Mildew Manor and me

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.