Trucks

I hate Tuesday mornings. Tuesday mornings are when the garbage trucks come. I live on a corner in a residential neighborhood, and we have three pickups — garbage, recycling, and green waste. So I get three trucks, times two sides of the street, times two streets (N/S and E/W). That makes twelve passes by noisy, rumbling trucks, not counting the extra times when they just swing by on their way to some other block.

I’m a musician. I hate obtrusive background noise in any circumstances whatever. When I was a little kid I hated the vacuum cleaner! But when I’m trying to practice piano, the grinding rumble of a dozen garbage trucks is maybe slightly less unpleasant than having someone drive nails through my hands. It’s a nightmare.

To add to the fun, there’s some street repair going on over on the next street. From time to time dump trucks, which are evidently too big to make U-turns, swing around the block past my house. And I’m only a block from a major residential thoroughfare, so at unpredictable intervals I’m serenaded by fire engines.

Short of living on a ten-acre country estate (yeah, I wish), there’s no escaping this stuff. It’s just awful. I doubt even John Cage would like it, and he was reputed to accept any sort of unintended noise as musical.

Here comes another one.