As soon as the weather is nice, they come out, other people with their habits and sounds. And every time I am stupid enough to go outside, to think that I can sit there quietly and work. It’s not that I hate them, I love all people just as little, just with vocal cords a little less.
The neighbors have noisy family visitors, the other neighbors drill a stone floor out of their house; the generator is on the sidewalk. There are machines that sand, grind, drill and mow. Everywhere telephones are lying on flat hands, in which people are teasing. In the third-floor gallery of the flat next to our backyard, a woman tries to drown out a child’s screams with vicious Chinese baby music.
At 3 p.m., the woman in the loud voice puts her chair on the gallery in front of her apartment in the flat. ‘I like drinking tea, but I always have some with me!’ she shouts to the neighbor, 10 meters away. “What?” she says, the only one in the neighborhood who didn’t hear her. ‘I like drinking tea, but I always have some with me!!’, she shouts. ‘Oh yes?’ says the neighbor. ‘Yes, sugar nuts!’ she shouts. ‘Those aren’t sugar nuts! I don’t know what it is, but there’s not much to it!’
All those sounds get in my head, earplugs hardly help. To remain calm under the violence and to continue to listen to your own thoughts is a meditation technique in itself, says the yoga teacher, but I have not yet mastered it.
Why am I so annoyed? Who am I doing with it? I know well, if all people are annoying and I’m the only one irritated, I’m most likely wrong and the chances are negligible that I’m rightly getting upset.
Somewhere the desire to complain is smoldering. To ring the doorbell of the Arab, elderly, frail, single lady, and say, ‘I like Arabic music, it’s not, and it’s also just a coincidence that you’re the first person I ring — if you’re a white, elderly, vulnerable, single lady, I would have dared too – but if you would close the window when you put on that nice Arabic music, then I no longer have to hear it behind the sofa or under the bed with the fingers to ears.’
But I don’t want to interfere with others, I don’t want to be annoyed, I want to live apart from others, as they live apart from me. Nevertheless, almost daily I keep my fingers crossed for a tidal wave, a downpour of biblical proportions, which washes everyone from the galleries and drives them out of the gardens; barbecues, sanders and sugar nuts float through the streets.
It would also be so terribly good for nature.