What would you do if a motorbike went up and down nearby?

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Weirdness
Pileated woodpecker
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29 Oct 2020, 4:28 pm

I seriously can't even believe any society functions like this. And they wonder why murders happen? Oh, I might know... I mean, sure for the first day one tries to turn up the heavy metal and drown out as much as possible, but it's theoretically possible, with no apparently laws against it, for this to happen 24/7 for years on end... and the only hope is that these thugs are 'bored'? Imagine being forced just a meter or so away from this possibility. Suicide or murder is the only horizon, surely...



Ade C
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29 Oct 2020, 4:51 pm

I struggled with this for many years after buying a house on a main road.i still get very tense when I hear them coming from half a mile away. It's a 30 mph speed limit and the traffic regularly exceeds that but despite numerous calls to the police they couldn't be less interested. I even had a speeding car crash into my garden wall once (as have many neighbours) but nobody gives a crap.
My best advice is to move!



Dear_one
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29 Oct 2020, 11:50 pm

I usually enjoy the variety of a motorbike on my street. I also get semi-trucks, forklifts, bicycles, mopeds, people, including Police, on horseback, emergency vehicles, snowmobiles, and lots of jacked up trucks with loud exhausts.
Weirdness - you need to get out of there for as many months as it takes for you to calm down and get well rested. You probably won't want to go back.



DeepBlueSouth
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30 Oct 2020, 2:01 am

A friendly, churchgoing widow who used to live next to me years ago once got involved with, and eventually married, a very course... ahem, rusticated individual who came to drive an extremely loud motorcycle seven days a week. When he first got it, he would crank the motor for between 30 seconds and as long as three minutes every time he started out. I was working as a bartender at the time, and a few of my regular customers were bikers themselves. They didn't understand this behavior any more than I did, and while they admitted that they enjoyed the ridiculously unnecessary noise that their chosen means of conveyance generated [it also increases their "visibility" on the road, as other drivers can hear them when they are not visible to the other drivers, but let's be honest and reasonable adults about this, it's all about loud noises and shiny things for them], they also had to confide in me that the noise from the neighbor was rude and actionable, not to mention extremely bad for the motorbike itself. One of them offered to "give the dude a scare" for me, but I told him that it wasn't a great idea for either of us. The noise, which by the way started at 5:55 AM every morning except on Sunday when it was delayed until around 9:00 AM, practically made the house unlivable for over two years. Both bedrooms here are literally 10-12 feet from that neighbor's driveway, and the noise was extremely loud anywhere in the house, but especially outside.

We had once been friends with the widow, and I had met the individual in question [the one with the bike] several times prior to all of this noise starting out. While he was dating the widow, I had a lawnmower die on me and he offered to mow our grass for a fee. He did so several times, but the last time, he'd asked for the money in advance to get a part for his mower and never finished the job. He never would give me a date on which he would do this work, and as a result of this, he'd run over a very long garden hose of mine. By the time he got the bike, he actually owed me $50 between these two incidents, and still does. My mother was a nurse who worked 11:00a-11:00p and rarely got to bed until a few hours after work, winding down from a shift as an ER Nurse at the local level one trauma center [which sees most of the emergent cases from this region, comprising of up to four or five nearby states in the Tennessee Valley]. At the time, I was a bartender who usually worked from anywhere between 6:00PM to 1:00AM and sometimes as late as 3:00AM on weekends. We both had a 45 minute commute home from work, for the record. Many nights after a late shift, I literally kept myself awake until the bastard left in the morning and rarely slept for more than four to six hours at a time for at least two years.

I petitioned the local law enforcement, but there are no noise enforcement laws in my town. Both my mother and I had verbally assaulted him on numerous occasions in the morning, on some days he didn't work, he would come and go as many as three or four times [going AND coming 3-4 times, mind you, not one-way]. There were talks... I have friends in both high and low places.... At the height of it one morning, I went to bed after he'd left for work at 5:55. Surprisingly, he returned again at 6:30, and by this point woke me up after I hadn't slept for at least four days. I told him that we'd both had enough of the noise, and he told me that he ought to kick my ass. I invited him onto my side of the lawn. Georgia is a "stand your ground state", and if he had taken me up on the offer, I could not have been legally held responsible for ANY of my actions. Long story short, he refused. I told him that it was likely that he'd have an accident and he called the police on me [though to be fair statistically, he was far more likely to die in a wreck than most other motorists in a region where one is more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than any way other than cardiac failure].

I was arrested without explanation, rights read, none of it [police don't really read you Miranda rights, that's basically something you see on television]. Within two or three minutes of being placed in the jail cell, I slept for at least eight hours, directly on the concrete floor. The guarantee of relative silence in a holding cell with just three other people and no engine noises was blissful. I literally hadn't slept that well in almost two years. The magistrate judge, whom I knew personally and had spoken with previously on the matter of the motorbike, did not charge me with anything and indicated that the individual who started all of this said that I'd threatened to shoot him. I truthfully denied this, said "with what, a water pistol?" and invited "the whole damned police force" to search my home for any evidence of firearms. I reminded him that I got arrested quite often for a man who didn't ever seem to get charged with anything [I have been arrested somewhere between 8-10 times in Georgia, I've honestly lost count, beaten false charges once, never charged with any crimes for the other arrests, but did have a genuine charge once in Tennessee for a cannabis pipe, full disclosure, I'm not a criminal or dangerous, unless I am threatened or without sleep for two years apparently]. I also told him that the town and county were building up a pretty good case against them for police targeting on me. I have zero doubt that this helped my case, and yet again, I was charged with nothing. However, the magistrate did a favor for me that day. He reminded me that there was no noise ordinance in this town and told me that there was nothing that he could do, then cleared his throat loudly and said, "BUT there is no noise ordinance in this town, again, there's nothing that I can do...." and gave me a knowing look. I told him, "Okay... I think I see what you're saying...."

From that moment on [the biker's look of confusion mixed with fear when he first saw me out later that day was priceless], I took the magistrate's "suggestion" to heart. I knew that the guy went to sleep early, yet neither my mother or I did. Every time we came home from work, we intentionally drove down the road past HIS bedroom and leaned on the car horn. Every time I saw him outside cleaning his guns and shooting his bow and arrow at a fake target deer statue, I went outside, set up two tower speakers in his direction, and cranked up the best of Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, The Fugees, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, NWA, the Wu Tang Clan, even some modern New Orleans Jazz and Funk thrown in there [the biker once told me that he hated the "n____r President" {Obama}, so I figured he felt much the same about black music in general, whereas I absolutely love it]. Other neighbors who had tired of the motorcycle joined in. They did the same with speakers across the street from his bedroom quite late into the evening several times.

Within less than a month of this, he tried to apologize to me and to mom [from the safety of his own yard], we both gave him the finger and walked away. A month later, he put the widow's house up for sale [which was now his since they were Evangelical Christians and this is a community property state]. Everyone else had dealt with him for TWO EFFING YEARS. He couldn't even take two months of his own bitter medicine. I wanted to feel sorry for his wife, but we all kind of blamed her for bringing him into our neighborhood in the first place. I still sleep every night with cranked up thunderstorm noise on speakers due to the constant trains going by, the muscle cars, and the occasional motorcycle passing through [deep, low, intermittent tones like crashing waves and thunderstorms are the best to block out engine noise] not to mention the fireworks and automatic gunfire we hear on certain nights. City roads and thoroughfares can indeed be loud, but whoever said the goddamned country was quiet has obviously never been to Northwest Georgia.


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Nades
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02 Nov 2020, 5:03 am

Weirdness wrote:
I seriously can't even believe any society functions like this. And they wonder why murders happen? Oh, I might know... I mean, sure for the first day one tries to turn up the heavy metal and drown out as much as possible, but it's theoretically possible, with no apparently laws against it, for this to happen 24/7 for years on end... and the only hope is that these thugs are 'bored'? Imagine being forced just a meter or so away from this possibility. Suicide or murder is the only horizon, surely...


Have you thought about getting a little two stroke motorbike yourself and chasing them down the road with it?



Dear_one
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04 Nov 2020, 11:49 am

Whenever you are alarmed by a sound, your body pumps out a bit of adrenalin. If it is not needed, because there is nothing for you to do about the sound, it builds up and can dominate your thinking in a positive feedback loop. I've dealt with this for years. What I do is to burn up the adrenalin any way I can, from riding a bike to punching a pillow. Yesterday, I had to work extra hard, and even though I had been feeling OK, the fatigue helped me sleep better and wake up more cheerful.



DeepBlueSouth
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04 Nov 2020, 5:20 pm

Dear_one wrote:
Whenever you are alarmed by a sound, your body pumps out a bit of adrenalin. If it is not needed, because there is nothing for you to do about the sound, it builds up and can dominate your thinking in a positive feedback loop. I've dealt with this for years. What I do is to burn up the adrenalin any way I can, from riding a bike to punching a pillow. Yesterday, I had to work extra hard, and even though I had been feeling OK, the fatigue helped me sleep better and wake up more cheerful.


This is terrific advice and channeling the adrenaline into exercise, thus better physical/emotional health overall, is said to be the best revenge of all. Hard work is often great medicine indeed.


_________________
-- Hank
o-(|8[#]


“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.”
― Dr. Hunter S. Thompson