplating various ways I could key their cars...

Ever since an early age I've been evil. Drawing pins (tacks) on the doorbell during Halloween, water and flour bombs on the windowsill, that kinda thing.

If you like for a small fee I'll protect you.

PattiKen said...

OK, I'n not going to ask where you picked up that little trick of the hands in warm water...