Have you ever heard a pile-driver? No, not heard of a pile-driver, but actually heard a pile-driver? Well, a year or two after I first moved to Provincetown, which, admittedly, was a very long time ago, they did some work on MacMillan Wharf, the main pier in town. As you can imagine, the work included a pile-driver, which in layman’s terms is a giant kind of hammer-thingy designed to drive piling for the pier deep into the ground beneath the water. They are unbelievably loud, but for a few months we became accustomed to periods during the day when it sounded like someone was firing off a cannon every few seconds right in the middle of town. We eventually got sort of used to dealing with the noise, like people who live near an airport and learn to suspend their sentences for a few moments every time an Airbus A380 flies overhead.
Only slightly less deafening than a pile-driver is another tool called a masonry saw. This is a tool which is designed to cut things like bricks, concrete, porcelain and stone. They start up harmlessly enough, the somewhat benign hum of an electric motor. But that all changes the moment the blade gets down to business, as it were, and actually starts cutting brick or concrete, at which point it makes a sound I can only compare to the sound of Satan’s fingernails being dragged across the chalkboard at a reform school in hell.
Many of you who knew me in my youth may remember me as, shall we say, not exactly a morning person. As a child, also, admittedly, a very long time ago, my mother would struggle just to get me out of bed in the morning, at which point I would stumble down the stairs only to fall face-first onto the couch and fall right back to sleep. In my 20s, it wasn't unusual for me to arise at noon or even one in the afternoon; but by that point it was more often due to the fact that I hadn’t “fallen asleep” until sometime around dawn in the first place. Things have changed, though. I am over 50 now, and when it comes to sleeping habits I have grown to resemble the more mature, prune juice-and-Matlock set more than the younger, vodka-and-Red Bull crowd. That is to say, I sometimes find myself nodding off in front of the TV at 8:30 at night, and sleeping in much past 7:30am is a rare and treasured occurrence.
So, today is my day off. I swam almost to the surface of consciousness this morning some time around 8:45. It was a beautiful, crisp Cape Cod morning, the slightest breeze was blowing in the window and off in the distance morning birds chirped with the satisfaction of a belly full of early worms.
I wasn’t quite awake, only on the verge of being so, so my thoughts were not being formed in words, more in feelings and notions, and they went something like this:
“Mmmm. Warm. Dog. Pillow. Cat. Comfortable. Sleep. Sleep in! Mmmm. Zzzzz…”

“Fuck that,” said the guy with the masonry saw, working 10 feet from my bedroom window.