Because I didn’t give the required 30-day notice (since I seriously wanted to get the hell out as fast as possible), the landlady informed me that she would be keeping my entire deposit. If I would’ve known that, I would not have even bothered cleaning the damned place. I gave as much notice as I could, but since everything was moving so fast, I wanted to wait until I actually signed the new lease before I made my announcement. Can’t fault me for that, but otherwise everything happened fast and smooth. My deposit was $300, about half a month’s rent. I’m writing it off, but don’t consider it a total loss. It’s the price I’m paying for peace of mind. My stomach no longer churns and pings when I think about going to my apartment.

The new place is bigger than the old, plus I have a balcony and an outside storage closet. There’s a dining room attached to the living room that’s almost too small for my table, but perfectly sized for my music gear, so I’ll be setting up my studio there. Finally, my gear will be within sight and within mind, instead of being in my bedroom and an afterthought on my way to bed. It’s my hope that I’ll eventually be more productive in my music. I’ll also assume that the floors are a little thicker here, so I can relax and be comfortable with using my audio monitors instead of trying to mix through headphones to keep from angering the neighbors.

I managed to exchange a few greetings with the neighbors next door; nice couple, I assume. Seldom hear them. Haven’t met the neighbor downstairs, but I’ve heard she’s a professional or graduate student. She dresses well, so that’s something. I do hear her on occasion, mainly during the day. I assume she uses the weekends to clean and play some music while she does so. I could hear her stereo, but at least it was during the day. Heard her knocking around this morning, which kinda woke me up a little.

Honestly, I’ll just have to expect that when I live in apartments. There’s absolutely no way to get around hearing your neighbors knocking or slamming. Landlord says this is a quiet complex; that just means there’s little crime and everybody goes to sleep. Otherwise, it’s the internal noises of apartment living that are unavoidable.

Some noises, however, were unexpected, like the loud humming in my bedroom. The hum is from the A/C compressor which is mounted on the roof directly above my bedroom. At least I can control that noise…just don’t run the A/C when I go to bed. Thankfully, winter is coming up, so that’ll be easy enough to do. The neighbor’s A/C compressor, though, I can still hear it, but her compressor’s over my bathroom, so it’s not as loud.

In the evening, around sunset, some of the trees near the complex get crowded by screaming birds as they do their daily quorum. There’s also a family of parrots that live in the cellphone tower just outside my apartment, so I hear them cawwing at times.

My balcony also overlooks the back parking lot of a busy restaurant. Car alarms and door slams.

One of my neighbors is, apparently, a professional bongo player. Haven’t heard him practice yet.

About once a night a trash truck will come around and bang around one of the many, many dumpsters that are in front of the many, many businesses along my street.

It sounds like I’m in for a bad time, but I guess as long as I expect it and learn how to take it like a man, I’ll be fine. At least I don’t have the shitheads in #214 stomping, slamming, and being otherwise intentionally abusive with their noise.

But Thursday, I noticed that my ssh connection to my house had gone dead. Nothing I could do from work would bring it back. OK, I thought. So after I finally get home, I take a look. The power to the apartment is on; it didn’t burn in a fire; the server was running and was responsive; but the cable modem was offline. So I log into the cable modem, the signal level was low enough that it basically said “Hey, I’m physically disconnected.” So I grab my flashlight and look outside, tracing the cable line as far as I can. Didn’t take long before I found the problem: the construction crew intentionally cut my cable line. They cut a lot of people’s lines. Intentionally.

So I called Time Warner and let them know what was going on; they’ll send me a tech to service the line, but the soonest he can come out is — get this — Sunday. Three days without Internet at my apartment. I had a nice little chat with the landlady about it the next morning. She basically covered for their stupid asses and made excuses. Blowing smoke, basically. “Oh, they had to do that, it was in the way…they’ll fix it today.” Like I trust welders to repair my telecommunications lines. By end of Friday, you know what happened? Absolutely nothing. They didn’t fix it. Why did she feel like it was necessary to lie like that?

At least I know I’m not the only one inconvenienced by the debacle. There were at least ten other lines cut. My only hope is that Time Warner will take notice and see fit to fine the apartment management for letting this happen, and that the management will pass the buck on to the contractors. It’s a damn good thing I’m moving out; this whole things just feels like a final “Fuck you, get out” sort of thing.

On a positive note, my lease application was accepted at the new place, and all I gotta do is sign the lease agreement, decide on a move-in date, and write a check. Can’t wait. Been slowly moving stuff out of my apartment and into the storage. Now that I’ve gotten a lot of stuff trashed, given away, or stashed in the storage unit, the amount of stuff I have doesn’t seem so unbearable.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

But the upshot is that I now have central heat, which is all-too-important this week, what with the latest arctic blast sitting on top of us. We even got some sleet today. Zero accumulations, but sleet nonetheless.

The apartment management declined my written request for a discount on rent for the inconvenience and expense of running the space heaters. Said it was “uncustomary”, and that I only had to deal with it for a week, and that a space heater was provided by management, and yadda-yadda. Notch it up to another thing I dislike about this apartment.

“But Shawn, why don’t you just move when your lease expires at the end of next month, since you hate it so much? Aren’t we all just a little tired of your bitching?”

That’s a (pair of) complex question(s) in search of a simple answer. There is no simple answer. This is my space. I’ve been here two years; it is cavernous, clean, relatively quiet. Sure, there’re shitty things about this apartment complex, but the same is said about everywhere else. I just cannot justify the mental and financial expense of looking for another place and moving. If the lease renewal contract I get next month presents itself with a stupendous rise in rate, then yes, I’ll have no choice, obviously. But if it’s all the same, then I’d prefer to stay.

This is my god-damn neighborhood and has been for the past nine years, thank you.

My former roomate and I have practically broken all ties, and good thing, too. Less stress, less drama. He tried to draw me into some drama last weekend; hadn’t even been moved out 18 hours and he was yelling at me about taking the cable modem; a case of I-said-You-said. The jackass stole my cable internet account without my permission, and, if I have learned right, the only way to do so would be to file a bunch of paperwork at the cable office to transfer an account from one name to another…and both parties must file. So, it looks like someone impersonated me. A heady accusation to make, but it would be fitting as a final “fuck you” to someone he no longer cared about.

After being on the phone with Time-Warner sunday, I decided that the best disposition of the modem was to go to my old apartment, open the door, attach a note to the modem that said “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!”, drop it and my old keys on the floor, and lock the door on my way out.

I dusted my hands on the walk back to the car.

It pleases me that we are no longer in each other’s sphere of influence. I can remove the gloves when necessary now instead of biting my bleeding tongue in an insane fit of diplomacy. That I stayed in the same household with him for almost six years speaks volumes of my insanity, laziness, fear, poverty, and an unwillingness to rock the boat. It’s a testament to intersocial constipation. I held back so much shit over the years, it just stopped flowing. The long winter. The dead season. The minutes of decay in the hour of life.

After our friendship went sour, I stopped communicating, he stopped trying. We found comfort in plausible deniability: I was simply closing my door because I didn’t want to bother him with my loud music; he closed his door because he didn’t want to bother me with his smoking. Our avoidance of each other was because we didn’t get along, but acting as such would have been unbearably direct. We had to find nonverbal excuses. Everything was unbearably passive-aggressive. We didn’t talk beyond an infrequent “hey” and a terse discussion of bills. On occasion, it was friendly, but that was just on the face of it. In private, fingers would fly. In public, tongues would wag. Our rare instances of actual contact over important issues met with inflamed egos and enraged anger. Usually, someone left the house shortly afterwards.

But no more of that.

I am in my own place now. I can stretch out. I can change. I can grow, create, do stuff without commentary, remarks, surprise. I can sit in the common area without bother. I can watch a heavy movie without the risk of someone barging in the front door dragging three strange friends and interrupting the moment at a particularly heavy part of the plot. The environment won’t change suddenly without my hand on the handle.

I am in my own place. Now, instead of having to avoid when I go home, I only have to avoid in the rare public place. That’s easy enough; avoiding in your own private sanctuary is much more difficult and taxing.

I am in my own place. It’s over now. I hope he and I can reach some shred of reconciliation, but right now, it’s doubtful and for the short term unwanted. I’m out. It’s over. We’re done.

I am on my own.