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The airhorn-blowing began around 11:30. While annoying, I do expect shit like that on New Year's Eve, so I didn't get too worked up about it (unlike B. and Clara Jane). It's the random weeknights when they're blasting that fucker that really piss me off. For an hour, we were subjected to what sounded like random freight trains blasting down our tiny street.

Now, this is what consistantly gets me about the dunebuggy builders - they're older. They're grandparents, and their infant grandchild lives across the street from them. It's bad enough that my kid gets to hear this shit at all hours. But they're subjecting their younger grandchild, who lives closer to them than we do, to it.

We've lived here for almost seven years, and this behavior has just started in the past year or so. Makes me wonder if the foray into grandparenthood has cause a bit of middle-age-craziness. Perhaps someone's feeling a bit long in the tooth and is grossly trying to overcompensate for the natural passage of time.

That being said ...

When we went to bed around 12:30, the airhorn blasts were becoming fewer and farther between. But as I laid in bed, I could hear thumping bass coming from that general direction. I could feel the vibrations in the wall behind our bed. From two houses and a street away. B. stepped outside to see what the rukus was all about, because sometimes my supersonic hearing fools me into thinking I'm hearing crunked-out basslines from neighbors two blocks away, when I'm really hearing the dog snoring.

Nope, I was right. They had their music cranked up in their massive dunebuggy-building garage. It was so loud that we were hearing it through the closed garage door, even.

Now, before I continue, I think you need to know about how this neighbor has decorated his van. You should know about the NRA trucker hat displayed on the dashboard. And the Calvin-urinating-on-Osama-bin-Laden sticker. And the NRA sticker, in case you missed the hat. And the Confederate flag sticker. And the "Guns kill people just like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat" sticker.

Think about those stickers, and imagine what kind of person would want to express these thoughts and ideas to the world.

Now, imagine that person, a grizzled 50+-year-old dunebuggy-building grandfather, locked in a cavernous concrete garage at nearly 1 AM, on New Year's Eve, celebrating by blasting Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" at a neighborhood-deafening volume.

Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of it, or cry for the angry redneck on the corner who's rocking his shit out to early Elton John in the middle of the night.