Although I've tried to conceal it, for the benefit of those around me who are not at fault, I've been a seething little ball of angry lately. It bubbles beneath the surface, this angry does, just waiting for a chance at release.

I came home tonight (at around 12:30) to find that once again, someone in the SRO next door has the radio on. I can't fall asleep with a radio or TV on. The sound of passing cars I can stand, but voices and music drive me bonkers when I'm trying to doze off. I just can't tune them out, and my brain keeps focused on them, which makes next to impossible for me to fall asleep.

In this case, the radio was sitting on the sill of an open window, about 5 feet away from my window. Even with my window shut, I could still hear it. I looked over and saw the lights were out.

Luckily, the people who run the place seem to be sympathetic to my plight. I went over and walked upstairs to the offending room, and could hear the music out in the hallway. I knocked repeatedly, but there was no answer. The manager came up with the key, and we discovered that the room's occupant was not even home. Apparently he'd just turned the radio on and left.

I unplugged the radio and stormed back to my apartment.

These days, about the only good things I have to look forward to are spending time with friends, eating food that's not good for me, and getting a good night's sleep. Apparently that's too much to ask, which is a shame, because not sleeping is only going to make me even more irritable than I already am, which frankly I don't need.

I'm starting to feel like my life is just a giant cluster-fuck, infrequently interrupted by all too brief moments of sensibility, instead of the other way around. When I see how I've ended up, all I can think is that I don't want to be here. I'm not just talking about where I live, either, though I think that's a big part of it. I would like to live somewhere where it's quiet at night. Where I'm not constantly assaulted by the smell of pot in the hallways, or worse, outside my own window. Where they don't dump trash outside my building. Where water doesn't sometime leak through the ceiling from my upstairs neighbor's bathroom when he takes a shower. Where the garbage men don't leave a trail of smelly trash in the basement when they take out the garbage at night.

None of that crap really matters though. I could find the perfect home for the perfect price, and it would still suck, because at the end of the day, it would be just me living in it. Some days, coming home to an empty apartment just kills me. So by the time I discover that some schmuck has decided to keep me awake with his radio all night, I'm already plenty aggravated. The noise is just icing on the cake. A rage cake with violence frosting. And I'm just dying to serve it up.