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…
Nous sommes arrivés. More soon…
Ruth’s Pimento Cheese Spread. It’s one of those things you just don’t realize you’ve been craving for thirteen years until you happen to see it in the Food Lion one Sunday night…
I could not be any happier than I am at this moment, being back in a city that makes sense to me and feels like home. OK, maybe I’d be a LITTLE happier if Bellsouth hadn’t lied and told me DSL was available in my new apartment, but that’s nothing a little bit of cable modem won’t fix. So maybe I’ll be able to answer email tomorrow; SMTP doesn’t seem to be working too well on my stopgap dialup account…
Pictures and commentary on the cross-country trip coming soon, I promise, along with the interesting and rather happy story of how Mark will be doing yet another one in a couple of weeks…
It’s official. We now have North Carolina driver’s licenses. And the really cool thing is that I got my old license number back so I don’t have to memorize a new one. And the really SCARY thing is that I still had my old number committed to memory after all these years…
It’s good to be home. One of the great things about Charlotte is that there’s so much good and dirt cheap food that it almost makes more sense to eat out than to cook at home. Five or six bucks will buy you a complete meal with entree and two sides at any number of places, and it’s even cheaper at the cafeteria, where you don’t really have to tip. We could eat someplace different this way every night for months, particularly when you factor in all the assorted ethnic places which weren’t around when I lived here before…
And should we decide to eat at home, the groceries are dramatically cheaper too. It’s amazing how having multiple competing grocery store chains will stretch your food budget…
Other random observations about Charlotte:
- Bellsouth sure is stingy with the phone books. SBC seems anxious to circulate as many as possible; you can get them at just about any supermarket. With Bellsouth, it’s like pulling teeth. They won’t even give you an office address where you can come to pick one up.
- Obviously they’re doing something right here with respect to residential development in the center city. It’s absolutely amazing how much there is…
- It’s so cute that finding graffiti on an abandoned building in the suburbs was actually worthy of a TV news story the other night…
- I’d forgotten just how polite everyone is. Except the manager of the Steak & Shake near our house…
- It’s really nice not sitting up in bed at 11:00 at night trying to remember if your car is parked legally or not…
- How much do you think it cost Food Lion to license the theme from “The Andy Griffith Show” for its ads?
- I’ve not yet run into a single task which wasn’t ten times easier to perform here than it is in San Francisco. Then again, I haven’t tried to buy drugs on the street or have anonymous sex with a homeless, syphilitic speed freak yet…
- Aside from leaving some very good friends behind, I have no regrets whatsoever about leaving the City of Doom…
Random thoughts for a Saturday morning:
- Evidently, we’re not the only people fleeing the City of Doom. Per Census Bureau estimates, San Francisco has lost 32,000 people since the 2000 census. And if you believe the population signs as you drive into the city, almost 50,000 people have left since the 2001-ish estimate of 793,000 was published. Somehow, though, I bet the signs won’t be changed to reflect the current estimate anytime soon…
- Charlotte, on the other hand, is looking pretty darned healthy…
- Chutzpah: that’s what the Bellsouth telemarketer I spoke with yesterday had. Or maybe it was just brain damage. After (1) asking me what I though about my new phone service and (2) sitting through the ensuing tirade about how I’d been sold DSL service as part of a package without ever being told that DSL wasn’t available in my new apartment, and (3) listening apologetically as I told her I was strongly questioning whether or not I wanted to continue using Bellsouth AT ALL, she then proceeded to try and sell me an UPGRADED service package. Jeez…
- Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new contender for worst local newscast in the country. I thought I’d seen the bottom of the barrel several years ago with the short-lived show on KBWB in San Francisco, but I think this is even worse. Aside from being stupid and annoying and trite, they don’t even have the technical proficiency thing down, with music cues and pre-recorded stories invariably drowning out the last three words of every sentence by the anchors. And here’s a hint: a “musical guest” may be appropriate on your morning show, but it just don’t fly on a primetime news show, especially when the musical guest (invariably) sucks ass…
- A summer thunderstorm in North Carolina is a wonderful thing, and I’d forgotten how wonderful. Yesterday about 5:30, it sounded like the world was about to end, and we probably got as much rain in one hour as San Francisco gets during a week in February. The only down side is that the satellite has a tendency to go out…
- Oh yeah. The hometown paper interviewed me again yesterday. It’s amazing how newsworthy I seem to have become in Greensboro for doing, well, nothing particularly important…
Now don’t think for a moment that I don’t miss Mark a lot since he left on his two-week road trip this weekend. Tonight, however, I was able to get my mind off it very successfully because I have — after thirteen years — finally been reunited with my vinyl. And this is a truly wonderful thing…
I never brought the records west with me. There was just too much stuff and I never really had a way to do it. So they’ve been in the closet of my childhood bedroom in Greensboro since 1992. Until now…
Having been heavily involved in the college radio thing during the early 1980s, I have a fairly interesting collection of stuff, much of which never made it to CD. In addition, I have copies of old syndicated radio shows from the period, like “Rock Over London” and the “BBC College Concert”. And I found tapes of my old radio broadcasts which I’d though were lost forever…
Let the digitizing begin. Anybody wanna sponsor me if I start an internet radio station?