Our apartment windows face Massachusetts Avenue. For those of you who aren't familiar with the District, Mass Ave Northwest is pretty busy - and loud - for most of the day, but particularly between 6 and 7 am on weekdays, when all the construction trucks are on their way to nearby work sites. There's a lot of construction going on near our building, which is great for the area, but bad for establishing a sense of 'calm,' which is only a word to me now, not a true state of being. Yes, the construction, along with the frequent sirens, can sometimes present obvious impediments to that sacred thing called sleep. The first morning we were in our apartment we became painfully aware of this fact. It was a pleasant, cool evening the night before, so when we went to bed, we left the windows open. Ah, we were so innocent then. So oblivious to the imminent chaos. We left the windows open: It seems absurd now. But then? How peaceful. That night, we lay there perfectly content in our new place and remarked to one another how the occasional passing car was so pleasantly lulling, a gentle swish, like the ocean.

Idiots.

We were idiots.

Somewhere around 5:30 to 6 am, the gentle swishing of cars turned into a tumultuous and hateful banging of dump trucks as they rolled over the many bumps in the road, their empty back ends bouncing and kicking against their frames as they drove by, thunderous, echoing, angry, like the cursing of God. It's a sound akin to slamming a giant empty keg inside a steel-walled raquetball court. Over and over. Now imagine having spent all night drinking the contents of that keg and you begin to get the picture: this is not a pleasant sound at 6 am.

The amazing part of the human animal is that it can get used to just about anything. It adapts. It . . . evolves. Amazingly, Catherine and I have evolved into humans who can't hear when we sleep. It's true. After over a year of sleeping in this downtown apartment, we actually find ourselves sleeping through the cacaphony taking place outside our windows each morning, which is kind of scary when you think about it.

But occasionally there's a sound that brings us immediately out of our sleep and sends us directly to the window in foggy-headed fear. That was the case this morning at 4:58 am when we heard the terrible, crunching sound of a car colliding with another obstacle at high speed. The sound was deep and loud, and seemed to last forever. It felt like it was in the room with us. We went to the window and noticed two cars, now strangely still and far away from one another on the road. We watched for a few breathless moments for some sort of life down there. Then people started getting out of the cars, apparently unhurt. They walked to each other's car, talked to one another. One took out a cell phone. We called 911 anyway, just to be safe. On the sidewalk in front of our building we could see from our 5th-story vantage point that two trees had been completely plowed over and now lay sad and bare against the brick ground. About 15 feet from the trees, our trusty fire hydrant, our building's safety net, had been uprooted from the ground and was leaning at a surprising angle to the ground, almost recumbent. Almost decapitated.

After we assessed the situation and figured out that everybody was okay, Catherine tried to get me to come back to bed. I was tired, but didn't want to go to sleep just yet. I looked out the window at the street below, and watched things unfold. The police arrived at the scene almost hesitantly, without ceremony or siren. They got out of their cars and began talking to the victims. That's when I decided I needed to go outside. My thoughts had turned to that sad fire hydrant, now a miniature tower of pisa there on the sidewalk. I wanted to make sure the police wrote it into their reports so that it would be firmly planted back in the ground at some point, hopefully soon. I don't know why. It just seemed necessary to do it right then. So I put on my clothes and went outside into the cold and the dark, awake, but not completely alert. I walked over to one of the cop cars and motioned for one of the uniformed men inside to roll down the window, which he did. I felt self-conscious.

"Hi, I'm a resident of that building." I motioned with my head.

The officer closest to me nodded.

"Are you guys going to report that hydrant." I pointed at the mini tower of pisa on the adjacent sidewalk.

He nodded again. He did not speak. It was either too cold, too dark, or both.

"Thanks," I said, and turned and walked away. If it sounds a little 'surreal,' it was. I felt a little like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing when he's talking to the hotel clerk and she turns into a giant lizard. Thankfully, the cops remained human through the entire exchange.

I walked back to my building, past the slanted fire hydrant, past the plowed trees. Through the lobby. Up the elevator. Down the hallway. Back in the apartment, I undressed, ate a bowl of cereal and laid in bed for over an hour, my body tired, but my mind buzzing. My eyes felt dry, even when I closed them. So I kept them open. I watching the flashing lights swirl and flash on my ceiling. I think I finally fell asleep around 7:00 am and woke up around 9:30. Altogether, a full five and a half hours. Not bad.

So yes - it was a weird night. And to add to the strangeness, when I got out of bed and went to the shower, I found a couple of workers on scaffolding right outside my bathroom window. These guys have been working on sprucing up the exterior of the building for the last several weeks and today they happened to be right at my floor. Eye-level with my sleepy peeing. I went and got my camera and snapped this photo of them right after one of them had sprayed some bird shit off our ledge and onto our window. Kinda cool. Here's another after they washed the bird shit away. Yes, we tend to gather a lot of bird shit on our bathroom window ledge. We have to clean it from time to time. It's not pretty. We really need some sort of pigeon repellant contraption.

But for now, we live happily with the birds, putting up with their shit, sleeping blissfully through the cacophony of morning, waiting for the next head-on collision, waiting for the next accident to shake us loose from everyday life.

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