THE LOUD WAR

by Brendan S



I remember once, when Anne walked out of her house wearing nothing but a white shirt and underwear, smoking a cigarette as she checked an empty mailbox ..

She looked really crazy to me.

Later in life, she appeared to develop a hunchback, and was always sounding like she "squawked" when she talked.

..

Well, somehow her hunchback is now gone, and she's turned into a total bitch toward everyone.

My own parents say, "Anne .. isn't .. sound."

Etc.

I know.

Because of The Loud War.


First, I said "FUCK YOU!" to her when she was driving down the road, and she halted her car. Which was kind of funny.


But it wasn't funny when I heard Anne mutter, across the yard, with her back turned to me, "Okay, Brendan. You want to rock and roll..?"

I used 500 watt speakers paired to be a 1000 watt studio back then.


And I rocked out a lot.

As it turned out, Anne liked to rock out too.

She hired the same landscaping crew I used to work on,

And I remember my Dad pacing back and forth, saying, "Yeah. There is something wrong with her lawn equipment."

What she would do is have a man who I once worked with, known as "Little T" work along the edge of her property with a rusty weed trimmer, that sounded loud and violent to the ears.

And then she hired someone to work beside him.


And proceeded to do landscaping on her property pretty much every single weekend, until she started to do this "at random" -- just having them come over whenever she wanted, and making as much grinding and violent engine and motor and cutting sounds as possible, whle I tried to make music.

So, one of the funnier things I've ever done, which was after a distant confrontation with Little T, who said something lame and half-assed in response to me, after I walked in my house, I got my guitar amplifier, put it in the window on the loudest volume, and proceeded to bang out open string guitar chords with full distortion on, out the window, for probably an entire ten minutes.

My parents were home.

People heard it, obviously.

But it was just so funny.

...

I never got in trouble.

That was one of the last times I've really played the "Electric" guitar, also.

I am usually all-acoustic.

So, in the hospital, it was discovered by the NSA that Anne really is insane, and was terrorizing me with her power tool stigmatas.

One day, during a "group" with a bald-headed asshole named "David" I remember this dinosaur-looking asshole say the phrase, "And then if your cat gets run over by a car...." and paused. "You would be REALLY SAD." I own a cat, and I know David knew I owned a cat.

Shortly, about ten minutes later, or seven minutes, a large plank was brought out by the men in the nearby white van, and a crew of two men were not slow to start cutting a board in half while David tried to talk.

I couldn't hear him.

It was pretty nice of the NSA to do that for me.

I even said, to piss him off a little bit more, "Yeah that group would have been better if it weren't for all the cutting sounds."

"Yeah, I don't even know what those workers were doing there."


- BLS