troubling sounds and sights, toujours

so i am making friends in the building i live in. cause i am walking in my kick ass boots. toujours, she says, my neighbor that is. the neighbor whose baby screams like it's being stabbed with needles at two in the morning. i could swear she brings home random children and sacrifices them to some forgotten deities. not kind gods. evil ones. with bloody altars and rusty knives.

as i am walking down the stairs the light goes out. the woman switches on the light again and before i can say "merci" she arrests my smile with a mean ugly scowl. "c'est vous qui marchez avec ... blabla" "oui," i say, not really getting it, still smiling my frozen smile. "hmmph, blabla..." she replies but now i must tell her that je ne comprends a thing, lady. a short ugly bitter woman as i look down on her. she points at my boots. the ones my brother-in-law described as those of a dominatrix, cause of the sound they make. Well, this seems to annoy her.

So here I was trying to understand what the hell this woman wanted from me. Yes, I have noisy boots, so what. Aujourd’hui I asked her, did you hear me today which would be a lie since I was not really walking today, only sitting on my ass fiddling with my pictures, learning, making miniature steps of progress. Like I should cut out a figure onto an already existent background instead of trying to cut and paste little pieces of background and pattern around my head… this is what kept me busy. Really what I should get is a better camera but these cost money. kacke.

I was wearing my nifty red socks with the nubbies on them to keep me from slipping and falling. Makes my step quiet like that of a ninja. Oh, but she says, toujours, all the time she hears it, pointing to the ceiling with her eyes rolling angrily. Pas toujours, I protest. Now I am getting annoyed. Oui, toujours, she mutters as she turns around, merci pour blabla. As I walk past her I’m thinking of the things I should have told her like, oh, madame, or is it mademoiselle? C’est votre bebe screeching toutes les journees et toutes les nuits? Cunt, I’m thinking. but this word I throw around too loosely these days. Lucky for you there’s this language barrier.

On my way to the supermarket all I see is little uglies with bitter faces. Full of hate they want to ruin your day. Completing my little tour of horrors, standing in my path is an open truck full of cow carcasses dangling from iron meat hooks. All we are, too. Meat, walking corpses. These are now driving to their final destination. I do not eat this. I do not need this. I will go mad in this world.

So now I take the boots off consciously. Yet, part of me wants to be Juliette Lewis in the fourth floor when she puts on five pound ankle weights, turns up the volume on her stereo and jump-ropes with extra umph in a neighbor battle of noise. She could have said this nicely is all I’m saying. The good thing about this incident was that I had to speak French. I have been avoiding this. People speak English, even German to me. It was amazing that the words just flew from my bouche. Not yet courent mais stuttering. I’ll show her. I’ll show all y’all.