Remember the Steak Mutilators? Well there must be some magical lure that the stove in that apartment has that incites people to blaze up some pungent shit on or in it. Same apartment, just as cloying odor.
But these guys are deep-fry freaks. I actually have grease streaks running down the back splash area under my stove vent. The wafting oil smoke billows up through their stove vent and over to mine. The smell is absolutely ghastly! It's not chicken, and at least, thankfully, it's not fish (yet), but it smells like some offal meats or pigs feet or something disgusting like that. Makes me literally want to puke.
And it's lately EVERY DAY!
I saw the guy over there (I don't know how many are in there) and he looked like he stepped right off the boat from DR, PR or some Spanish place like that. May even be Mexican as I think a lot of these apartments are occupied by them since they find easy employment as landscapers and day-laborers. The music he was playing on his tinny-sounding, old-fashioned transistor radio was very old skool shit like the stuff they play in Tropico. I always associated that style of music with the older Spanish folks but I guess it's popular with the young too since he looked only in his early twenties.
Had a bit of a gut, shirtless, some tattoos (couldn't make out if they were gang tats since I was spying on him through my dusty peephole) slicked back hair, smoking a cigarette in the breezeway looking like he was waiting for someone to come by. Thankfully, they can smoke in the breezeway and it doesn't come into my apartment but the minute they crank up that ole fryolator, watch out.
Just two more months. Two more months. Two more months.
Like a mantra I have to keep repeating it to myself. This place has been quite the roller coaster experience between times of quiet and pleasant surroundings to times of cacophony and ugliness. Ah the community dwelling woes of an impoverished person.
Years ago, a viewer of this blog wrote a comment on one of my posts during my really financially strapped periods between call center jobs. They said: $ = FREEDOM. Though at the time, my idea of freedom was having the ability to cut loose from anything or anybody I felt was "holding me back," I also knew and certainly still know that without commitment, endurance and a lot of hard work, you can't have the money needed to enable the freedom that I yearn for. My non-committal, devil-may-care version of 2009-2010 "freedom" puts you in places like I am now.
So I bitch and complain about rude, low-end neighbors and the everyday lives of the struggling masses. And I chant my mantra. But in reality, unless I put nose-to-the-grindstone, utilize my full potential and stop being a lazy-ass fuck, even in the next low-cost place, I'll be waking up everyday freakin' day to the noxious smells, slamming doors, crying babies, shrieking toddlers, crawling bugs and honking car alarms (oh, why do they have alarms on rusted, early-nineties Dodge Neons?).