Willie Williams – Armagideon Time
The decision for me not to move was actually an annoying one. I had been racing around scouring listings and checking out places for a good month and a half leading up to the end of the year. I’d only ended up with a handful of places I really liked and the one I got as far as picturing my stuff there and calling up my future takeout places was snatched away in the time it took me to fax fourteen pages of information to a stranger. The real estate market is a bummer. I’d designated my holiday off time between the 21st and the 2nd as do-or-die hardcore moving time and it was going pretty shitty.
And then there I was the day after Christmas, coming home from a long night out at the local. I got as far as the inside stairs (because the front door isn’t always quite locked. A highlight of slumlord living!) before I looked in my bag to find no keys. And I had a crystal clear picture of putting my keys on the couch earlier and perhaps neglecting to put them in. I put out a 2am call to my mom (she was super thrilled with that, let me tell you) for the emergency spare set and surprise, she had neglected to keep them in a safe place because I hadn’t bothered asking for them in the three years I’d lived there. Sonofabitch… I crashed at her place (thankful she’d moved back to Brooklyn, but not so much that she’d defeated the whole purpose of the spare set), went to look at another shitty apartment the next morning before trying the super (didn’t have a pair) and Ant (who was in France unbeknownst to me) without luck.
The last resort was a local locksmith and I got quoted a $75 price (before tax) that I had to grin and bear. And natch, it wasn’t quite as easy all that. The one lock was always a pain in the ass and it turned out to give the locksmith a load of trouble. So over the course of the next three hours when I got a new knob, lock, and faceplate for my door and was out $165, a thought bubbled up: fuck it, I’m not moving. And I weighed the pros and cons. The temporary poverty was about the same for either option, likewise for the aggravation. But instead of handing over an arm and a leg to someone new and still having to figure out a way to move all my shit, I’d deal with the slumlords and area I knew and could get a chance to live alone for a bit while I redecorated and all that. So I called the management company and got a new lease sent over and here I am. Broke as shit, but sorta happy, if unsure how to motivate myself to start over. I’m super lazy and poor, but moreso lazy, and riding the slumlords to get all those things we ignored too long fixed is a full time job. Also finding a new roommate is gonna be a bit of an adventure. Ah well, we’ll see what happens.