What does it all mean?

The Scene: Eighth floor of Carlton Arms, just before four in the morning.

The windows are cracked open, because they always are. Capturing the sun’s rays in summer and containing an overactive central heating system in winter, the interior of this dormitory regularly cracks 80 degrees without regular intervention like letting some of the frigid winter air creep in. The suite is quiet because, and I think this point needs to be made clear, it is four in the morning.

The Players: Everybody in any Carlton C suite (including your intrepid reporter); and insidiously loud music emanating from the building to the east.

The silence is abruptly broken by tinny, static-filled pop music, broken every few minutes by the fast-talking rattle of advertisements desperate to sell you a magazine subscription in the thirty seconds between overdramatic crossings about breakups. Print magazines are so last decade, anyway. It’s not the kind of loud to rattle the window panes or the bass registers on local seismographs, but it’s inescapable, like someone’s wired up a radio in the windowsill and refuses to turn the dial.

Whatever sweet dreams I’d been having interrupted by this sudden intrusion, I stared blearily up at the ceiling hoping the music would shut off. It didn’t. I rolled out of bed and, noting the scarlet LEDs of my alarm clock reading 3:47 am. None of the windows I could see in the thin, high courtyard between buildings were obviously the source of the sound, even when I fumbled on my glasses*—yet one of them had to be.

The Clues: Repetition, repetition, repetition.

An ungodly hour on a Wednesday night isn’t exactly prime time for partying, but maybe that’s what it was. Starting up the music again at sunrise the following day made that possibility less likely, as did keeping it running for the entirety of the weekend save for a few hours in the afternoon. I left for a month, the year rolled over into the next, and when I returned, pulling open my window let in the same music. It was almost reassuring, on one hand, to know that some things will stay the same—on the other hand, why?

Several nights, one window accompanied the music with an interior light cycling between the three computerized primary colors of red, green, and blue. I can prove nothing, unless I can find someone with better directional hearing than I possess—but all the evidence is there.

The Conclusion: An aspiring DJ with a long way to go.

Look. Not to hash on any career plans, but the solution to being rejected from the clubs is not to subject an entire block to an impromptu job interview instead. Close your window, put on some headphones, and, please.

Get some better music.

*Which, to be clear, is extremely frustrating at four in the morning. Normally, when waking at that point, your sole desire is to retain all of your tiredness and return to bed as soon as possible; putting on your glasses is a concession to awakeness no one should have to make at such an ungodly hour.

Carlton Arms via Bwarchive