Nonetheless, even though it was a fairly painless time, it's a tad tricky to get the time and space to reflect with twice as many in a smallish apartment as normally there would be, all hovering about the main room with network access. And although having live-in guests is an instructive experience, reflecting aloud on it with them still sharing air, narrow corridors, and dishsoap, is awkward. So I've been quiet, and am not dead.

Now, in other news, let me transition from good guests to bad neighbors...

A while ago, the screaming and holleringnext door got so bad, at 1:30am approx., and was accompanied by pounding, thrashing, such that I concluded a fight had broken out, and somebody was hitting somebody, perhaps multiple somebodies, maybe some people holding down others for their beatin'. I called 911, and told them was I was hearing. The cops came around, not too slowly, I suppose, but not as quickly as I'd like. Of course, given the number of loud-noises-and-hollerin-maybe-a-beatin calls they get, it can't be that urgent on the relative scale.

The police come to the door, the banshee-voiced matriarch answers, they ask if everything is okay, they step inside, look around, step out (all the while I can hear loud recriminations and hollerin coming across out their windows to mine), and, since the cops can't see anybody getting beaten, no victims come out front, nor is the front room in disarray (faceoff's in the back of the house, you see) from a fight, they depart, perhaps with a cautionary word about noise. Over the next hour, after a short spat of recriminations over getting the cops called, volumes lower to the non-insane as people slowly filter out of the house or start sleeping it off.

Now, inducing an episode of Cops isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Especially not with the reputation of the city police force (it's no LAPD, probably not even up to Milwaukee standards, but still), it's not. When clan gathering next door approach conversation-hampering decibel levels, piscis and I try to remind ourselves that there are different cultural values, different families express themselves in different ways, we can play music or radio to mask the sounds, in short, we exercise all the tolerance we can.

Now I know where my line was crossed, and I think it's where it has to be crossed: Violence.

If merely shouting had continued, I might've bitched and moaned about it, and have researched sound-level laws of the municipality. The screaming arguments would worry me, and I'd fear for the mental health of every child in a mile radius, increasingly according to the inverse square rule. But, butting in to their affairs would seem too arrogant, too much an imposition of my ways and tastes.

But hell if I'm going to let somebody get the crap kicked out of them in earshot, just to preserve my clear conscience on a pluralistic multiculturalism. Domestic violence is not a matter of inter-cultural indifference.

And that's the tale of how I called the cops on my neighbors, and why I'm still trying not to feel guilty about it.