Got out of the house half an hour “early” today to mail some Drmn’ toys (turned out to not actually get to work any earlier, due to sucky traffic and the fistfight that almost broke out in the endless post office line today*).
A couple guys and I nipped out for an early lunch to look at this 3-family house for sale today. Yeah, yeah… One of those things I told myself on coming out here was that I would never share a wall with anyone. I mean, the whole point of owning a house is–in exchange for all that maintenance and lawn mowing crap–not having to hear someone else’s screaming toddlers and domestic disputes the next room over, and not fielding complaints for humping your laundry up the stairs after midnight or firing up Big Speakers when the muse strikes you. (Maybe this is a spoiled midwesterner wide-open-spaces thing.) But with 3 guys going in on a 3-family, I might actually be able to afford a bachelor pad** (without dipping into the ol’ 401k…).
This place turned out to be a rather unimpressive shithole place, in Stab ‘n Kill at that. After careful consultation with JK (with the windows down all the way to get the smell of the sheperd’s pie the last remaining residents were cooking on the first floor, the smoke of which had sucked right on up to the 2nd and 3rd floors through the unsealed holes in the ceilings/floors where the radiator pipes came up, out of our hair), neither of us could find any redeeming qualities for the place, even for a cheap “flipper-upper” we’d renovate and move back out of in a year.
* this middle-aged guy with a cane is at the counter telling his life story, followed by “I don’t wanna hold up the line or anything, but…” followed by a portion of a long and winding ramble about the recent (as of yesterday or so) postage rate increase to 41 cents, and how many 39 cent stamps he still has, and on and on. General form was like one of my usual blog rants, but in realtime to a hapless postal clerk while a huge line is stacking up behind.
“Well, you are kind of holding up the line.” – somebody (not me) in the back of the line
“Wow, SOMEbody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!” – Cane guy
(various escalations back and forth, bystanders chipping in their own 2 cents’ stamps, Cane Guy playing the discrimination-against-disabled-guy card, and all hell breaks loose.)
** here’s what comes up if you google “bachelor pad”. (Ok, I’ll work on that compulsive Googling problem.) About half the document is saying that your interior decorating should basically consist of scattering little lies throughout the house to make women more likely to sleep with you. (“Why yes, I do always just happen to have a copy of War and Peace casually sitting out at a naturalesque 30 degree angle on my coffee table. What of it?”)
Leave a Reply