The diabolical rumor proved true. I got a tape of the mtv video music awards show from someone who should know better than to store such destructive meme-factories in their home (my own access to mtv being blocked--I finally found a use for my television's parental controls: entered a blind random passcode and blocked all the offensive channels--eg MTV (but not MTV2 since I once saw a Placebo video on there--albeit in Europe--and still nurse hopes that one day they will broadcast another), QVC (trinkets molded mainly from paste and bad intentions advertised to lonely lonely housewives--I refuse to endorse any channel dedicated solely to advertising, which actually also applies to MTV), and the Fox Family Channel (nothing against the content really, but I'm in protest over their parent company's squatting of the domain paranoia.com--what a waste of a great domain!)--so that even in my weaker, more desperate moments, I cannot be tempted into such degrees of alienation), and I scanned through it while writing an angry email--aint Joe always *angry* about something?--to some goofball on a mailing list who was wrong about something I now forget.

I was appalled! Shocked! Amazed! Who are these people, and what planet do they come from, why have they chosen to invade us, what is their ultimate mission, how do their strange minds work, has anyone been able to capture a specimen and what did the autopsy reveal? These were the questions that sprang immediately to mind, but they remained unanswered--the MTV-VMA was not self-aware enough to ask them. I saw a woman in a smock embroidered with her album's release date, a cape draped from her neck, a froopy hat rising up, a frighteningly loud voice coming from her mouth; I saw young girls transformed into grotesque arabesques by the hodgepodge of clothing strapped to them (eg: one wore a fishnet single-piece swim-suit under a red belly-shirt and a low-cut pair of cut-off shorts, a wide black choker around the neck, and a red Stetson dress hat--though she had the face of an angel, she had the attire of a thrift store); I saw Bono there of course, who was designed by MTV, and Michael Zombie Jackson, and I saw Mick Jagger too, looking old and empty (which made me unhappy for the weakness of men); I saw Britney Spears stuffed into forms imaginary imagined by formalists with nothing but eyes and dangling ganglia (Saurons of Image Alchemy), writhing with a serpent and obviously ignorant of the symbolism (ie: symbolic of a symbol only--looping back on itself until meaning is lost in the regression, as Britney is lost).

At one point my television began jumping about on its stand, obviously profoundly disturbed by the overwhelming pressure of self-promotion passing through its cathodes (as is well documented by underfunded researchers, the ballistic force of concentrated ego-phota is much greater than that of other broadcast ordinance, in certain circumstances overwhelming cathode ray tubes not specifically designed to support it; the plasma display was recently developed to address this problem, certain high-end models by Sony and Phillips tested at over an entire month of constant MTV), and I was forced to stop the tape and tune my digital cable box to the History Channel for an hour.

I saw a multitude of people I've never heard of with hyper-colored hair and clothing, stylized voices and postures, pierced universes of false flesh and unreal sound, collision of myriad ../images ultimately meaningless; noises from their mouths met by audience noise in incomprehensible feedback loops; there was a dense cluster of "fans" packed into one rear corner for the spectacles to point at and play pre-recorded words of appreciation for (which sad little sheep would bleat and stomp their hooves as if just petted and fed); a multitude of screen graphics: 900 numbers to call in order to place meaningless votes, release dates for albums, blurbs from mindless critics, Taco Bell graphics....

Exhausting. It took my breath away--seriously, I had to call the paramedics for some emergency oxygen.

(Who the hell is dead Allia, btw? All I know is that she received a funeral remarkably similar to that the Soviets put on for V. Lenin. Maybe if I go and visit her glass tomb I'll recognize her.)

And then it happened. I swear that I saw it! It's true! Oh foul winds of corruption, oh tragic fall from grace, 'tis true: the Ramones appeared on the mtv music awards! The surviving ones anyway--ostensibly to "honor" Joey Now Dead Ramone, with a subtext of spitting on fresh graves; and you could see the madness that had infected them, the coercion that had taken over, the $ tattooed eyes of them, the poor old bastards. This was the most disturbing thing I've seen since Johnny Rotten appeared on Politically Incorrect (hosted by Tom Marr, descendant of the wily weasel), evidence that the world had, indeed, become obsolete. This year's hit-list can be found here: http://vmaorigin.mtv.com/bands/

My neighbor--the girl in the apartment next door, dark shoulder-length hair, sour expression, sexy--has been having quickies over lunch with a married guy, preppy middle-management, streaks of gray showing through, drives a Chevy. He always tucks his shirt in.

I saw them arguing one day in the parking lot between their cars (both gold with alumni plates, his with a child seat strapped in back and a cell phone dropped in front), grew hushed and eyeing me when I passed to my car, and when I chanced a look pulling out, the guy was giving me a glare, as if waiting for a camera. Like I was his wife's investigator.

The next day, I was working when I heard some yelling outside, then a door slamming. I fit my forehead to the forehead shaped dent in the curtain of my door and watched through the grainy peephole. Thin red dress more like a negligee, she yelled, "Why can't I be angry?" around the corner, went back inside. He followed her in and shut the door.

That night, we got home at the same time; fitting keys into locks, I said "You okay? You want to talk about it?". Her creased brow in the dim light, appraising me, making all the right assumptions. "I don't know you," she said, "That can be a good thing," I said, pushing at my door. "Telling strangers your problems is one of the two good things about them." (When you say something like this you know a lot from the reply.) "What's the other thing?" she asked. I said, "You get to be a stranger too."

Later, she knocked on my door and I let her sit in the leather chair, where she noticed things about my apartment, the broken Egyptian statuette, the multitude of things I keep in boxes. I poured her a Scotch with lots of ice, surprised I had ice--my freezer normally shows me empty trays--and she took a sip and spoke to dim reflections cast up on my window.

She told me Bob was her boss, that his name was Bob, and how that ruined working there. "It used to be, I wanted something while I waited. Until I found what I really wanted. But it's easier to want what you have, and what you know. It's easier just to stop waiting."

She told me she had used up sixty seconds of her fame by appearing in a video called Girls Gone Wild, flashing to the camera for a string of Mardi Gras beads, at the insistent persistence of hoards of drunken men. She wanted to be more careful about how she used the other fourteen minutes..

"It was the rush of the crowd reacting to it, and not for any accomplishment, but just because of what I was, because of what I am. Then there's competition for cheap plastic beads, and people begging, offering to pay you, and everybody going crazy because of sex. Then some guys start groping me, like just because I bared myself, it suddenly became permissible to touch a stranger's breasts. I knew they all were animals, and all of them the same man."

I asked her if she was always angry with her boss since the affair began. She said she was angrier with herself for being moody all the time, and for demanding so much from him, for wanting more than he could give her. She didn't want to be that way, but sometimes had no control over it, and broke into tears and ran to the bedroom, slamming doors, feeling ashamed. Feeling like a little girl.

"It's because he's not right for you," I said, and she laughed, because she already knew it. "If he were, then you wouldn't be resorting to desperate tactics just to get what you need from him. He would give you more. He would want you to have more."

"It's not like I ever expected it to go very far," she said. "It was just a fling, just a lapse of caution, but I think I got tired of flings about a week after it started. I think I always do."

We sat on my porch and watched the traffic back up on the highway across the river. I told her the hazy red line of slowly moving brake lights was a wide marching column of medieval soldiers bearing torches up to the horizon. They went to protest the punishment of Prometheus, or maybe they fled the ravages of industrialization. She thought they looked like the scales of a giant serpent crawling out of the river in search of food. Someday he might decide to head in the other direction, and we would be crushed by him, or eaten.

We were friends after a couple of hours, which is normal and sad without being normal or sad. Women stuck in the cycle of serial monogamy can feel emotionally stultified, and they often want male friends who aren't their boyfriends. She said there is some kind of reassurance in it, maybe because the only solid, platonic relationship she'd ever had with a male was with her father. I decided it was her subtle way of telling me no.

I told her I'd had friends whose jilted boyfriends had done crazy things. One had developed a habit of stalking around outside her apartment waiting for her to come home, another parked his car in a patch of shadow down the street, and then followed her when she left, just to see where she'd go. My sister once had a boyfriend who sat outside with a police scanner and listened to her phone calls every night.

She didn't think Bob was dangerous, he had too much to lose, was too worried about his wife finding out about his affair. She would start to worry if he told her he'd confessed--he would have nothing to lose then. "Is that why you've dated so many married men?", I asked. Because they're safer than the average boyfriend?

"I love that word boyfriend," she said, sounding wistful and sad. "It's like a piece of the past that couldn't keep you anymore, and spit you out when you were too old. When did we get old enough to have lovers and affairs? When did I stop being a girl, somebody's girlfriend, or having crushes on the boy next door?"

I told her I thought only a certain kind of person had a "lover", maybe somebody who grew up too fast and consumed more from the world than maybe they should have. "I used to think that our parents' generation was the last adult generation," I said. "There's nothing adult about me at all, but then I meet someone like Bob, who doesn't seem to have been young, and I wonder what went wrong in his life. What kind of father did he have, what military academy did he attend. I don't even consider that he might just be an adult, with children and a mortgage and a role-model other than Homer Simpson."

She had begun laughing, and I felt good about that. "Maybe we've grown up slower because we saw what responsibility did to our parents. How they blew it, messed the world up, messed their children up. Maybe it takes a lot of courage to be an adult today."

I stared off at the marching soldiers assaulting the horizon in rigid columns, their fire casting a bloody glow on the sky. We heard somebody knocking on her door, and she went to argue with him some more. I finished her Scotch and went in to watch TV. The Simpsons was on.

Robert Frost noted that good fences make for good neighbors, but I suspect he never lived in an apartment. For how to make a good neighbor of the guy upstairs? You are at his mercy, trapped beneath him like an insect pinned to a Styrofoam canvass, subject to his careless whim and idle reproach. You are his slave, his victim, his helpless eternal antagonist, and he--he is Satan. He is Cockroach. He just refuses to die!

My upstairs neighbor's passion for noise makes Johnny Rotten wince. He arrives home around six every day--I feel the arrival in my bones and teeth, and know the sudden ache of old wounds near to reopen, the onset of familiar terror. Then the thumping begins--it's his first priority--he starts the thumping, boosts up the bassline, bangs with the drum part, and it is the sound of wars raging in my head, for it fills my home with discord. When I am out and hear muffled loud music, for instance the oceanic roar from a nearby car, I feel physically ill, my ears hurt, my teeth set on edge. It has become an affliction for me, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I've tried banging on the walls, but to no avail--the bastard just ignores me. I've tried pounding on his door in order to reason with him, but he doesn't heed that either. I've tried calling him on the telephone, but he doesn't answer it. I've tried throwing objects at his sliding glass balcony door, but he ignores those. I've tried waiting in secret for him to arrive home from work, but he chooses those days to come home late, almost always just after I've given up (thump thump thump thump go his evil footsteps on the stairs, launching that SDI into the above-me again). I've tried combating noise with noise, put some Slayer in the disc slot, slid the lever up to maximum, held my ears, but he doesn't mind that--it's the noise he loves, and it has nothing to do with the coherency of music. I've tried drilling a hole in my ceiling in order to pump poisonous gas up through his floor, but the drill bit broke on a sheet of metal he's lain over his floor.

I dragged one of my porch chairs under his balcony, stepped on it and then hoisted myself up, scrambled over the railing and attempted to peer through his closed drapes. I knew he was in there by the riot of noise inside. The were s