Sunday, June 1, 2014

Soundscape

Someone was losing it tonight. When the air stills and grows cold before sunset, dinnertime dramas carry across the paddocks like a memoried song. Mostly it's Dave the Farmer shouting at his dog. His curses filter through the Karris and drift, complete and in all their unedited glory to my front veranda. But tonight it was a man from the valley beyond Dave who was cursing, shouting. Living in the gentile outskirts of town is quite different to tenement housing but kind of much the same when it comes to neighbours on a still night. After all the yelling and cursing, the revving of his car, the loud protests of his mates trying to stop him, the thumping bass of his car stereo, the romancing swamp frogs, the dogs setting up their howling and barking and the sudden honk of a heron flying home to roost ... well, the sound of his car getting bogged in the mud of a wintery driveway made me laugh out loud.

3 comments:

  1. That is pretty funny. It's surprising the number of blokes, especially young ones, who get bogged or prang their vehicles after getting in a huff. I suppose it's a good thing that he didn't get out on the road and wipe someone else out.

    But living in an apartment complex, this sort of thing is not a particularly rare occurrence for me. I get to hear when all the neighbours are fighting, or rooting, or watching the telly.

    In fact, I had a similar show the other day, albeit one that ended up in a somewhat darker place. The lady next door rang some shop to complain about an irregularity on her docket. Over a fifteen minute period, she went from "Explain this to me!", "Why does this keep happening?", to "You're trying to steal from me!", "I'm going to call the police and have you thrown in jail!", to "I'm going to have my husband and his friends go down there to beat you up and trash your shop!" As far as I know, she isn't married, but I guess the clerk at the shop wouldn't have known that.

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  2. Heroin flying home to roost. "Faaaack!"

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