the duplicity of industral neighborhoods.

Yesterday as I walked the dog, I got about twenty yards from Renard's front door before coming to a vacant patch of overgrown land. It smelled strongly of honeysuckle and queen anne's lace. Having been left undisturbed for so long, it was its own tiny forest starting to spill over onto the sidewalk. If I'd been there at night, sniffling the air with my eyes closed, I would swear I was out in the country.

You can see stars from our back porch way more clearly than any neighborhood I've lived in, including my first apartment that was two blocks from a dark and quiet beach.

Most of our neighbors have lived on this block for upwards of seven, eight years. Maybe living in an industrial neighborhood for extended periods of time forces a person to seek out greenery. I have learned that my next door neighbors are organic farmers, and they were of the opinion that I should "go meet Al." Al is something of the oracle of the neighborhood. He's the scatterbrained but lively expert on all goings-on in our neighborhood. After I met him (and was prompted to remind him my name about five times), he led us to the yard behind his house, which is bursting with greenery. There, under the big ugly slabs of concrete from the expressway, is a little community garden on a man-made hill. It was raining when I was first shown the garden, and my next door neighbor took the opportunity to produce a handful of cantaloupe seeds from his pants pocket and plant them right there.

"This little patch is empty," Al said, kicking at some tall grass with the toe of his shoe. "If you have anything to plant, go for it. Everyone'll leave it alone."

Even our landlord was just featured in a local newspaper for his efforts to organize a neighborhood-specific recycling program. He was delighted when we led him outside to show him our big DIY recycling barrels.

In short, for all the times I reference the house on Paper Street in "Fight Club" when discussing Renard's problems, it hasn't yet been my experience that we live in a typical industrial neighborhood.

But there are exceptions.

I will not write another sad-panda entry like the one from earlier in this week, because we're all staying positive. I will spare everyone the long list of offenses committed in our alley, tales of aforementioned spider invasion, or the odd occasional weird smell outside. Instead, I have to lament on what's turning out to be a big problem to me:

I can't sleep in this house. It has not been soundproofed, because it was clearly not built to be lived in.

I've never had a problem with sleep in my life. It used to be that I could sit anywhere and fall asleep within 20 minutes, and stay out for hours. I have slept through two earthquakes, the better part of a home invasion, problematic bouts of jet lag, and dozens of noisy roommates and neighbors. But Renard has proven to be a problem.

It would seem that the walls built in February provide zero reduction in noise. In my bed at night, I can clearly hear Michelle and Jeremiah speaking in hushed tones. I can hear their cats sneeze. Sometimes in that late-night haze of keen awareness, I can hear a single book being removed from a shelf and put back.

And if there's anything happening in the studio directly below my room, forget it. Paper cutters, machinery, the radio, people talking at normal volumes - anything - will wake me up. I had my suspicions this would be the case. Having a firm knowledge of the sorry state of these floors (and being able to identify what flavor shisha my roomies are smoking in their hookah in the basement while I'm in my bedroom upstairs), I had a feeling sound would be an issue.

While I could once slip into a solid ten-hour coma after five minutes of rest and unwinding, it now takes me an average of two hours to fall asleep. And if anything disturbs me, I wake up like a shot and require another hour to fall back asleep. Three days in a row, it's been people talking at completely reasonable volumes and rather late in the day, since the restless nights have been making me sleep past noon on a regular basis.

This morning, someone decided at 8:55 a.m. that since his or her constant knocking on the neighbor's door wasn't cutting any ice, he or she would knock harder, for a solid eight minutes. (Maybe it was knocking, maybe someone was using a hammer... at this point, I wouldn't bat an eye if it was an ant climbing up a wall based on what I know of the acoustics in this place.)

I'd only been back to sleep for two hours and was so crippled with exhaustion that as badly as I wanted to answer the door while dragging my baseball bat behind me, I couldn't stand up. The southern sun was blinding. An ambulance went by. Trains. Trash-pickers. I was awake and staring at my clock until the sun obscured the time... and when I finally dozed off, it was people talking and laughing in the hallway. Ugh.

I really need to find a solution. But the walls are built, my bedroom floor is finished, and I can't very well tell people to refrain from talking at 12:30 in the afternoon. But something's gotta give, because I'm turning into a zombie.