They started again that night, a little after eleven, the pounding dance beats of an unidentified, and, ultimately, unidentifiable song. Tim rolled over, his mind not quite sure of how many hours of sleep he'd lost in the last week, let alone the last month. Ever since he moved in, Tim thought to himself, it's been like living next to a club. Only, of course, clubs are visited by beautiful women.

Finally, after hours of watching his mirror bounce ever so subtly against the wall, hours after the music had stopped every other night, Tim got up, put on his bathrobe and stepped out into the hall. Turning to his right and walking a few feet, he pounded on the offender's door, increasingly irritated as the music continued, and no one answered. At long last, just as he was about to give up and go to the RA, the door swung wide.

A round, but otherwise normal looking student looked at Tim's expression and asked, bluntly, "What do you want?"

"I want you to turn off your music; other people are trying to sleep."

"Don't like it, huh?" his words dripped with sarcasm and contempt, "Bet you're real good on the dance floor."

"No, I'm not real good on the dance floor, but that's because I have no rhythm not because I hate the beats. Anyway, hasn't anybody else asked you to turn it down?"

"Of course," Tim's pear-shaped adversary replied, "but fuck em, I like it. And that's all that matters."

"How many people?"

"Just about everybody short of you and the RA up to tonight."

"Fuck," Tim was blinking in disbelief, "and you still didn't turn it off?"

"Hell no."

"Don't you care about your neighbors?"

"Why? Do you?"

"Of course!" Tim's irritation and his neighbor's belligerence had just about pushed him over the edge, "Treating your friends and neighbors with respect is the heart and soul of any society!"

"I don't care about society, it just gets in the way of my individual freedom!"

And the door slammed in Tim's face.

A nodeshell fiction rescue!

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