For Whom The Bell Tolls

It tolls for thee

I live DIRECTLY across from three churches. One is a Greek Orthodox church which rents out its basement to a corny Evangelical church that is constantly blasting Jesus rock music into my apartment. The third church is a Polish Catholic church that continues to pretend that Pope John Paul II is still alive in that they have a bronze bust of him which always has fresh flowers next to it, and on Easter, there were pamphlets that people had thrown on the street that said that the service was dedicated to the "Holly See" with a picture of JP II.

In the beginning of December 2008, the Polish church apparently purchased a RECORDING of bells chiming to the tunes of "Noel, Noel" and "Joy to the World" in preparation for Christmas. I know for a fact that it was a recording, because we're not talking about Notre Dame here, it's a church in the middle of a city street with an empty steeple and no bells to speak of. The church proceeded to test these recordings continuously for 24 hours, so that after about 5 hours of this crap in my apartment, I found myself singing along, "Noel, Noel, Noel Noel! Born is the king of Is-ro -el!" In any event, once the "testing period" was up, they switched the recording to play on the hour, every hour either Noel, Noel or Joy to the World. 3 a.m? Noel, Noel time! 7 a.m.? How about some Joy to the World? What this essentially means is that every hour, someone goes up to the steeple with a boombox, presses play, and then holds a megaphone up to the speakers for 2 minutes, which may be the worst job ever.

At first I thought that once Christmas/New Years was over, they'd cut it out with these recordings, but the plan seems to be to keep the fake bells going until such time as someone breaks into the steeple and pulls a gun on the guy with the boombox. And that someone may be me and that time may be VERY soon.