Had my going away party the other night, and if you missed it, you missed epicness. Epicnosity. Whatever.
One of the things I most enjoy about the Downtown Eastside is showing off how inexpensive things that are fun can be, and when the bills came around at Pat’s Pub in the glamorous Patricia Hotel on East Hastings, there arose a chorus of “SO CHEAP!” I think I’ve made some converts.
It was amusing when an older fellow mistook the Anon mask for some pantomime thing. The mask was a present from Jay, and very handy it came in at picture time, for lo, I never did get downtown to get my makeup done that day. From Pat’s the die-hards went to the Heather, so I’m glad I got to say good-bye to it properly. Smart money says I’ll be back eventually. After seventeen years of going there, it’s hard to break the habit.
What with my newly glittery appearance and glamorous clubbing lifestyle, SOME people are jealous, it seems.
Well, now I know I’ve really made it. My friend Jenna, who used to live with Barrett Brown and is currently Facebook-engaged to Adrian Lamo, has Glitterified me. First the ninja trading card, now this. And all of DramaSec has been hammering that post ever since, wondering what the hell is going on.
Absolute, positive proof that bitching about moving house pays off.
So, remember that the Big Move was this past Monday? Well, THERE IS STILL MOVING TO DO, Gawd help me. Today I hired a couple of guys to take out my heavy furniture and put it in the dumpster, because let’s face it, the particleboard bookcases are just not worth keeping, now that they’ve gone all soggy and rotten on the bottom. And the sofabed/loveseat is a) emerald green b) faded c) excruciating to sit on, so out it goes. And what did those nice young men do, other than cost me $60 (well, in fairness they agreed to do it for $20 apiece, but then one of the new twenties literally flew out of my pocket when I pulled out my keys and was claimed by the sky gods, as it was entirely THAT KIND of a day if you know what I mean)?
They broke my only working lamp, for which I did not have a replacement bulb. And the switch was neatly snapped off as well.
So, that put an end to my plan to sift through the rubble on the floor and look for things I needed to keep. Which is awkward, because the carpenter who lives next door is desperate to get his hands on the place and start renovating, motivated in large part by the fact that there’s a pianist on his other side (I don’t even have the vivacity to make a dirty joke at this point, CAN YOU SEE HOW STRESSFUL THIS HAS BEEN?) and he’s tired of being woken up by construction at 7:30 Monday to Friday and Beethoven at 7 on Saturday and Sunday. As Fran Lebowitz would doubtless say, if he wished to be awakened by Beethoven, he would sleep with Beethoven.
All of which is to say that his plan to rip up the carpet tomorrow is going to have to wait until 10 at the earliest, lunch most likely.
And now, the horrifying pix! Yes, direct to you from Mildew Manor, we present:
So, this has basically been my position every day for the past, say, TEN YEARS, ever since I moved into Mildew Manor. Within a week, I noticed black mildew in my bedroom, where a concrete structural column comes up quite near the bed. The building manager told me to keep the bedroom warm and it would eventually go away, which it did after I coated the entire column in bleach, only later finding out that causes the mold to release spores or weaponize or some godforsaken thing.
About four years ago, I started to notice greyish stripes in my living room walls, coming down from the ceiling. I didn’t know then it was black mold on the uprights, but I do now. For some reason, I assumed the stripes were my fault, maybe from burning something on the stove, or the candles, or maybe incense, and the “extra gravity” of the uprights attracted the microscopic particles. Yeah, I was drinking a bit at the time.
By the time I found the mushrooms growing in my carpet and the hole eaten in the wall behind the tv, however, the jig was up and I knew it was not my fault. It’s ZEUS’s fault, damn him. Eventually the co-op fixed the eavestroughing, so the water no longer cascaded down the wall outside, right where the tv is. And eventually the carpet became so wet it would no longer support any fungus this side of blue-green algae. And eventually the mildew decided it was being too geostationary, and started spreading across the walls everywhere, giving the place sort of a greyed chicken pox look. It’s very Derelicte!
Not to mention the incessant soundtrack. We’ve had two years of construction at the co-op, and it has finally reached my apartment (they’ve been trying to work out their courage, I guess) and so every day I have been waking up to a symphony of sledgehammers and jackhammers and smash, crash, boom, to the point where the entire bed shakes, not to mention the two I call the Fuckery Twins with their vocabulary. Seriously, nobody should start with that vocabulary until I’ve had my coffee. Bring back the nice supervisor who did bird calls and sang to himself; he was nice. I bet he was cute, too.
Anyway, for the curious, here is the soundtrack to which I awaken each day at 8, which is awkward since I work each night till 4.
Anyway, 300 words to say that in ONE MORE WEEK I will never have to deal with this place again (other than sending in my tax assessments for the last three years so they don’t sue me, welcome to co-op living). And I’m telling you, I cannot wait.
Since the power’s off, because I DO NOT WANT TO BE ELECTROCUTED BY MY BASEBOARD HEATERS, I sleep with three empty whiskey bottles full of hot water (yay for central hot water) and one actual hot water bottle, and it works very well under my eiderdown, Hudson’s Bay Blanket, and down-filled full length parka. For lights, I use a railway lantern from Army & Navy which would work well if it weren’t made in China and thus leaks as soon as you set it on a hard surface. And that, when it works, works well.
And that, my friends, is how I’m going to be packing up my apartment over the next five days, God help me.
No, really, the problem is I have no budget for anything fun lately. I’d better be paid by next Monday, because that’s Packing Up and Moving Into Storage Day, not yet a national holiday, and I am going to need to pay some bills by then, for srs. There’s no point in having all the funds in the world “in invoices” because as far as I know truck rental companies won’t take invoices in lieu of cash.
Nor will liquor stores, and I am going to CLEAR ONE OUT on the evening of the 25th, believe me.
raincoaster 