Home Sweet Home, and other lies

I considered writing about my apartment in the past tense.

So it would seem like a humorous remembrance of a worse time in my life.

This would be, rather disingenuous, because as I write this, the hallway leading to my front door smells of freshly spilled 40 (“40” is a drink people pour on the ground in rap videos to commiserate old pals…or so I’ve been told). Let’s just say someone was remembering the hell out of a buddy earlier today.

Heading up the stairs you can see and smell the cat litter someone left on the second level, as carrying it to the dumpster was too exhaustive. Thankfully the smell is somewhat displaced by the pungent, but slightly more tolerable, scent of freshly put out cigarettes. If I were to wager a guess, they’d be Pall Mall’s or something equally cheap and “feet-smelly”.

In fact, the vast array of smells that continue to assault the nostrils with “Shock and Awe” force as you explore the bowels of my apartment complex could astound and perplex even the greatest food critic. Picking out the distinctive aroma of marijuana covered up by incense that meshes perfectly into fish sticks-from-a-box and the ever present nose-punch of peanuts.

Within my 3 years living here (yes, you read that correctly, 3. Starving musicians love some cheap rent), I’ve had my ceiling collapse, my fixtures randomly removed “for maintenance” without warning, another part of my ceiling partially collapse from the person above me misusing his bathtub. (How does someone misuse a bathtub you may ask? By simply filling it to the brim, leaving the water on and subsequently filling the reservoir until it over flows so much that the person below you has a surprise splash from the water weight caving in the ceiling. It’s like a surprise. Not the birthday kind. But the kind from the IRS. It’s pretty terrible.) And many other minor to major annoyances that might someday be funny stories, but mostly just provide a contrast to how I hope life will be in a few years. A very, very stark contrast.

My downstairs neighbors blare a sizable subwoofer at all hours of the night with enough volume to shake my couch and patio doors. Within a few days of my next door neighbors moving in I now have bugs for the first time since living here. They look like cockroaches but are, in fact, called “water bugs” by the people I’ve asked about them. Even if my place is completely devoid of food, they would still crawl through the comically thin walls to scrounge for some nourishment because my neighbors are just that sloppy. I can’t imagine what their side of the wall looks like. Possibly full colonies of different insects evolving and organizing to eradicate the human infestation in their new home. They’ll probably come for me next.

It’s interesting, living in such a terrible place though. The people you meet, the crazy things you see, the various inhalants you’re unwittingly subjected to, they all make for a real growing experience, and stories you couldn’t make up while collaborating with Dr. Seuss, R.L Stine and Stephen King in some weird alcoholics writing circle.

For the past few days, a white van with curtained windows and weird side paneling has been sitting just outside the back door to my apartment with a long extension cord running from the passenger window, onto the pavement, up the stairs, through the back door, and into the laundry room, where they draw power for a TV they have set up in the back seat of their text-book-rape-mobile. The first day, it’s not that weird. After living here a while, you just expect people to be creepy and/or threatening, so you learn to ignore anything that might send the average person scrambling to call 911. But after day 3, these electricity mooching, TV watching weirdos were beginning to get a bit strange even by my admittedly low standards.

What were they watching?

Did they live here?

Were they monitoring us?

Are they the FBI?

I hope they’re the FBI.

Can anyone else see them?

I should practice ninja skills.

Etc…

After a few days they moved a bit further away, and strung the cord even further, then, after about a week, they disappeared.

Some day, I hope to tell my kids about how when I was younger, I lived in a crappy apartment complex, filled with crazy bugs and collapsing ceilings, ridiculously strange people, and at one point, it was probably monitored by the FBI. And they probably killed some people. Probably.

But as it stands, I can only tell people on the Internet that I’m poor and live in a really creepy place that tends to make my life more interesting than I’d prefer. I also pretend I have ninja skills.

Tl;dr: On the ladder of housing I’m still looking for the first rung, but pretending I’m a ninja being chased by government agents makes me feel less sad. Sometimes.