Dowload J Mascis, "If That's How It's Gotta Be" (ripped from vinyl, FYI)
The place is literally so shitty, that when we were unloading the moving truck,
There was feces in the toilet.
And there was no handle on the toilet.
There was, generously, a coat hanger attached to a string for flushing…
but the water was off.
That is sort of the low- highlight. But there’s more.
One day, someone let the air out of both my bike tires in the hallway.
The door is left open randomly, and is almost never locked until sometime after dark.
Actually, maybe it’s best that they let air out of my tires- since the door is wide open, flats would make my bike more difficult to walk away with!
There is a full size window in the shower. I have since painted over the window (to keep the children at the school across the street from learning too much); the previous solution, which was left for me to remove, was car window tinting.
I doth not jest! The car tinting had a wonderful dual nature: I could see out, and, right, we have to trust, still be unseen as I looked out on the neighborhood!
So the trashy local kids who drink and shout and cuss and spit and cough and yell and laugh (the demons) directly under this window, could perhaps be spied on while I take care of my hygienic needs.
Right after I moved in, someone left a couch (too big for the stairs) in the hallway.
For ten days.
Eventually, we all stopped being polite (like the Real World!) and shoeprints and bike tires began to leave their marks.
When I moved in, no cleaning or anything resembling cleaning had been done. Compounding this, I have a Chinese-style oven, which means two fans, high gas flames, and… covered with wok grease. The fans and hood had so much ‘ambient grease’ covering them, that there were little stalagtites of (somebody else’s!) fat hanging down. (still can’t remember difference between ‘tites and ‘mites)
On the food tip, it’s South Philly, so there are plenty of bugs. And the fridge, until I divined the Goldilocks temp, alternated between freezing my lettuce solid and melting my just-bought ice cream. It also runs all the time.
Ah yes, the fridge also is in front of one of two electric outlets in the entire house. None in bathroom (how am I to curl my hair?), one in bedroom, just one plug left in kitchen, so my sous-vide process must be done in the bedroom (not really).
But there are two cable outlets in the bedroom, so we have the essentials covered.
The cabinets were perhaps put in by a sadistic child with a learning disability, since one door opens into the side of another cabinet (i.e. opens 2 inches), and all of them have an inaccessible top shelf, unless you have a step ladder. They were not so kind as to supply a step ladder, although they did leave other furniture.
There also was no working smoke detector (took them a month to replace it), which became an even more pressing issue when my brand-new flouro bulbs kept burning out, just weeks after I put them in. I looked at the lighting (as if I’m some fucking electrician) and the copper wiring was so old, it was green.
There is a lot of great stuff about my neighborhood (not so much ‘a lot’ about my house though), and maybe I will share that with you all later. But right now, I feel like complaining, because I am like that wiring:
old and fussy and smoldering.
Which is why I played you J Mascis: he’s like that too.
