"Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock"; went the clock he hung above his bed.
"Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip"; went the steady trickle of water droplets from the leaky faucet in his bathroom.
"Howl... howl, howl, hoooowwwwwwwwwwllllll!" went the neighbor's dog.
"BzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZZ"; went the mosquito as it flew tantalizingly close to his ear, then away, then back again just when he thought it would leave him be.
"Meeeoowwwwwwwwwwwwww <screech> FCHHHHHHHH"; went the cats, right on cue.
"Squeak... squeak... squeak squeak squeak squeak SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK"; went his upstairs neighbors' bed... accompanied by faint moaning, which somehow simultaneously aroused and repulsed him.
"Beep beep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep"; went the cars on the nearby main street, whose easy accessibility had been the main reason he'd chosen that God forsaken apartment in the first place.
"SNOOOOORRREEEEEEE"; went his roommate, impressively managing to make himself heard through two closed doors and the white noise coming from his broken TV set -which his roommate insisted he couldn't sleep without turning on at full volume.
And that was not all; for the entropy of the cacophony was echoed -if you'll pardon the pun- in the arrhythmic flashing of the faulty street lamp right outside his third floor window, and artfully imbued with the red hue of tens of tail lights which his ancient, tattered shutters couldn't quite block.
The potent mix of unwanted stimuli was enough to drive any sane person completely mad... and his relationship with sanity was already severely strained, at best; if sanity incarnate had been one of his neighbors, they would have been slipping passive aggressive notes under each others' doors and stealing each others' newspapers.
For the thirty seventh time in so many days, he cursed his inaction and vowed to do something about his nighttime pet peeves... and for the thirty seventh time in so many days, he mentally rolled his eyes at the notion that he would actually be proactive and do anything about them.
Some of them were perfectly within his control; he could take down the clock and smash it to tiny little pieces with the hammer he bought when he'd moved in; his mind still alight with noble ambitions of independence and DIY manly handiwork... but which hadn't been removed from his toolbox since he put it there, for fear of his unpredictability and anger management issues... and for good reason, now that he thought about it.
He could ask his landlady to replace the rubber seal on his faucet or change the whole faucet... or he could even fix it himself and be done with it, but both options would entail speaking to his sexually starved cougar of a landlady if he didn't want to lose his security deposit... and he didn't particularly relish that conversation, especially considering how she reveled in shamelessly and inappropriately flirting with him and watching him squirm under her piercing gaze as he attempted to formulate the least offensive "no thank you"s he could so she wouldn't kick him out of the apartment. Besides, spending his own meager earnings on repairs to an apartment he didn't own rubbed him up the wrong way... it was like changing the engine oil on a rented car.
His other problems required even more refined diplomacy, however. He'd never been the most sociable of people, but his limited earnings restricted his housing options severely; it was a choice between legally sharing a suspiciously affordable, spacious and conveniently located apartment with one annoying roommate; and illegally sharing a remote, tiny studio apartment with a very nice Bengali family but which also would have forced him into a daily three hour-long commute to work as well as frequent unavoidable awkwardness and averted eyes as Mr. and Mrs. Shah attempted to raise the family count from four to five.
He turned over in bed and lay on his back, lost in thought; come to think of it, most of his issues had to do with his hatred of dealing with other people; okay, so maybe he couldn't do much about the mosquitoes, the lonely dog, the street lights and noise, the horny cats or the horny landlady (well, technically he could do something about the latter, but of course she was as attractive to him as a week-old tuna sandwich left in the sun), but he could at least have a word with his roommate and the upstairs neighbor.
"So why doesn't he?" You're probably asking. Why would a grown man be so passive about everything wrong with his life when he could make a stand and end his problems?
Because after living there for more than a year, the fight was completely sapped out of him and he'd long since learned that there was no use. It was like trying to kill a hydra; fix one problem, and three others would immediately sprout in its place, some of them orders of magnitude worse than the original problem he'd been trying to fix. It took him a few furious weeks and several anger management courses to accept that maybe it was best not to disturb the karmic balance of dickery and just learn to live with his problems... it was much easier than having to face an entirely new set every week.
You see, nobody had warned him when he'd moved to that town that everyone -and everything- were dicks. At any given point in time, there was a 100% chance that someone, or something, was being a dick to someone -or something. You would be perfectly justified in letting out an incredulous snort at this point, o reader... for the odds that an entire town would only be populated by dicks are infinitesimally, almost anomalously low. You'd probably even be prepared to wager some of your own hard-earned savings to back that up... but by Aragorn's chin cleft, you'd lose all of it.
It wasn't named "Dickville Town" for nothing.
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