Why does it always seem that the people who like to walk back and forth thunderously end up living above someone quiet and reserved? Someone who you would never hear a peep out of were they to be inhabiting that same position above. It is almost as if there are people specifically born to occupy this role. Not just the proverbial “loud-ass noisemaker” role in general, but the one seemingly designed to make a strategic kind of noise above a neighbor seeking nothing more than silence and solace.

Tragically, it’s always these types of people that end up living beneath a “Thunderfeet.” Worse still, a Thunderfeet that also has a child (or children) with even more thunderous, erratic walking patterns (or should one say, in that scenario, sprinting patterns). Jeremy was subject to just such a combination. And it happened right after he thought he was getting rid of the previous Loud Ass. A woman named Melody who had the audacity to run a fitness course out of her apartment. That meant jumping jacks, jump roping and all manner of other assorted jump styles that quickly made Jeremy want to stab out his own eardrums. Particularly since he was among that rare breed: a writer who actually got paid well enough to stay home all day and work. And, try as he might to kowtow to the obscene noise levels by putting in earplugs (cranking up music was out of the question, as it broke his concentration), Melody’s fitness course booming and overall din could not be stamped out of his cochlear register.

Despite Jeremy’s complaints to the landlord, he sided with Melody, claiming she was within her rights as a tenant so long as the offending noises weren’t being made before or after certain hours. Jeremy couldn’t believe it. He reckoned Melody was actually letting the landlord rail her every now and again so that she could do whatever the hell she wanted. That’s certainly how it came across. Whenever he tried to explain how he could hear literally every breath—every fart—through the uninsulated floor between them, she patently didn’t give a single fuck. Like she knew it didn’t matter what he said or did—because she was untouchable. And, in Jeremy’s estimation, that was because she was letting herself be touched.

But these new tenants simply had the get out of jail free card that so many irresponsible adults enjoy: having a child. Because, when one has a child, they can pretty much get away with bloody murder. It’s a catch-all excuse for everything. Random thuds and shrieks throughout the day and well past eleven p.m. on a weeknight? Blame it on the child. That’s what this child’s mostly absentee parents usually did whenever Jeremy caught them at home to remind them that he could hear every single thing, so could they please try to tread a bit more lightly? Of course, he left out the part where he could often hear the babysitter getting plowed by her boyfriend du jour, the one who climbed up the fire escape to crawl through the window for these stolen trysts. Better to hold onto that piece of information until he really wanted to ignite his flamethrower, so to speak.

Besides, his beef wasn’t ultimately with them, but still with the landlord. The landlord who continued to have the gall to never vet his tenants. Because he didn’t care about Jeremy, or the comfort of anyone that lived in the building, for that matter. For, just as some people are born to ceaselessly annoy with their noise in an apartment above someone else’s, so, too, are some people born to be soulless landlords. In fact, Jeremy reckoned it was a prerequisite before descending onto Earth. “God” or whoever automatically plucked out the soul of anyone destined to become a landlord, whether through “hard work” or simply the luck of inheriting a building from their parents (typically the latter).

Jeremy continued to fester over this theory in the months that followed the Johns’ move-in. That was their last name: John. But if they were the Johns, he was fast becoming Salome, ready to chop off all their heads because he couldn’t goddamn take it anymore. At first, he tried to place the blame on himself, insisting internally that he was being “too sensitive.” That perhaps he had some form of misophonia. It didn’t take him long, however, to declare that, no, he was perfectly within his rights to be irritated. And that these people were as uncouth and inconsiderate at the last cunt. Another one born to make noise in an apartment above someone else. It was like a grand metaphor for life. Some were fated to be trampled upon while others blithely did the trampling. Jeremy wished he could have had a say in what his role would be before he conceded to being shot out of the birth canal. Alas, no one gets to be asked about anything before they’re thrust into this hellhole called Earth.

In any case, it’s not like Jeremy expected it to sound like a morgue up there, for fuck’s sake, but he did expect a few common decencies—like people not thudding around as though actually trying to break through Jeremy’s ceiling. Do people honestly have so little concept of themselves? Jeremy already knew the answer…and that was that obviously they had no self-perception—or at least not an accurate one. People only thought favorably of themselves, unless you were lucky enough for a self-hating type to live above you. As Jeremy knew, though, that would never happen: the self-hating types are doomed to live below people with far too much love for themselves and no consideration whatsoever for others.

Because Jeremy cared about how he was viewed, and if he was bothering other people, there was no chance that he would ever wind up in, say, a top-floor apartment (and definitely not a penthouse one, where all concern for making noise could be thrown out the window, so to speak). It simply wasn’t in the cards for someone so solicitous. Curse this personality! Jeremy thought. Oh, how he wanted to be like Melody or the Johns, to be an above-apartment noisemaker unbothered by how much he was pissing someone else off with his unfettered movements.

Ultimately, Jeremy couldn’t take living below the Johns anymore. He didn’t even bother trying to wield his so-called babysitter leverage. He knew it was pointless to try to get this classification of humans to ever shut the fuck up. There were two kinds of people in this world: the tramplers and the trampled. So he did what any avoidant, misanthropic person might do: he saved enough to put a down payment on a house about thirty miles outside the city.

Of course, what he couldn’t have anticipated was that, every day, right in his backyard, a gaggle of wild turkeys would post up on the grass and hold court gobble-gossiping all the live-long day so that Jeremy couldn’t focus on a single word he was trying to write. That’s when he knew that the impossible dream in this life was, more than anything, true, pure and undiluted silence. Perhaps it’s just a matter of deciding which is the lesser of the two evil loudnesses: the city kind or the country kind. Jeremy had no choice now but to tell himself it was the country kind that was less evil.