It’s 9:30 on a Friday night. I probably won’t be sleeping for at least twelve hours, because our pod is out on the street with a large part of our stuff in it, and there’s no way I’m leaving it out on the streets of Purgatory San Francisco all night without watching it…
Not only is it excruciatingly difficult to live here, it’s even difficult to leave…
Almost 3AM now. Someone has urinated on the pod, but no one seems to have broken in. There are a lot of drunk, stupid, noisy people in this neighborhood, especially on a Friday night…
6:40 AM. At sunrise, we loaded the last of the stuff. All in all, we took almost no furniture, and we still have quite a bit to ship. But at least the overnight pod nightmare is almost over, assuming that the damned thing isn’t overweight and also assuming they can get the misaligned door shut properly…
Either way, we should be able to go to bed in, oh, four or five hours. But wait. We don’t really have a bed anymore…
Just to make those last few days a little more fun, we had a little run-in with the asshole neighbor downstairs last night. A bit after 11, Mark accidentally knocked over a lamp and broke a light bulb. Not wanting to step in glass all night (and risk a cut which wouldn’t mix well with the blood thinners I take due to my heart-thyroid combo) I made the fatal mistake of turning on the vacuum cleaner for about 45 seconds to pick up the pieces…
It was less than a minute; it wasn’t like I was vacuuming the house from front to back for a long period of time, but shortly after I finished came the loud banging on the door. I didn’t even bother to answer it lest I lay into the son of a bitch, who unfortunately also happens to be a friend of the landlord. Before bed, though, I did leave notes on the doors of my downstairs and next door neighbors, explaining the situation and apologizing if it had caused any problems…
Mike downstairs is just your basic garden variety prick and busybody whose life is so miserable that he feels the need to spread it around and make everyone else miserable too. In earlier days, I’d tried to be pleasant and neighborly to him. One year, I even had him up for my Christmas gathering, at which point he got drunk (as is his custom) and embarrassed himself and everyone else there…
The past few years, though, he just became impossible to cope with. So I stopped even trying, speaking to him only when absolutely necessary. Like the time when the 90-year-old plumbing in our kitchen sink finally gave way. Unbeknown to us, water was running down the back of the building. He came up, banging on the door, yelling “What the fuck are you guys doing?” as if we were shooting a hose out the window merely to torment him, rather than innocently washing the dishes…
Yes, Mike hasn’t been much of a neighbor. I think Mark’s moving in really pissed him off, whether due to the “extra noise” or just because it meant someone else actually to be happy. Any other neighbor would have congratulated us or at least feigned pleasantness. Not him…
What I might have told him last night is that I was tired of ten years of trying to be a good neighbor to him. I’d have mentioned the outstanding lengths I’ve gone to over the years to avoid making him deal with excessive noise. I’d have added that I’d put up with his perpetual hammer-banging and “renovation” for years without a complaint, not to mention smelling his nasty second-had cigar smoke and putting up with his nosiness and his snide comments about what he’d heard from my bedroom the night before…
Some people miss their neighbors when they move. Right now, I don’t particularly care if this one lives or dies. And if he says a word to me, including “hello”, before we leave, I’ll probably advise him that it would be really easy for us not have to speak to each other again at all for the next five days…
Just to make those last few days a little more fun, we had a little run-in with the asshole neighbor downstairs last night. A bit after 11, Mark accidentally knocked over a lamp and broke a light bulb. Not wanting to step in glass all night (and risk a cut which wouldn’t mix well with the blood thinners I take due to my heart-thyroid combo) I made the fatal mistake of turning on the vacuum cleaner for about 45 seconds to pick up the pieces…
It was less than a minute; it wasn’t like I was vacuuming the house from front to back for a long period of time, but shortly after I finished came the loud banging on the door. I didn’t even bother to answer it lest I lay into the son of a bitch, who unfortunately also happens to be a friend of the landlord. Before bed, though, I did leave notes on the doors of my downstairs and next door neighbors, explaining the situation and apologizing if it had caused any problems…
Mike downstairs is just your basic garden variety prick and busybody whose life is so miserable that he feels the need to spread it around and make everyone else miserable too. In earlier days, I’d tried to be pleasant and neighborly to him. One year, I even had him up for my Christmas gathering, at which point he got drunk (as is his custom) and embarrassed himself and everyone else there…
The past few years, though, he just became impossible to cope with. So I stopped even trying, speaking to him only when absolutely necessary. Like the time when the 90-year-old plumbing in our kitchen sink finally gave way. Unbeknown to us, water was running down the back of the building. He came up, banging on the door, yelling “What the fuck are you guys doing?” as if we were shooting a hose out the window merely to torment him, rather than innocently washing the dishes…
Yes, Mike hasn’t been much of a neighbor. I think Mark’s moving in really pissed him off, whether due to the “extra noise” or just because it meant someone else actually to be happy. Any other neighbor would have congratulated us or at least feigned pleasantness. Not him…
What I might have told him last night is that I was tired of ten years of trying to be a good neighbor to him. I’d have mentioned the outstanding lengths I’ve gone to over the years to avoid making him deal with excessive noise. I’d have added that I’d put up with his perpetual hammer-banging and “renovation” for years without a complaint, not to mention smelling his nasty second-had cigar smoke and putting up with his nosiness and his snide comments about what he’d heard from my bedroom the night before…
Some people miss their neighbors when they move. Right now, I don’t particularly care if this one lives or dies. And if he says a word to me, including “hello”, before we leave, I’ll probably advise him that it would be really easy for us not have to speak to each other again at all for the next five days…
Of course, before last night’s unpleasantness, there was the last supper with Dan, Jamie, and Eugene at Rocco’s on Folsom Street. Various combinations of the five of us have been having dinner together on Friday nights for many years, and last night was the last time, even though it was rescheduled for Saturday since we had the pod to load on Friday. I will miss these people very much…
I also said my final goodbyes to Irma and the kids last night. Jamie has taken custody and promises to send me updates. We even considered registering irmacam.com and throwing up a webcam, but I don’t think that’s really going to happen…
Tomorrow is my last full day as a resident of San Francisco, after almost thirteen years. Years ago, I often thought about how I might spend my last day in the city. Apparently, it’s not uncommon; Herb Caen once wrote a column on the same subject, featuring numerous stops (and numerous drinks) all over town…
My last day will probably be less ambitious. I’ll go to work, finish up a few projects, ship a few final items, and say goodbye to my coworkers. Then I’ll come home, do a little freelance work, invoice some clients, send aa few change of address notices, and pack up the G5 for its trip to North Carolina. Afterward, Mark and I will probably get some takeout food and then clean the toilet…
Typically, my final commute home on Muni involved waiting 25 minutes for a bus which supposedly runs every ten, and then crawling home for a trip which lasted only about fifteen minutes longer than walking would’ve…
Goodbye, San Francisco. You can give me your phone number, but I probably won’t call…
Unlike most of my past cross–country road trips, I wouldn’t be making this one alone. Also, this one had a goal at one end: our relocation from San Francisco to Charlotte. We’d already shipped a pod and about 35 boxes to our destination, and we still had a rather sizeable load in the car as well. We’d had a lot of work done on said car, and I was relatively confident about its ability to get us across, despite its age and its nearly nonexistent shocks…
The weeks prior to the move had been brutal; it’s even more of a pain in the ass to leave San Francisco than it is to live there. And the day of our departure was no different. We had one final run-in with our psychotic downstairs neighbor which ended in me telling him (in so many words) to go fuck himself. And the last thing we did in San Francisco involved sitting on the sidewalk in front of FedEx on Harrison Street, packing up one last emergency load of stuff to ship, since the car was overflowing. I’ll probably always chuckle thinking about us squatting down on the sidewalk South of Market sorting our undies into neat little piles for shipping, although it seemed slightly less amusing at the time…
After a torturous drive out of San Francisco, we made our way to Cupertino to have lunch with Dan in the Apple employee cafeteria, which made both of us wish we worked for a big high-tech company. After our goodbyes and yet another torturous drive across Highway 152 from Gilroy to Los Banos, we were finally on Highway 99 headed south and it felt like we had escaped the City of Doom for good…
The car was a little overloaded with a few things we’d been planning to drop off with Mark’s sister in Fresno, but it had been holding up just fine. Until we pulled into the Red Roof Inn. There was a loud thunk and a rattle, and then the car got really LOUD. I had very little doubt that we’d just lost our muffler…
All the same, we managed to keep our spirits up through dinner with Mark’s parents. It was only the second time I’d met them, and I thought things went really well. They were friendly and nice and we all got along very well and ate and talked well into the evening. And they offered us the use of the house for Saturday night since it seemed we’d still be in Fresno another day getting the car fixed…
We dropped the car off at Midas, had breakfast with the in-laws, and then returned home to wait for the damage report. The total was $450 for pretty much an entire new exhaust system. Other than that, though, everything seemed fine with the car…
Relieved to be through this first challenge, we hit Wal-Mart for shorts (I owned very few which still fit) and assorted road provisions. Then we picked up Mark’s brother-in-law and had a final dinner at Me-n-Ed’s…