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Joan the Dork's avatar

I grew up across the street from a Catholic church- and a fairly large one, at that. The bell tower made it the tallest building in that part of town, and I'm pretty sure it was the highest point by elevation because all the taller buildings were downhill from it, although I'd have to check a detailed survey map to be sure (and fuck that- this is just a throwaway anecdote, after all). The sound 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘥, is what I'm saying. You could hear it to the edge of town, and while we weren't big enough to call ourselves a city, this was a 𝘣𝘪𝘨 town. Big enough that, for most of its existence until very recently, it was actually 𝘵𝘸𝘰 towns.

You can imagine how loud that shit was from across the damn street.

They rang the bells every hour, on the hour, from 8 in the morning 'til 8 in the evening, and twice as long and loud at noon.

Now, this wasn't all that big of a problem on weekdays. Since school started at the ass-crack of dawn, and the first bells didn't ring until 8:00, us kids were drowsily ignoring the daily fascist flag fellation halfway across town in our first period classes while the local establishment of the Raping Children Cult was holding their first single-instrument concert of the day. Monday through Friday, we only had to listen to the evening performances, and that was bad enough. This being before the proliferation of DVR and streaming services, there was no pause button or closed captioning for the TV, so whatever program we were watching would just lose a minute or so of content every hour. Conversations routinely got suspended for the duration. Mixtapes had to be rewound so the song that got bell-ed over could be played again. You get the idea.

Weekends, however...

As a teenager, the most glorious thing in the world was surviving five whole days of high school hell and reaching the weekend... but thanks to Holy Motherfucking Church's need to remind everyone on the bloody planet of its existence multiple times a day, sleeping in on Saturday was a virtual impossibility. Not even with earplugs. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘬. The sound bounced off the building next door and rattled the windows. The best we could manage was to wake up, blaspheme impotently out the window, and then try to go back to bed.

And, of course, it only 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 got worse on Sunday. Nothing says "keep the Sabbath day holy" like blowing out the eardrums of every heathen in the area code, right? Nevermind if there was a wedding or a funeral going on- and we could tell which it was without even looking. Five minutes of somber but obnoxious tolling, funeral. Ten to fifteen minutes of total cacophony involving every bell of every size they could fit in the damned belfry, wedding (I can only assume the duration was based on how much the happy couple left on the collection plate).

Life within a quarter mile of that church basically stopped every time they got their gong on.

So, good people of Minneapolis, I feel your pain.

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Ben J's avatar

This may come as a surprise to some, because it has been obscured by the Deep State. There are these wonderful inventions called ALARM CLOCKS. They have been aroundfor nearly a century.

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