The True Witching Hour

Midnight has been found out! I have proof positive that 2:30 a.m. is the new midnight.

Two nights in a row my sleep has been disturbed by noisy, inconsiderate and even violent neighbors. Okay, so I live in a trailer park of ill repute but still….listen to this.

So, two nights ago, I’m snoring away. Yes, I do that occasionally. It’s a sign that I’m really in deep REM sleep – that’s how I’ve sold it to anyone I shared sleeping quarters with, anyway.

Suddenly my deep breathing (with sound effects) is interrupted by a few loud thumps. Nothing close enough to my RV to worry about, so I settled back in. A few minutes later, the banging around begins again and in my sleepy fog I try to locate where the sound is coming from. Still, I’m not induced to actually leave my warm bed in 33-degree weather.

The timber of the sounds had picked up as well as the pace, so finally, I pick up my cell phone to check the time. Sure enough, it’s 2:27 a.m. I drag myself out of bed and part the curtains between my abode and the cab of the truck. Peering out into the dark, I spy one of the creepiest of my neighbors schlumping around his RV like he’s looking for something he lost or maybe doing some spring – oops, winter – cleaning.

What an idiot, I think to myself. What the hell is he doing? Let me just explain. When I say creepy, I’m not using the term lightly. The first time I saw him up close I wasn’t truly convinced that he wasn’t a creature of the night – one of the undead. His pallor is somewhere between the color of octopus white meat and that grey part of an oyster, except the portions that are covered with tattoos, which give the old (I’m guessing 60 or so) guy a bit of color. I can’t explain why seafood comes to mind, except that both of these items are pretty slimy. Yep, that’s it.

He’s burdened with stringy, greasy, dyed, black hair that he covers with a drooping and dirty Gilligan hat. His personality isn’t exactly enhanced by the nervous jerking and occasional overly-long stare that usually accompanies drug use.

Anyway, I gave up on trying to figure it out and went back to sleep, more easily than I would have expected because the racket was still going a half hour later. Morning came too quickly and as I unlocked my car to head for work I glanced over at his space. The vehicle and its owner had vanished in the night.

Then, last night, I’m startled awake by a loud bang that at first I took to be a gunshot. But it wasn’t. It was my other disturbingly decrepit neighbor, who is a close encounter of the third kind (alien to more than an hour of sobriety) and his pals slamming his RV door. This was followed by a sound that could only be made by a fist hitting a body – hard. Moments later, as I slung open my own door (not a smart thing to do), I was witness to two men screaming death threats at each other and scrambling down the lane as if they were taking the fight to town.

Guess what time it was! Yes, of course, it was actually 2:36 a.m. About an hour later, after two sheriffs, an ambulance and a fire truck had visited, the park settled down for the remainder of the long winter’s night.

This evening I discovered that one of the men running had been stabbed. Hmmm…. Might be time for that move I’ve been talking about for a year.

Anyway, these two events I submit as absolute confirmation that just like 50 is the new 40 for women, 2:30 a.m. has replaced midnight as the witching hour. Especially on a work night!