Abode
Some more fun facts about my new abode. The alt-weekly classified ad through which I’d found the place had said impressive lake & downtown skyline views, but you have to be on the upper floors to see that, and in my opinion they’re not worth the walkup. My ground-floor views out the front bay windows consist of a small fortress of a liquor store, a gothy leather/fetish/adult-toys boutique whose phone number contains the word DEAD, a bar named after a prominent late German existentialist philosopher, and one rounded end of a diminutive pill-shaped Olmsted park. This park features a tall black spindly Gigeresque fountain burbling with green water and spasmodic songbirds, a ring-shaped flower garden whose center circle on weekends is the slo-mo battleground of a local Tai Chi posse, and an arguably excessive battery of large-lettered signs commanding dog owners to be vigilant in their shoveling of pet shit. The day after I moved in, Buffalo received what the news later said was the city’s largest single-day rainfall in over ten years. During the downpour, one of my living-room bay windows wept, its upper window-frame plunking fat drops of exterior spillover onto the floor a few feet from where L & I were watching DVDs on my laptop (this was before the furniture arrived); I’d thought the water-sounds were part of the movie. So far my gas stove has awarded me with two (2) gas leaks, necessitating my having to twice phone up the gas company’s emergency number after I started getting the impression that the dangerously-subtle gas-like bouquet I was detecting was not my imagination; I have since been presented with a newer (circa, say, mid-Ford-administration) and so far less problematic stove. In the bathroom I have adorned the shower with two shower curtains, one on either side — one to keep water off the bathroom floor, the other to keep the large poorly-frosted exhibitionistic shower-side window covered, for the benefit of the neighbors across the way — and it does nothing to keep my mind off my ever-darkening presidential-election-related cynicism that the double curtain makes the shower feel like the inside of a voting booth. In the celebrity-resemblance department the landlord is Jayson Blair and the on-site maintenance dude is AJ McLean. I once again have a Laundroid in my employ, the hulking washer-dryer combo machine that stands six-three and looks like an ENIAC disk drive. It took me two loads of laundry to realize that my laundry room should not turn into a tropical sauna with dripping walls and a droplet-blanketed ceiling each time I ran the dryer, and shortly thereafter I had AJ come over and obligingly hook up the Laundroid’s air-vent to the massive Shai-Hulud of a duct that’d been idly dangling loose out of the wall. It is a large apartment but is bizarrely inexpensive compared to the sort of rent I’m used to paying, so rest assured I am ever on the lookout for what the catch might be. As of last weekend, whenever I fire up the stove to cook something, the kitchen fills up with the scent of charred tapioca (long story; not the stove’s fault). The shower head that came standard with the apartment dispensed water at about eyebrow-level and with a water pressure on par with that of the average nosebleed; a few weeks ago I finally gave in and shelled out some roquefort at a certain purveyor of domestic frou-frou whose repertoire purportedly goes beyond mere bed & bath, and so I now own a girly masseuse-style shower nozzlette that hoses me down each morning from a height of seven feet and emits a coddlingly pulsing cone of firm but forgiving water rivulets that seems to not so much massage as molest. I have been slow to buy blinds for the windows; for a few weeks I had a black bedsheet thumbtacked over my bedroom window, followed by a month or so of two mostly-opaque sheets of 32″x40″ white foamcore, both of which options admitted minimal daylight and thus consistently wreaked unbelievable havoc on my sleep habits (actually it’d be more accurate to say my waking-up habits); I have just recently obtained a translucent tatami shoji blind for the window, and I now wake up every morning bathed in diffuse sunlight and feeling like a ninja.
