Distressing day
I'm not gonna go into it in detail, but here's a bit of sample dialogue from this afternoon's altercation with loud-car guy, something he yelled as he jumped out of his car and advanced on me:
"Are you confronting me?!? ARE YOU CONFRONTING ME?????"
I thought about saying, "No, you're confronting me," but that didn't seem like the wisest course of action.
(I should note at this juncture that I was not blameless in initiating this confrontation; I had parked my car in his space. But at the time, I didn't know it was anyone's legitimate space, because the apartment managers had told me it wasn't. Also in my defense, I was feeling sick and sleep-deprived and more or less at a loss for how else to proceed.)
Another bit of his shouted dialogue:
"You live in an apartment building!!! Of course it's loud!!! If you don't like it, go live somewhere else!!!"
Mentioning the noise clause in the rental agreement also seemed impolitic under the circumstances, especially since I couldn't actually speak a complete sentence without interruption.
Apparently around the time the apartment managers were telling me that nobody should be parking in that space, they were telling one of my neighbors that it was fine for him to park there. I actually have a small amount of sympathy for him now that I know who he is: my previous (friendly but brief) encounter with him was when he used to park two spaces down from me, in the backmost darkest corner of the parking lot. But on Christmas Eve he left a bunch of wrapped presents in his car, and on Christmas morning he found that someone had smashed his car window and stolen the presents. That's gotta suck. So he moved his car because, as he put it (roughly paraphrased), "The apartment managers couldn't protect it where it was before."
The apartment managers may've worked out a reasonable compromise this evening while I was over at Arthur & Pam's attempting to de-stress. (I discovered that driving for half an hour on a freeway at rush hour (fairly steady 25-35 mph) in the sunshine is pretty soothing if you aren't in a hurry. No decisions to make at all, just stay in the lane and keep a steady speed.) We'll see. (We could've avoided many of this afternoon's problems if the managers had been available when I tried to call them all day; I'm not quite sure why loud-car guy could reach them by phone and I couldn't.) Tonight I'm sleeping in my living room (a room away from the back wall of the apt), with earplugs, 'cause I suspect loud-car guy is going to be extra-noisy in the morning just to annoy me. I'm also deadbolting my door, and I've parked my car down the block. It scares me to have someone who's that furious with me know where I live.
Especially given that I came home this evening to find one of my bedroom power-strips unplugged. I'm pretty sure I must've accidentally yanked the plug out in my haste to leave earlier. But it was kinda spooky.