News & Articles

The sitar music. THE GODDAMN SITAR MUSIC. I can’t take it anymore! It’s driving me insane. Day or night, no matter the time, the sitar music continues playing. Softly, gently, elegantly eating my brains from the inside. It’s torture. Each chord is like another little bead of water dripping on my forehead.An elderly Middle Eastern woman recently moved into the apartment building across from mine. This being Los Angeles, our windows are roughly eight feet apart. The sitar music never ends. It’s always playing in her apartment, even when she’s not there. My TV drowns it out, but I spend most of my day writing and I need quiet for that. I’m not good at concentrating. No TV, no music, no distractions of any kind or my mind will wander. For instance, right now it’s wandering toward murdering this old woman.The worst part is I can’t complain about it, because she’s playing the music at a reasonable volume. It’s not loud. It’s just that the sitar, and the weird howling that passes as singing in her native country, is perhaps the most obnoxious sound in the universe. She probably feels the same way about American music, but do I play the “Friends” theme song over and over again, 24 hours per day? No! I play it FOUR HOURS PER DAY while I masturbate.A few times each week, a man comes to her apartment and the two of them argue loudly. I look forward to this, because it’s the only time I can’t hear the goddamn sitar music. How am I supposed to work in this atmosphere? My publisher has given me a June deadline for my erotic pirate novel, “Boobs Ahoy!!! Starboard Wieners!!!” How am I to finish it if this noise pollution continues?I really wish she was Armenian. The violent arguments would be the same, but the sitar might be replaced by a duduk, which is the Armenian instrument used in all those mythical adventure movies like “Lord of the Rings.” Sitar music is so unbearable that I’d even prefer bad karaoke singing. There are millions of untalented wannabe singers here in Los Angeles and they all sound like a hungry baby goat, but at least they take a break once in a while.I never realized sitar music was something people listened to non-ironically. The last time I heard it was at the beginning of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” by The Fat Boys, and even they knew it was only good in moderation.My apartment is a mecca of annoyance lately. I’m being attacked on all sides. Upstairs is the ugly nurse. I use the term “ugly nurse” because episodes of “30 Rock” have changed my view of a typical nurse from an elderly woman taking four tries to find a vein in my arm to Salma Hayek packing eight pounds of boobs into a shirt that only holds four. So the woman upstairs is the “ugly nurse,” packing zero pounds of boobs into a shirt that holds 50.The ugly nurse works the early shift, and since the walls of my cheap apartment building are thin enough to hear a gnat ejaculating, any noise past 7 p.m. louder than a sneeze results in a knock on my door and a stern lecture. When I politely and kindly suggest that she die in a rat’s anus in hell, she complains to the landlord. My dream is to wake up one day to find she’s died of bitchiness.In the apartment below me is a chain smoker who seems completely unaware that everything she says is delivered in a shout. She comes home from work every night and discusses seven-year-old episodes of “Sex and the City” with her friend over the phone, repeatedly stating that she “can’t wait until the next episode.” Well, hurry up and watch it, you jackass. It’s been on DVD since Jesus was born.I’m tempted to buy a Mr. Belvedere DVD box set and a box of nicotine patches and drop them off at her door to push her towards becoming a better person. Sadly, my bank account is nowhere near topping my March 2009 record of $23, so I’ll have to use the more cost-effective solution of getting her to leave by turning up my laptop speakers extra loud when I view pornography. Which is often.I haven’t had a roommate since college because I don’t like being bothered. Being surrounded by these neighbors is like having THREE roommates, except I can’t retaliate against their annoying personalities by smashing their possessions or passive-aggressively eating their food from the refrigerator, like most people do with troublesome roommates.I guess I’ll just have to put up with it. This seems very un-American, but it’s the only way since I’m too poor to move out and too handsome to jump off a freeway overpass. I can only hope I develop Stockholm syndrome and start to enjoy sitar music. And when that happens, I give each of you permission to kill me.