if you are a faithful and a fearless reader of tinyengine, you will know by now two things: the first is that i am not an early riser. the second is that (the tearing down of) the house next door is taking its toll on me. and say what you will about me being a baby and wanting to sleep until 9am, and say what you will about how my life is pretty good and i shouldn't complain about things, but just wait until i tell you what happened this morning.
first i will say that i grew up with a father who built things. there were a lot of tools around the garage. i know all about all kinds of tools. i don't know how to use all of them, like a lathe, or something like that, but i generally know what they are. so, this morning, when i dreamt that i heard a radial arm saw starting up and then whirring into a piece of something very hard and strong and shiny, and the tone changed into that high metal-splintery raging shattery screech, i was almost reminded of the old days hearing my dad at work in the garage. then, i woke up. and then i realized it was completely dark outside. and then, lying there, perfectly still, in the pitch blackness of the pre-dawn, i heard it again. somebody was using a gigantic power saw inside of that cavernous house with open spaces where windows and doors should be. and they were using it before the sun had even come up. the sound echoed all over the place inside that house, and then it catapulted directly at my bedroom window, as if it were being shot through a big gramophone horn. it was shocking. and loud. and i was mad. not as mad as the guy who yelled all kinds of things about how he doesn't wake up at 6 in the morning expletive expletive expletive, but i was upset. i had also been up until about 2am, worrying about all the lead paint wood dust and chips that were ending up in my yard. so at this point, i had slept about 4 hours. well, the saw stopped and then after a number of minutes, a faint hammering was heard. it was as though they hammered something for fun, and then waited to see what would happen, and then they started hammering things for real. i think that at that point everybody on the block was awake and even if they had tried to go back to sleep, the hammer sounded like a brahms rhapsody at that point, so nobody yelled again. anyway, my plan is to practice a lot of opera tomorrow afternoon. maybe for about an hour i'll just work on a really tough cadenza, with my windows open. that might be a good idea. i'll see your saw and i'll raise you a high F.
