{"id":4028,"date":"2006-09-18T17:41:38","date_gmt":"2006-09-18T22:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2006\/09\/18\/it-was-a-dark-and-cacophonous-night\/"},"modified":"2022-01-30T15:37:44","modified_gmt":"2022-01-30T21:37:44","slug":"it-was-a-dark-and-cacophonous-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/09\/18\/it-was-a-dark-and-cacophonous-night\/","title":{"rendered":"It was a dark and cacophonous night"},"content":{"rendered":"

I awoke Sunday morning in stages, as an increasingly urgent call raised me from the depths of sleep. It took a few seconds for the intruding stimulus to register: who is<\/em> that laying on their car horn in front of our house?! The horn went on and on, until I grudgingly decided to investigate. Of course, as soon as I threw off the covers, it stopped.<\/p>\n

Ah, probably some drunk who got turned around and thinks he’s serenading his girlfriend, I thought. Or, perhaps, I dreamed. I crawled back in bed…and it started again.<\/p>\n

This time, I hopped up a bit more energetically, pulled on a pair of pants and stumbled to the front door, where my father-in-law was peering out onto the driveway, casting a baleful eye at the culprit, his own ’93 Chrysler Concorde.<\/p>\n

“It’s your<\/em> car that’s doing that?!”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, it’s gotten to where it does that every now and then.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, great. But you don’t know what causes it?”<\/p>\n

“Well, it’s probably a short of some kind.”<\/p>\n

At that point the noise stopped. I remarked that if it went off again, we were going to have to do something<\/em> (as I had just seen the beam of a neighbor’s flashlight wash angrily across our drive); otherwise, we’re going to have the whole neighborhood marching on us.<\/p>\n

We closed the door to the silence, and I almost made it back to the bedroom before it started a third time. I ran into the garage, hit the door opener while grabbing a set of Channel Locks, sprinted to the driveway, popped the hood and disconnected the battery cable, thereby quieting the clamorous beast forever. Or at least until daylight.<\/p>\n

Did I mention the barking dogs?<\/p>\n

With things temporarily under control, I returned to bed, noting the time for my testimony in the upcoming trial — 3:47 a.m. Sleep came back as grudgingly as I initially left it.<\/p>\n

\"Divider\"<\/div>\n

A few hours later, after breakfast, we reconnected the battery and pulled the fuse that controls the horn, radio amp, and cigarette lighter. My father-in-law will have to light up while listening to Rush in some other vehicle, at least until he gets the car to the shop to have the short fixed. We thought about disconnecting the horn, but have you looked under the hood of a car lately?<\/p>\n

The good news is that none of my neighbors has left any threatening notes or phone calls, although I have an uneasy feeling about the dead goat hanging from the oak tree in the front yard. Ah, some drunk satanist probably got turned around and left it in the wrong place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wherein is explored the theory that the happiness of the neighborhood is indirectly proportional to the number of times you wake it up before 4:00 a.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6775,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4028\/revisions\/6775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}