noise machines

It’s 4:47 am and I can’t sleep. My instinct is to wake up Sam so I have someone to talk to, but I quite like being married to him so asleep he shall stay. The birds chirping out the window aren’t helping either. Loud and methodical like little treetop alarms. I’m one part annoyed and two parts impressed that Sam is sleeping through this.

I can’t blame the birds for my lack of sleep, my busy mind is the worst offender. Today Sam and I leave Seattle and head to our next spot. Yet again, I find myself on the precipice of a big life change. A BLC. Yet again, my brain is turning over every potential outcome of this decision. Yet again, yet again.

People keep asking me why we moved, why we upset the status quo of our vibrant, Angeleno lives. My answer changes depending on the mood I’m in. Like with all things in life, there isn’t one exact answer. Sometimes it’s because I am too traumatized to live in a big city. Other times it’s because the entertainment industry has gone off the rails. Often it’s because I’m genuinely scared Los Angeles will run out of water or get buried under too much of it. The easiest answer is “to be closer to family.” But right now, at 4:49 am on a Thursday morning, my answer is: “We moved because of the noise machine.”

At our home, sleep was not a given thanks to our neighbor and his addiction to buying tiny adorable puppies to eventually neglect as enormous untrained dogs. For two years the soundtrack to our nights was Dante, a gorgeous Alaskan Malamute, wailing at the moon as his owner left to smoke pot, ride motorcycles (most likely at the same time), and unsuccessfully try to pick up women. When our neighbor brought a Cane Corso puppy home, I nearly set fire to the block.

My neighbor’s bone-thin dogs weren’t quite what broke me, although they did make life pretty unbearable. It wasn’t even his habit of idling in his dumb Mustang for hours a day, or the trash he’d throw into the street, or the little plastic Stiiizy baggies he’d throw in our bushes…it was his carbon monoxide detector. More specifically the high-pitched chirp it let out every 60 seconds. Chirp.

Ever since I was a tween blowing through bedtime to listen to Loveline, I’ve had a chirping detector theory. Chirp. As former Loveline listeners will recall, Adam Corolla (co-host and trash person) would often lose his mind at callers whose detectors were going off. To me, it seemed like the callers with the saddest stories were often the ones who had the most chirps in the background. Chirp.

As an adult, who could only afford to live in low-income neighborhoods, I’d hear the distant, high-pitched chirps piercing through the air. Bushwick. Chirp. Fort Greene. Chirp. Gowanus. Chirp. East Hollywood. Chirp. Boyle Heights. Chirp. I began to associate the chirps with struggle. My theory is that those who have difficult lives, subconsciously tune out the little, mechanical warning sign of danger. For some, surviving the moment takes precedence over changing the batteries; the high-pitched chirp just falls into the background of their subconscious, just another nuisance to block out like the sirens, yelling, freeway, helicopters, dogs, and cars.

One time, while on a FaceTime call with my family, Sam, also a tween Loveline listener, pointed out that someone’s carbon monoxide detector was low-battery chirping. I scanned the boxes filled with faces I love until I landed on my cousin’s freckled face. “I don’t hear anything,” he said tilting his head toward the ceiling. “Oh wait, yeah, that’s mine I think.” My heart twinged. Of course, the chirping was coming from his apartment. 

After a few months of the chirping next door, the battery got really low, and one chirp a minute turned into four chirps every 30 seconds. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. It was maddening. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. I’d texted the neighbors a few times about changing the batteries, but my Midwestern-polite requests were getting ignored. I even considered going over there with batteries myself, but this was at the height of the pandemic; when stepping outside was scarier than going mad. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. I began to feel bad for my neighbor, how muddled was his mind that the constant, insufferable, high-pitched chirping of a low battery didn’t impact it at all? Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

One day a little plastic heptagon showed up on Sam’s bedside table. “It’s a noise machine,” he said while unraveling a long thin cord. He pressed the power button and the “noise” that came out could only be described as screaming static. It was horrible. “Honestly?” I told Sam, “I think the chirp is better.”

Sam’s brow furrowed, “Well hold on, there are other settings.” He pressed a button and the next noise was even worse, I think it was supposed to emulate waves crashing against the shore but it sounded more like an old hair dryer being used as a lasso. After clicking around to even louder, more jarring noises we both settled on the least, worst setting, which was “rain” against a “window.”

That night, much to my chagrin (and the dog’s), we became noise machine people. I hated it. Falling asleep to what sounded like rain recorded using tin foil and a microwave was the worst. But it did drown out the chirps, and the sirens, and the yelling, and the helicopters, and the dogs, and the cars.

Precisely two years into our simmering, passive neighbor war, a U-Haul truck showed up next door. Sam and I pulled up chairs, cracked beers, and watched as our neighbor carried out his earthly possessions, muttering and cursing every step of the way. Through a combination of open windows and neighborhood gossip, we learned he was evicted (maybe it was for breeding cats, or selling illegal fireworks, or dumping trash in his own yard, or abusing his dogs, but I can’t be too sure).

We won. The chirping, the crying, the—to quote my LA brethren—bad vibes were gone. And yet, the noise machine remained. Instead of drowning out our neighbor, it was drowning out the sirens, yelling, freeway, helicopters, and cars. The “sounds of the city,” I’d shrug to Sam as he dug his head further under his pillow.

Last August, Sam and I went up to Washington, to spend the weekend with his family at the Long Beach Peninsula. I didn’t want to go because I was still a bit comatose from the no good, very bad month prior, but figured spending a bit of time staring into the ocean would be good for me. And it was. So good. During the day we carved our initials into the wet sand and watched the water slowly wash them away. In the evenings we sat around a crackling bonfire where I’d surreptitiously inch my toes toward the flames until the pain from the heat ensured I was still a living, breathing, human. At night, Sam and I fell asleep to the sounds of real waves crashing against the shore. Being able to hear Sam’s breathing slow to a relaxed pace, under the backdrop of real-ass waves, seeded a chilling thought in my mind: we had to leave Los Angeles. We had to leave our city, our home, and our friends. We had to move toward nature. Toward water. Toward peace. Toward each other.

When we came home from Long Beach late on a Monday night, we were greeted by a fly infestation. Hundreds of flies buzzing under window shades, in cabinets, perched atop furniture. They. Were. Everywhere. “Something must’ve died under the house,” Sam grumbled, dropping his suitcase in the doorway. Yeah, our future here. It was like we’d stepped inside a rotting carcass. Without discussion, Sam, the dog, and I got to work. Swatting. Thwacking. Chasing. Smashing. Shooing. An hour later all the flies had been sufficiently murdered. I couldn’t help but still hear phantom buzzing.

Five months after I lay awake, listening to the hum of the real-ass waves coo Sam to sleep, trying to ignore the irksome feeling that I’d led my little family into the wrong life…we left Los Angeles and moved in with Sam’s parents.

The first night in Sam’s childhood bedroom, as that quintessential Seattle rain drummed on the window, I rooted around in one of the many boxes scattered around the room. “What are you looking for?” Sam asked, while positioning his tattered 80s-era stuffed animals onto my pillow. “The noise machine,” I responded. “Oh, I don’t need it here,” he said.

That’s why I moved. So that Sam can sleep to real rain and not staticky-plastic fake rain. So that our nights aren’t filled with the chirps of dying carbon monoxide detectors. So that I can inch my toes toward the fire, just to check if I’m still alive.

To tell you the truth, I could use the noise machine right now. These fucking birds have only been getting louder. There aren’t any batteries or eviction notices that will turn their chirps off. I chose this, I need to keep reminding myself.

It’s 6:27 am. In 28 minutes, my alarm will go off. Hopefully, that’ll wake Sam up so we can go walk the dog. Maybe I can convince him to buy me coffee at the shop down the street. I can’t believe we’re moving again tonight. I hope there aren’t any chirps of ANY KIND where we end up. I hope I can sleep. I hope it’s good. I hope it’s the right decision. I hope. I hope. I hope.