Go Fourth Apartment Two

(In advance: Please forgive me for the lack of page breaks in this post. Even though I definitely put spaces between paragraphs, the formatting seems to be messed up. Hopefully this problem will not affect how you feel about the content.)


I think that an insect has laid eggs under my skin. I have three nasty, itchy bites on my left ankle and the whole thing has become swollen. It’s a pseudo cankle and I’m very distressed about it. Not so much about the insect eggs, but the cankle situation. If some form of beast wants to lay its unborn children under my skin, that’s fine. I supposed it’s on honor, but not at the expense of a cankle. Furthermore, I am not comfortable with only one cankle. Having one slim, gorgeous gam will only increase the cankle’s hideousness. I am not wrong about this.

I shouldn’t be surprised though. I live in a hundred (fact unverified) year old building that doesn’t have screens on the windows. They open out so birds and bats can fly in at their leisure. But the bugs think that they have the right to come in and possibly lay eggs under my skin. I am at the mercy of these arthropods, and mercy is something severely lacking in those who have jointed appendages, exoskeletons and thoraxes (thoraxi?). I can’t take responsibility for any of it. I’m far too busy. I will just have to suffer through this one cankled leg phase. 

But here’s an even better update that I think you will enjoy much more than reading about my insect/human fusion problem.

 Ba...
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I’m engaged! 


It’s pretty exciting times around here my friends. But I won't talk about it much on this blog because my snarkiness will ruin the romance of it all. Feel free to peruse the wedding blog that my FINACE’ and I have cooked up. Bon appetite. 

And I want everyone to know that this engagement isn’t going to make me an adult. I will not stop writing this blog just because I have a lady ring on my dainty little finger. I am still far too immature to be a married person. So you’re welcome. 

Now enjoy Part Dos of my apartment saga. 

I found my apartment on Craig’s list. This is a recreation (in true Craig’s list form) of the ad: 

FunkyFourthStreetStudioapartment$400utilitiesincluded.FourthStreetFairPeacocksandmore!

I thought, whatever does that mean? I guess the most important stuff was accounted for; the price and utilities.  As for anything other relevant thing, it was not available. But it sounded good, affordable and close to my new office. 

But most importantly, what did “peacocks and more” mean exactly? And what’s so funky about this neighborhood?

I decided to come home and visit for a long weekend. This apartment was the first one my mom and I looked at. Turns out, there was a peacock (peahen) living on the street with a bunch of chicken friends. The block long street was tree lined and there was indeed funky stuff everywhere. Funky is one of those things that is hard to describe, but like pornography, you’ll know it when you see it. 

The building itself looked decent from the outside even though the stairwell was spooky. But the apartment was perfect. Small, but perfect for me; brightly lit and clean. It also had a completely tree obstructed view of not one, but two highways. So it felt like being in a city, but didn’t look like it. The “tour” took 5 seconds and the building manager didn’t seem to care if I signed a lease or not. This is the perfect landlord temperament. 

We looked at a few other rat infested apartments, but this one was the best. It was weird to decide where I wanted to live right away because it’s not usually that easy, but I believe if you find exactly what you’re looking for the first time around, why keep at it? Why shop around if you would like to live in a funky, peacock filled neighborhood, which is so close to your office that you can (and do) walk? The ad did not do this street any justice and neither does this post. 

Here are some of the other highlights:

1. Lighthouse lens (recently stolen. By who? Giant lens theives. Why? Because black market lighthouse lenses are a real commodity. How? With the help of a giant)
2. Big scary Dooley car that used to breathe real fire!
3. Dog park/stage area
4. Short bike ride to the recycling center
5. A hearse
6. Everyone kind of smells like alcohol all the time
7. Fire pit 

 
Funky Fourth Street Friends and Foes 

When I moved in I was helped by my kindly neighbor, I’ll call her Yenta. She helped me move boxes, let me borrow tools and gave me a role of desperately needed toilet paper. Yenta has a closed head injury and is also the vigilante of the ‘hood. Within the first few days of me living there Yenta had single-handedly removed a meth-addict squatter from the dog park. Any conversation I’ve ever had with her has been 15+ minutes of her repeating the same information to me. She keeps me updated on the goings on and such.

The hoarder across the street has also been interesting. He watched me moving my things on the first day and very nicely said “I hope you like living here!” By nicely I mean that it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard. The last I heard he had a quadruple bypass and his sister cleaned out his apartment while he was in the hospital. I have seen him recently and he looks good. And by looks good I mean he was standing on the street staring at something. 

There is also another man who lives on the street that has a cat named Little Boy. It took me quite some time to figure out that the ghoulish yelling throughout the neighborhood was not in fact the ghost of Fourth Street Past, but a real man looking for his cat. 

The cat spent most of the winter in my stairwell because he doesn’t like to use his own litter box, but he would get stuck outside. Apparently some of the neighbors complained and Little Boy was kicked out of our cozy stairwell. 

Then I found note tapped to the door that said something like this: “Let Little Boy in he is cold call this number and hang up I don’t have many minutes on my phone or knock on first floor door and I will put him in my apartment.” That had Yenta’s footprints all over it. 

The adventures of Little Boy are countless and heroic. They will be recorded in the annals of history. 

Sense of community ownership alert: Once I found a note on the door that said: “Dog owners please keep your dogs on leashes or in the dog park. One of the chickens was killed last night. Feathers were everywhere.” 

There is another neighbor that has a dog that can only be compared to the beast from the Sandlot. He is the biggest dog I’ve ever seen and when I walk home sometimes I think he’s going to jump over the fence and eat me. The fence has been recently updated, but for awhile it looked like someone was trying to keep a dinosaur in with a fence made out of dead goats and twigs. (I.e. something a dinosaur can eat and also step on)

A few months ago the guys across the street were having a hootenanny, fiddle, stand up bass, and the works.  But I don’t talk to the people across the street.  (I attempted to attend an across the street party once and it turned out to be a dreading party, i.e.: people were dreading each other’s hair)

My crazy/smelly across the hall neighbor is playing usually playing WOW (shudder) and drinking at 4am so sometimes I wake up to him screaming. Note about my across the hall neighbor: He is really political, but also kind of dumb. Because he doesn’t censor himself or have a quiet voice, I spend a lot of time hearing about his views on Muslims, women, Obama and the state of the country. I’ve only spoken to him a few times, but he seems to think I want to hear about his views on politics/the economy. He is wrong about that. I don’t want to hear anyone’s views on politics, let alone some yahoo who thinks all Muslims are terrorists. But he did give me his George Forman grill, so that balances it out right? 

Finally there is another man who I have literally “met” four different times. I meet him about once every three months and I obviously have made no impression on him whatsoever. He always asks how long I’ve lived here and no matter what I say he always says “Oh, I’ve never seen you before. I’ve lived here for twelve years so a lot of people have lived here in that time.” The last time this happened (two days ago) I decided not to be friendly towards him like I have before. It doesn’t seem to matter anyhow. Maybe he’s messing with me. I don’t care.

I love where I live. I think few people realize what a luxury it is to walk to work. It took me eight minutes to walk home (before my AmeriCorps term ended) and I never have to deal with traffic. I didn’t have to brush the snow off my car in the winter. I don't think about gas or accidents or passing people. I think about how I have earned the right to be smug about it. It feels good to be sustainable in a real way.  Even though it’s the blazing dead center of July right now and walking anywhere is torture, it’s good to be in walking distance to the doctor, the dentist, the train station, the library, four museums, and a host of other cool things. It’s hard to come by in the Motor City. 

It also feels good to stick it to Henry Ford’s ghost. Not many people know this, but Henry Ford is quite possibly history’s greatest villain. Hitler kept a photo of him on his wall. He helped create a city where it became necessary to destroy the poorest neighborhoods with highways so the rich people could get the hell out and leave poor people without cars in a city that dumped it’s model public transportation system for the highways that ruined their homes. Henry Ford is a dick and also my nemesis. 

My apartment is a cozy little Mecca and some times I wake up to a rooster or peacock crowing. (Update: the chickens have been missing as well as the peahen, sources are uncertain of whereabouts) Ok so sometimes the peacock uses my car as its bathroom and I have to go through the car wash twice to get the muck off, but it’s my happy little universe. The street is torn up and it didn’t get plowed in the winter and sometimes when people are out at the fire pit they smoke weed and it comes in through my window and keeps me up at night. And if you’ve been keeping up with me at all you would know how I feel about that. All in all I feel safe and secure here. I’m sure it’s some kind of fluke. 

Conclusion:

Here is a non-adult adventure that I participated in a few weeks ago. I was away for the Fourth of July weekend and I came back to an apartment that had been without power for three days.  You can imagine what the state of my refrigerator. The one time I buy vegetables and when I return I have spinach soup in the veggie drawer. I really had to throw away everything, which sucked. But my response to it was to ignore the spinach soup for a few days and not open the fridge. I didn’t really have any canned food either and didn’t feel like driving to the grocery store. My solution: Forage for food around the street! There is a ton of wild fruit growing around here and I took advantage of that. If I had been desperate enough I would have killed one of the chickens. So you can see what my life is like. 


I'm also sleeping in a fort right now. Life doesn't really get any better.