The Curse That Lingers

OK, so I haven't told you all - don't you love how I say that like I assume I have readers - I haven't told you all that The Jesus Syndicate finally MOVED AWAY! Is it blasphemous to thank the Baby Jesus that they finally packed up all their shit into a big ass truck and LEFT? So here I am, thinking, well, FINALLY, Easy Street, USA but then the owner of the house through the wall (the JS were just one in a 12 year string of renters) decided to get out of the slum lord biz and puts the fucking property on the market. So far so good, right? Owners are better than renters, property values rise when everyone owns, blah, blah, blah.

Well, that would be true if only the FUCKING OWNER WOULD STOP WORKING ON THE HOUSE! I want to ask him if he's building the Taj Ma-FUCKING-Hal in there or what? For at least a month there have been workmen in there daily, DAILY! - through the wall - banging, Roto-rootering, drilling, and belt sanding the whole place beginning at roughly 7:30 AM on MY DAY OFF!! The owner, his wife (daintily painting the exteriors of the windows) and a team of about 10,000 workmen have been at this - need I remind you - 50-something-year-old ROW HOUSE from dawn to nightfall. I tell you it's enough to drive a sane person crazy and I am The ABIB, so youze be knowin' what be happenin' to MOI.

So the incessant, daily noise threshold is roughly that of a revving 747 but I'm cool, I can deal; an extra pillow over my head and some heavy-duty earplugs can work wonders. But on the heels of the noise, comes the fumes and when I say fumes I mean everything from poisonous wood lacquer to whatever it is that Roto-rooter dudes snake out of the toilet, K? These old houses have very porous walls; these walls can, as demonstrated in past posts to this blog, clearly transmit noise down to the emoryboard-on-fingernail level, and they can also transmit fumes down to the ingredient level! It's a fucking direct pipeline from that side of the wall to ours. How lovely! I come home and my house is filled with the smell of wood floor lacquer that permeates EVERYTHING: the air, the air coming out of the dryer, the air coming out of the pre-heating oven, and eventually, the air coming out of my fucking trying-to-recover-from-the-flu lungs! I couldn't cook for three days since whenever I turned on MY oven in MY house out came 400-degree, heated toxic chemical fumes. We ate out. I tried to present the owner with a bill but he breezed past me like the slumlord that he is, figuring that if I actually LIVE in this neighborhood, in which he merely deigns to be a rental owner, I must be barely above the poverty level and collecting foodstamps. Fucking arrogant jackass.

So you see, it never ends. Never. The JS finally move their fat fucking asses out only to be replaced by the Toxic Chemical Workteam lead by the slumlord from hell himself. So I've decided that the best way to fight passive agressive shit is with more passive aggressive shit. I put our third car up on blocks in our backyard and left two major appliances (dishwasher and old dryer) on my front porch along with various bags of dogshit and a decomposing carved pumpkin from Halloween. Since it's the day before Thanksgiving I guess you can imagine what that's looking like. Insects that I'm pretty sure are not native to this area. HAH! Try to sell the place now, ASSHOLE! So you see, The ABIB may get momentarily thrown for a loop but that doesn't last, bitches. I can wait it out. I've got a kid in college so I have a third mortgage on this fucking place. I can wait you out Mr. "I Live In Columbia and Only Own a RENTAL Property In This Pathetic Part of Town". I can wait you out, boo; The ABIB Abides. Pour me another White Russian, would ya and Happy Thanksgiving!