"Come to an art party in Bushwick," said the bright-eyed young hipsters, the wide-eyed young poets, the starry-eyed young lovers. "You can read a poem."

I found a poem. It was a found poem. I stomped through the snow. I read it while the sleet drummed stacatto outside, on all the hard surfaces of the next industrial neighborhood to fall. The sleet fell on all the neighborhoods, newly and long-gentrified alike.

This was the poem I found, the found poem:

I am giving up writing, because I am 27, and I never wanted to be a writer as much as I wanted to be a rock star, but was not very musical, and I've noticed that when they reach my age many of the greatest rock stars simply drown, either in swiftly moving rivers or pools of their own vomit.

I am giving up writing because it is not an aerobic activity and does not double as exercise.

I am giving up writing because I've maxed out my typing speed at 90 w.p.m and English is an imperialist language.

I am giving up writing because it is lonely.

I am giving up writing because I was not part of the Allied Advance in Europe, and I harbor a secret and irrational belief that it is by experiencing the Allied forces' invasion of Europe that one becomes a great writer.

But most of all I am giving up writing because I will never write anything as insightful or illuminating as the New York Times' one-line reviews of all the movies showing on television in the greater metropolitan area one recent Sunday.

Asian hit man teams up with passport forger. Sleek but empty.
The straight-to-video sequel.
Actor-cabdriver agrees to kill stalker.
Magazine editor and cargo pilot stranded. Island looks great.
The Da Vinci Code for beginners, with Declaration of Independence as guide. Ludicrous.
Deadly monsters hunt explorer station in Carpathian Mountain cavern maze. Rock-bottom horror.
Genial shaggy-dog tale of extraterrestrial in Harlem.
Crack dealer tries to go straight. Bloody and occasionally ridiculous.
An architect falls for the spirit of a comatose woman.
A black woman develops a budding romance with a white man.
A British earl advocates rehabilitating a child murderer.
A hopeless romantic faces many obstacles in her courtship.
Divorcing scientists chase tornadoes. Fantastic roller-coaster ride.
A student poses as her twin brother.
Voidemort lays a trap for Harrry at the Triwizard Tournament.
A drug dealer turns to rap music for salvation.
Widow becomes frantic when 6-year-old daughter vanishes during trans-Atlantic flight. Thrill-free thriller.
A playright fears a scathing review from a powerful critic.
The agony of Jesus' final 12 hours, relentlessly, brutally portrayed.
New York bachelor meets mermaid. Sweet and sassy caper.
Dimwit silent-screen-star trio fall into Mexican adventure. Cheerful idiocy.
Rich man and poor man swap lives. Fast, lavish, likable farce.
An Algerian fights French colonial exploitation.
Out-of-control St. Bernard mixed up with well-mannered one.
Disease movie with bike racing. Artificial.
Young man with pruning shears for fingers. Clever, effective parable.
Appealing fantasy of rejuvenated Florida retirees. Don's supporting Oscar.
Elderly couples from problem-free planet with unfinished business on Earth. Tired material, gallant actors.
Sly, vivid portrait of Ray Charles's rise to the top of the charts.
Teenage ex-con struts his prison cool at new school.
Two twisted bank robbers punish three teen boys for fouling up their heist.
Guilt-ridden cop with nowhere to turn. Grimy and entertaining.
The sociopathic, talented Mr. Ripley, many years later. Darkly comic thriller.
Stranger steals woman's identity and runs up huge debt.
A woman begins a frantic search for her newborn.
Deliveryman stalks woman who cut him off in traffic.
Siblings learn their family history involved the occult.
Dismissed nurse sues hospital.
Strangers offered $1 million to spend night in scary mansion. Junky remake.
Another Mafia blockbuster. In some ways, even better than the original.
Cold-eyed, breathless, brilliant.
Capote's depression-era orphan and Southern spinster cousins. Poignant.
Stories concern a minister and an HIV-positive drifer.
Small-town pizzeria owner inherits $40 billion.
California sorority princess goes to Harvard.
Imaginative drinker and giant, invisible rabbit.
Multiple-murder stage romp, bowdlerized.
Rejected honeymooner finds solace with free-spirited woman. Chemistry fizzles; comedy was flat to begin with.
Two single New York parents meet, argue and fall in love. Sunny fluff.

One of those days, those days, woke up with a knot in my stomach, a lump in my throat, a sinking sensation, a sense of foreboding. No particular reason, other than the days of my life, the horror of time, the relentlessness of selfhood, and the pointlessness of words, the futility of my efforts, the looming, the glooming, the swiftness, the slowness, the lateness of the blooming, the sureness of the rot. And why couldn't I be one of those people who lives happily in the suburbs or works tirelessly for the cause, and when the time comes goes gently into that good night, instead of raging and raging and banging and whimpering and chasing my tail? And why couldn't I believe that we are soon to elect either a woman or a black man to the highest office in the land, and that this office is high and this land is yours and mine and ours, and some good will come of it, and you can just be the change you want to see, and you can inhale let exhale go, and you can send all the positive energy you've accumulated during this yoga practice out to the entire world, and your body is made of light, and it is all in our minds, and it's getting better all the time, and nothing is fucked, dude, and every little thing is gonna be alright, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

Why?

At least I could do the laundry. At least I could do that. Also, I had no socks and no underwear and it's too cold to go without either just yet. I took up the burden of my dirty clothes and lugged it to the laundromat that never sleeps, or so it says in the window. Maybe I should be a housekeeper and forget everything else. I could take in a washing. I'd been looking for a career that can be accomplished while stoned. You can't really write stoned, even Hunter S. Thompson said so. Personally, I find it breeds parentheses and italics like fungus, which like many things, are terrible vices unless used responsibly and in moderation. You can teach math stoned, but you might burst out laughing when you overhear the middle-aged parents of your charges talking in the other room. But a stoned washerwoman, there was a definite possibility for a life path. Wasn't there a washerwoman somewhere down south who saved up some astronomical sum of money and gave it away? The washerwoman philanthropist, they called her. Deeply religious woman.

I would be a different sort of washerwoman than that.

I was folding my incoherent wardrobe and piling it in stacks when it came to me. I needed to hear the horns that come in late in the song that is late in the album that Paul Simon made in collaboration with the indigenous people of the Amazonian rainforest. These horns would loosen something trapped in a crucial part of my anatomy, and I would be healed.

I pushed the necessary buttons. The song came on, the horns came in, and I tilted my face in the direction of my poorly balanced speakers and offered up my tears to the noise.

The horns came in at an odd moment, a beat before or after when you might expect them. (I observe these things about music and then later find out there are words for them, like "dynamics" or "clap track.") They caught you off guard, and they were so full and loud and beautiful, like the dawn, and all the pain I'd ever felt was tremendous and soaring and not in vain.

What were the words to that song, I wondered. There was this hymnlike part I could make out, "I believe in the future/We shall suffer no more/Maybe not in my lifetime/But in yours, I feel sure," but after that I wasn't sure. Luckily the internet is here to footnote and cross-reference our every emotion, and soon enough I had the answer.

Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm
And these streets
Quiet as a sleeping army
Send their battered dreams to heaven, to heaven
For the mother's restless son
Who is a witness to, who is a warrior
Who denies his urge to break and run

Who says: hard times?
I'm used to them
The speeding planet burns
I'm used to that
My life's so common it disappears
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

I know that Takashi* and Sung* had to move forward with their relationship. (*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent, who, if you read on, you will find to definitely include Takashi and Sung.) I know that the time had come for them to shack up together in one of the coveted two-bedrooms in this rent-stabilized tenement. I could even accept that they were ahead of us in line for the two-bedroom, even though Takashi and Sung, being cohabiting lovers and not roommates, only require one bedroom. I just didn't think that the progression of Takashi and Sung's relationship and its evolution into apartment C5 could have such negative repercussions for Weinstein and Schiff, Apt. A2.

Takashi and Sung (whom I only know by the names on their mailboxes, having never exchanged with either of them more than a cordial hallway "hi") were a couple who lived in two separate apartments across the lobby from one another. Whether they were neighbors who became lovers or lovers who became neighbors I could never discern, but every so often I'd catch one of them in the lobby wearing pajamas, en route to the other apartment. I could also never tell whether they maintained the two apartments as independent residences, or whether they were sleeping in one and working in the other, or some such arrangement. All I know is that we never had any trouble.

Takashi, by all appearances, was a jazz musician. Still is, I'd imagine, but he's up on the third floor now, with Sung, and pretty much out of sight and mind. The beauty of Takashi is that even when he was right next door, he was also pretty much out of sight and mind. He would come and go at odd hours with his bass on his back, and sometimes I'd hear the faint sounds of him practicing next door as I sat up late reading and writing and alphabetizing my books (never, you know, smoking and drinking and ranting). The major evidence of Sung's existence in the building were rare sightings in the lobby, and whatever she did made no sound at all.

Then one day the only family in the building with young children produced one too many and moved to Philadelphia. Takashi and Sung moved upstairs, and we got new neighbors, and all hell broke loose.

The new neighbors are not jazz musicians. The new neighbors are not up at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday, and they don't like it when we are. They express this to us by banging loudly on the wall between our two apartments, so loudly that the picture frames rattle, so loudly that we scream and jump and cower in the corner. Have you ever seen two grown but very short women cower in a corner of their own nice but very small apartment? It's a sad sight.

For the last year and a half, there has been an escalating struggle along the once-peaceful border between apartments A2 and A3, and it's starting to take its toll on everyone involved. A peace has never been brokered, and a peaceful solution has never been tried. One day we lived happily in our little home, half a living room, two bedrooms, two iBooks, two New Yorkers, three Netflix DVDs, $250,000 worth of undergraduate education, a dozen different knds of hair care products, countless neuroses, a half-eaten avocado in the fridge at all times. About an equal number of boyfriends and panic attacks per year for both of us, perhaps fewer boyfriends and more panic attacks than we would have chosen, but enough of each to keep us humble and things interesting. We counted our blessings and went about our self-absorbed striving. And then suddenly, it seemed, we found ourselves in a state of constant fear and aggression that hasn't abated in months.

All we are ever doing when they pound on the wall is talking normal tones and maybe listening to some music at normal volume. Sometimes on a Saturday at 11 p.m. and sometimes on a Wednesday at 2 a.m. Sometimes we have guests over, and these neighbors and their pounding are frightening our guests. They are making us look like bad hostesses. And while there are very few norms of social interaction to which I subscribe, being a good hostess is something I take very seriously.

I refuse to acknowledge that there is anything out of the ordinary about the schedule we keep in A2. The way I see it, some people choose to work between nine a.m. and five p.m. and sleep between ten p.m. and six a.m., while others choose to work between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. and sleep between 4 a.m. and 11 a.m. That's what makes the world go 'round and that's what makes this here little archipelago The City That Never Sleeps. It never sleeps, see, 'cause someone, somewhere, is always up. And we've got the 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift.

And if it is late, and if we are noisy, would it kill you to maybe just tap on the wall, instead of bang like the world is ending? Because the shock of the adrenaline is not good for our nerves. Though I'd like to point out that I do not bang on the fence that separates us from the yuppies, nor do I bang on the side of the garbage trucks I can hear while I'm sleeping, nor do I run down to the subway in my loungewear and bang on the side of the L train, which I can hear blowing its whistle with increasing frequency as the morning commute escalates right through the middle of my night here in the tiny time zone of the Republic of Myself, nor do I slam on the ceiling when whoever it is vacuums at 6 a.m. and moves the furniture all over, nor do I stand at my window and dump buckets of water on the heads of everyone who rattles the garbage cans in the alley right outside my window, because that would be a distinct misapprehension of what it means to live in an apartment building in the most densely populated city in America. And while there are very few aspects of reality on which I have any kind of grip, the fact that I live in an apartment building in the mostly densely populated city in America is one of them.

I have entertained many solutions to this problem. I have fantasized about getting a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and simply firing through the wall the next time they bang. Their senseless pounding will seem so impotent when a giant flaming fireball rips through the wall and into their bedroom. I have considered taking the high road and baking them a basket of muffins. I have considered taking the low road and baking them a basket of muffins laced with enough marijuana to render them catatonic and eventually unconscious, but could never abide wasting drugs on people I don't like. I have considered buying them a noise machine and some earplugs. I have considered singing lullabies. I have considered getting a sledgehammer, knocking down the wall that separates my bedroom from theirs, and climbing into bed with them and rubbing their heads until they fall asleep, then putting them out on the garbage alley and doing a little impromptu renovation in which I turn their bedroom into a kind of master-bedroom suite by connecting it with my bedroom, and put a hot tub where their bed used to be, which will drown out all kinds of noise.

Our landlord, when he was uncomfortably involved in this situation, had his usual wisdom to drop on the subject. It was both a vague and all-encompassing statement that explained everything and solved nothing.

"On the one hand," he said, "they need to sleep. One the other hand, you need to live."

My only hope is that we'll one day ascend to one of those two-bedroom apartments, which have a living room that doesn't border any other apartments, a living room in which our wildness can run rampant through the twilight of our twenties and the twilight of our twenties can run wild through the night. Until then, all I can do is send a silent plea across the lobby and up the building's western stairwell. Takashi! Sung! I hope you're happy! I miss the hell out of you, you lovelorn bastards! Come back, and it'll be just like old times! We'll ignore each other from extremely close proximity, and all will be right with the world.