CONSTRUCTION BLUES

Did you ever live near or next to a high-rise construction site? If you did and were able to withstand the almost constant noise pollution without becoming deaf, or having a nervous breakdown, my hat is off to you. At this point my hat is on a hat rack, not on my head. My head, or what is left of it, is long gone. It was last seen floating in space, high above the clouds.

My apartment overlooks a brand new construction site. My spies tell me that it is going to be a high-rise parking emporium. Whoopee!
Beside the parking place to be, I overlook the iron girder skeleton stage of an office building to be. Up to three levels at this point.

What’s better than one construction site, why two construction sites sitting cozily side by side and vying with other for the decibel prize.
I’m writing this under battle conditions …. Right up in the front lines.
There is an awesome looking weapon that looks very much like a giant crane with prehistoric ancestry. The thing is doing its best to pile drive a long, reinforced, rectangular pillar some fifty to sixty feet into the ground, but who is counting.

Ordinary words like, horrendous, shattering, deafening, annoying, can be used to describe the noise this monster evokes. I am barely constrained from using words more satisfying. This battering ram makes contact with the poor, defenseless pillar some fifty times per minute. I counted. This goes on for ten minutes or five hundred poundings, whichever is first. A four-minute break follows.

This short break is not a silent one. Huge shovels are picking up earth, stones and assorted debris. Drills, large enough to have been used on dinosaurs, are happily drilling away. Jackhammers are tattooing their way into my head somewhere in space. Truck and tractor engines are revving it up. Anvils are anvilling, saws are sawing away, hammers are hammering, and my fist is pounding a hole in the desk. Is that what is meant by Dante’s Inferno?

Stopping my ears with cotton batting and earflaps, do not help. The combined noises come ripping through, laughing all the way. It’s a living presence out to get me. Unlike some ‘sidewalk superintendents’, I cannot just stop, look, and listen and then walk away. My home is more than my castle; it’s also my office. I am stuck – a prisoner.

I’ve been able to adjust my watch, very much like a railway buff does with train schedules. I know it is exactly eight A.M. when I hear the battering ram bellowing hello. I know when it’s noon. The blessed lunch hour has arrived and all is quiet on the western front. And I know when four P.M. rolls around because I can again hear my b rains thinking. The workday is over and I can start mine.

I should tape a thirty-minute segment of the racket. I could play it to guests who overstay their visits.