I won't tell you where I live, but I will tell you why I'm going to kill that motherfucker on the corner.

It's 3am. The diner downstairs stays open all night. Last fall, a loud argument one late Saturday night led to gunshots, a man lying face down in a pool of his own blood. That wasn't so bad. That wasn't so loud.

But there's this city employee who gets hungry about this time most nights. I know what department he works for, I have the license plate number. I have video of him throwing sandwich wrappers into the bushes of the silent McDonald's across the lane. But his crime? He is someone who has not mastered the art of parallel parking, even as the hours trail toward dawn. His truck is equipped with one of those incessant back-up beepers, not so much to avoid creasing a child who's shorter than the rear-view mirror, as to forestall potential litigation. BEEP.... BEEP... BEEP. And silence.

The refrigerator kicks on. Maybe the soothing hoot of an Amtrak train from the tracks a few blocks west. I fantasize a reverie of cricket song, near sleep again. BEEP... BEEP... BEEP. This can go on for fifteen minutes, even half an hour. Sleep becomes a memory and agitation is layered upon stress. I hope his burger and fries are fine.

Consider the city. It is glory. Man's gift to himself. But it revenges. It cries out at all hours, a machine bleating its distress as it's torn stem to stern. Our stress is its stress, returned tenfold. It lives, thrives, dies, aloud. Those goddamn buses! Are they designed to sound that way, like beasts being torn from a primordial swamp?

I've learned to keep a substantial temper in check. I am generally polite. And yet there are times that the tumult of Chicago by night or day makes me edgy as a cat. I'm ready to claw.

I grew up in a small town, out in the country. Dogs bark on distant hills. When three dogs bark, you know there's a fire, a killing, as their sequential bays echo from valley to valley. And the semi's song on nearby state highway 109, the haunting hymn of the cross-country rail line with a train's gentle, urgent pulse of sound. It soothes. Visit paradise: The saturating roar of a waterfall drowns thought at first encounter. But it becomes as common as wind. Soothing. To shoot toward the opposite extreme, a teeming metropolis like Hong Kong is a wall of sound, a splendid post-Bloody Valentine-style disquiet guitaring through your brain in a theater of fixed, unblinking neon. Incessant traffic, music, air conditioning blasting from open storefronts, and uncountable choruses of treacly Canto-pop moshing together. It's cacophony, but exhilarating. It is incessant yet it is consistent.

I like that. It's an externalization of the buzz that most of us want from the city, the comings and goings. But what makes me want to kill, particularly in summer with the windows flung wide open, is the rupture of poise in a metropolis. It's not even the prospect of jackhammers and construction fluster. Can't the city just be? Can't we all shut the fuck up? It's the simple inability of so many of us to recognize: hey, I'm living here, too.

I have dreams of leaving. It's nice to borrow a friend's cabin in the woods. Yet I visit my parents down South and find the lack of sound becomes the sound of sorrow, of isolation. Instead, I am in the city still, darting toward the subway, a City of Chicago vehicle announces repeatedly, insistently, auditioning as an extra in the remake of "Blade Runner" we've all already been cast in, "Sweeper now approaching! Sweeper now approaching!" And there is the blind man's BONK! of CTA card vending machines. The Blue Line whooshes north through the subway tunnel. "This is CHICAGO!" a Wisconsin-bred voice crows. (As if we thought it was Kenosha.) Get off the train, taxi drivers sound their availability, a quick bark in case you aren't actually savoring the raingloom or snowburst of deepening dusk. They only want to get you to the warm place you want to go. But a half dozen such advisories in four blocks? It turns the caffeine inside uncool. You start to feel all pissy-autistic, like an especially hungover crank.

Hey, I prosper in public spaces. I never got a good idea sitting in a quiet corner by myself. David Mamet has a phrase for the writer's knack to compose in any imposed urban space: "writing in Chinese restaurants." It can be as meditative as the dusty fug of any fussy, antediluvian library reading room. In fact, silence skeeves me. My mind can be nourished by noise, surfing on sound in a stream-of-consciousness. Many of these words were written in one of the loudest bars I know, within a crowd as large as a mansion in a room the size of a house, no room to move, eyes and ears filled each way the head turns. For a writer, noise can be another form of silence, with faces welling up, scraps of dialogue overheard as if from a borrowed (if fragmented) subconscious. It's one mass mind. The office in my apartment bears too many colors, too many flavors, too much quiet. I think of my life instead of my work, and that is not good.

So I seek sound. Walking the streets, we want to think the best of our lives, our hopes, our fellow man. We want to be available to the potential for joy. Serendipity? I'm counting on it. But then the insult. Here is a medical term of art I love, identifying the trauma that might come after getting a blunt instrument knocked up the side of your head: it's "an insult to the brain."

It's a little after eight in the morning. It's just turned eighty degrees—summer at last. (A season also known as Road Construction.) There is a continuous and odd barking at the four points of the intersection outside. A hoarse, red-eyed, speedfreak nutjob often offers unsolicited advice at this corner to passersby in a similar rasp, but these are not his office hours. The sound persists, like orgasmic grunts, groans of oh-baby sex. Outside my window a middle-aged man with an M&Ms carton jammed on his head is thrusting sacks of peanut-sugar candy at cars in the intersection. But he is without language. He is all gesture and howl. Finally I unravel "SHOKLOT!" followed by "GrumPFUH!" and "HaRN-haRN-KFFF!"

Decipher? I want to annihilate. How dare you take me out of myself? Our city is filled with aural insults, self-important bursts and small-minded clangor thudding at the cranium. Let me have the sound of traffic. Jets above. The el in all its sparking, corroded grandeur. The clatter of trains overhead is gorgeous. It has structure, it decelerates, accelerates, the echoes of an age of industry in slow, rust-rotten decline. It is a song. But once we factor ourselves, the human element, into the machine, we are left with too many forms of suddenness that rupture the customary delusion of seamless flow. Air rage, road rage, it's all bellicose burps of hardly suppressed bafflement and defeat. We forget manners because we have forgotten how to move within community, how to dance lightly through the day. It's all bad when you consider the abrupt and thoughtless gestures we contend with yet accept.

Walk through the day—it doesn't get any better. Rush into a store. There's music, then there's Muzak: burger magnates wish you to be as tenderized as their beef before you reach the front of the line. Loudspeakers tell you, sell you. The sound-besotted French film master, Robert Bresson, insisted that an artist's job was to "Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen." But he also knew that sound is more powerful than images. You can look away from the spate of ad-spackled public spaces, but the ears go straight to the mind.

Rush back into the street. Traffic cop's whistle dances a spastic jig in your skull. The city cries Streetwise; the city wants you to buy its pomes; the city is homeless, help the homeless; the city needs basketball jerseys for its team. The city blares its horn and blows the stoplight and says fuck you and calls you stuck-up and ignorant when you pass, fists still in pockets; the city yells Geddouttathastreet! as the city clips at your heels with two tons of Suburban horsepower. Are we marking territory? If we no longer smell the prairie, see the essential contours of our topography, perhaps we are making the mistake that to be noticed we must be loud.

I'm basking in the newfound June-warmth on a sidewalk on Milwaukee Avenue. I labor to imagine the dusty path this once was. It was surely a native circuit that rhymed with the course of the river. I close my eyes. It's over eighty degrees but there's a cool breeze, a timeless breeze. It smells damp but carries no particular pollution. My eyelids, my upturned cheeks, my mind can imagine it being a couple hundred years ago. And now the catalog of noise, scratching off marks on a clipboard.

A street person known as Lobo bays at an incoming train. He pauses for a sec just as a car alarm be-DEET, be-DEETs. A screechy truck klaxon sounds as a double-parked pickup drops off newspapers. A bandsaw wheeeeens through aluminum in a nearby building. A soundcheck reveals itself in a nearby club by an abrupt burst of feedback. A boom-car stops-and-starts past, threatening to dismantle itself from the whummmmm of the denatured rap, all bodily vibes instead of rhythm. Progressive deafening as self-expression? Lovely if you own hearing-aid stock.

The murmur of assembly has been replaced by shrieks, yelps, vulgar imprecation. For instance: mobile phones are a fact of our lives. What about the cell-phone voice that careens across elevated platforms and city streets and restaurants? You look over, thinking there is a barking loon contending with an inner banshee who could perhaps be talked down from hysteria. It is a tone of voice that never used to be heard outside of a motivational seminar. On a blustery, beautiful gray afternoon at the corner of Wacker and Wabash, a tall, well-dressed man belts out, "Do you guys want to make money or do you want to live on your integrity?" (An intriguing choice, that.)

But his voice carried more meaning than his strange demand, and it's the tone most everyone uses. Cellular telephones in public space are seldom employed with a conspiratorial murmur, or a lover's reassurance, but instead the hectoring of the salesman, the oaf: phone voice. I prefer the friend who looked up, suddenly illuminated and announced, "Excuse me, I'm vibrating now," and then adjourned to the sidewalk for a private chat.

We are all knuckleheads making ourselves known in public space, our belches, bleeps and banter like a fart in the consciousness of grudging strangers. We are all madmen. Concede that, maybe we can talk. No amount of joking will make that fact go away.

How does the old gag from Peanuts go? "I love humanity, it's people I can't stand"?

Even starting a discussion like this makes my fillings hum. Consider: How can we proceed beyond thoughts of benevolent murder when we encounter the moviegoer with inexplicable screeching gales, engaging the manly art of self-amuse? The woman who was louder than burning buildings, loudly describing to her companion the shopping to come after the movie, ignoring the sequence of riot, pillage and torching that Mr. Dolby streams into our ears. The all-too-many men who pack their filter cigarettes with a dozen or more crude slaps while carrying on a conversation, convinced that it will make the smoke more satisfying, rather than merely audible. The couple who bray magazines aloud to each other at the newsstand. The putt-putt ice cream trucks playing endless iterations of "Turkey in the Straw" or "Pop Goes The Weasel." The mother who ignores her crying child. That sonofabitch who won't fix his doorbell across the street and whose sonofabitching friends are yelling "Hey-Hey-Hey!" for the past hour just because they're low on methamphetamine? Can't we all get a gun?

Call me crazy. No need to be cynical. It's another damaging day. It's not like you were sleeping or anything.

Also by Ray Pride

TIP OF THE WEEK
Ultra-prolific Chicago filmmaker Fotopoulos recently had a retrospective of his work at Anthology Film Archives in New York, a set of screenings at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and his feature work will soon be on video from Facets.
(2002-05-30)

MORAL FEAR
In the compelling, heartfelt adaptation of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," terrorists do something awful on American soil. Seen the commercials? Despite director Robinson's protestations, the studio wants you to know what happens.
(2002-05-30)

MOVIE LOVE
Buoyant, tasty, gorgeous, Roman Coppola's debut feature, "CQ," is a knowing lark, a movie in love with movies, in love with love and too easy to fall in love with.
(2002-05-30)

TIP OF THE WEEK
"Insomnia" gleams. Christopher Nolan's remake of Erik Skjoldbaerg's 1997, Norway-set thriller is a more-than-worthy parallel film, standing on its own for its quiet wit, sorrowful tone and moments of timeless elegance.
(2002-05-23)

TOUGH "ENOUGH"
(2002-05-23)

SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: June
(2002-05-23)

SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: July
(2002-05-23)

SUMMER FILM PREVIEW 2002: August
(2002-05-23)

OEDIPUS WRECKS
(2002-05-16)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-05-09)

REAL SEX
(2002-05-09)

SCREEN KISS
(2002-05-02)