Bad night's sleep

I don't know why some nights I can sleep despite neighborhood noise, and other nights I can't, and I lie there cursing the people/things generating the noise.

Last night was one of those nights. I guess because it's now cooler, people have decided to bring their boom cars back out and cruise again. And there are dogs at all the houses 'round me, so when one starts barking, they ALL do.

(And beagles. Ugh, beagles. They may be good dogs for a lot of reasons but they "bugle" - a sort of high-pitched howl that sets my teeth on edge).

I was lying there, wondering which neighbor's dog started it, and wondering if it was worth a call to the "noise complaint" line. (I decided not...it was really only 9:30 at that point, but when you get up at 5 am...). I turned my white noise machine up a couple notches, I could still hear it.

Finally, I got up and put in ear plugs. I don't like to do that because I always wonder if I'd hear the fire alarm if it went off. But I decided at that point the chance of being immolated was low enough, and the chance of not-sleeping if I didn't block the noise was pretty close to 1, so I put them in.

A while back, some other Oklahoma bloggers were discussing the story of the man who was arrested for mowing his lawn at 4:30 am (Oh, how I would have loved the residents of HFOB to have been arrested for partying drunk, with the stereo at "11," on their lawn at **3** am).

This is the problem...we don't like, most of us, additional laws and rules being heaped upon our heads. But there are some people who just can't seem to understand the idea of a social contract. We shouldn't NEED, for example, laws against texting while driving - common sense would say, "You don't take your eyes off the road to read someone else's "OMG LOL!"" But people do. We shouldn't NEED to tell people, "Mowing the lawn with a gas-powered mower at 4:30 am will upset your neighbors." But people do. (And I could draw a little parallel here with the way medical/health news is reported...I think I over-react to a lot of stories because I know most of the stuff already, and I feel like the stories that are probably put out there to inform the people who are, apparently, blithely unaware of things like DON'T EAT EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF SUGAR are really pointing at me and are saying, "even the comparatively small amount of sugar you consume is TOO MUCH and you are a BAD PERSON.")

And this is where - even though I hate the idea of millions of petty laws - I begin to fantasize about what things be like were I the Benevolent Dictatrix of the World.

For one thing: There would be "quiet hours" in most neighborhoods from 9 pm until 7 am. Anyone caught driving a boom car, mowing, leaving their dog staked outside to howl, whatever...they pay a fine. If they persist in violating, the noise making object is taken away from them. (People who work nights? There would be specially zoned neighborhoods with "quiet hours" from 9 am to 7 pm, with that information posted at every entrance to the neighborhood).

Also, grocery stores, supermarkets, hypermarkets, megalomarts, whatever - they would not be permitted to mount televisions in their store that would blare advertising at the shoppers. They also wouldn't be permitted to play music that was advertisement of products they sold.

And there'd be cell phone blockers...in churches, in schools, in theaters. Yes, yes, I know: doctors and first responders and those sort of people need to be reachable. But we managed that before cell phones! Put in a regular phone in the usher's office (or the secretary's office, or something) and then send someone to retrieve the person who was needed. Or, perhaps, have two sets of frequencies: one issued to the general public, and a special frequency that can only be used/picked up by the phones of people who might be needed in an emergency. With stiff penalties for misuse of the emergency frequency. There'd also be blockers in every car that rolled off the assembly line, with fines for people who tampered with them.

Anyone caught littering would receive many, many hours of public service...picking up litter.

People caught starting fires, especially in a drought...well, I think we'd need a penal colony for that. Surely there are some cash-strapped Pacific nations who have atolls they're not currently using?

Ironically, though...I'd not have restrictions on things like the type of food people could buy (or feed to their kids). Or the type of light-bulb (other than maybe to offer some kind of incentive to any company that comes up with bulbs that are both aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sound.)

But really, it's a lot of what I think of as "Benevolent Dictatrix" issues (that is: people behaving badly) that make me never want to live in an apartment again (and which make me think how nice it would be to buy a very large plot of land here, build a modest house in the middle of it, and then have hundreds of feet of airspace as a sound barrier between me and my neighbors. The main thing that stays my hand is the complication of the whole thing, and the thought of having to pack and move again)