To my dear upstairs neighbors

The time has come to write a letter to the guys who live above me. Here's the draft I'd love to send:

We've been sharing a split-level house for half a year now. For 6 months, you have stomped and shouted your way through my life, and my nights have been rainless thunderstorms. I don't sleep until you sleep. This can't keep happening.

If you recall, we gave you a generous grace period when you first moved in. It was summer, and none of us needed to be up early, so what was the harm? In retrospect, it might've been wiser to set a stern precedent then, correlating your furious noise with our noisy fury - fighting fire with fire.

Instead, we took the passive-aggressive route, and at worst you endured a few saccharine requests for peace and quiet. Our smiles have grown more and more dour as you've taken advantage of our neighborliness. Now we're done asking.

You know, during the day, it's kind of entertaining to hear your antics. Your dialect is foreign to me, and it is a delightfully exotic sound that resonates through the walls when you shout a conversation between the front yard and the rear-facing kitchen. Your amelodic, arrhythmic, abysmal singing is almost charming; I myself have been known to Walk on Sunshine a little too loud. When your activities make the whole house rumble like we live by the El Train, it's a sport of sorts for us to try to figure out how you're producing such cacophony; Are you rearranging your furniture for time? Have you installed a bowling alley up there? Are you amateur jackhammer enthusiasts?

It's when you do these things at night that we have a problem. And you know it's a problem. You know when you hear a knock at your door that it's time to be quiet - I can hear hear your hushed whispers when I stand fuming on your porch. How interesting that you refuse to open the door. How peculiar.

That, my dear neighborinos, is not how this is going to work from now on. You do not have license to make a nightly ruckus until such time as we plead that you stop. Your cue for sotto voce is not "Don rolls out of bed, puts on shoes and sweatshirt and overcoat, walks around the house, climbs the stairs, and pounds angrily on your door". The question, then, is how do I make you realize that your behavior must change?

Consequences. Let's talk about consequences. Certainly I want to beat the bejeezus out of you, or at least I do at 2AM with temperatures in the teens. But I'm not going to. This is important, so I'll repeat: I will not cause you physical harm. It's just not in my nature, for one, and moreover, I have a considerable aversion to criminal charges. I am not going to hurt you (although I make no such promises for my roommates. You know the big one? He's cuh-razy). In fact, I won't even damage your property - won't penny-jam your door, won't fill the car you keep in the backyard full of shaving cream, won't put meat to rot in your vents (shall I go on?). I promise.

This self-restraint pretty much leaves me toothless. Toothless, I think to myself as I pound on your door in a snowstorm, like an old woman. And then I think about old woman cliches, like threatening you with a rolling pin (rejected, see above), screaming shrilly at you in a foreign language (rejected, your native tongue trumps my highschool Latin), or calling the police.

Eureka.

It's unmanly, it's embarrassing, and it's my civic duty. It's regrettable, but after months of waning politeness, it's all you've left me.

If you keep making noise past 11PM, I'm calling the police.

Love,
Don

P.S. Please don't worry about any noise you make during sexual congress. I would never begrudge anyone the opportunity to get busy, so that isn't on my list of gripes. Besides - and I say this from months of experience as an unwilling observer - the duration of this particular category of noises is laughably short. So really, no complaints... at least not from me.

So that's the letter I wish I could write. Brevity, though, is the foundation of clarity... plus I'm not sure their English comprehension is up for the task. So here's the letter I'm going to write. It lacks the linguistic flair on which I pride myself, but I think it'll do the trick...

IF YOU KEEP MAKING NOISE PAST 11PM, I'M CALLING THE POLICE
-your downstairs neighbors