crisis déménagement.

1:

It's July 2nd and this is my fourth night in my new apartment. I've spent two of those nights alone and two of those nights with Llama Suntooth …and I got the sense that she was even more sentimental about the old place, the place I just move out of, than I was.

And in a lot of ways I admit that the old place was pretty cool; I liked the bright orange living room and the dark blue bedroom and the livid yellow kitchen left by the previous tenants and I liked that the landlord hated all those colourful walls and couldn't wait to get his hands on a barrel of white paint to purify the place and I liked the back deck that picked up sunshine for most of the day and made my plants spring up and blossom and I liked that a lot of good artistic and musical projects happened in that space and that I made some good friends while living there and that, of course, Suntooth and I forged something good there in then thousand small ways over countless shared breakfasts and cups of tea and kisses, but in the end the place was mostly crap and I'll tell you why:

Noise. Noise noise noise. The walls at that place were completely uninsulated and every faint crinkle of a plastic corner and every toenail scratching on the bathroom floor carried from one apartment to another, creating a broiling cacophony of sound that continued for the entire day. The lady who lived beside me, you see, loved to listen to Radio France at full volume from the time she arose at seven in the morning until she went out in the evening around seven pm. When her radio was not on she would sing, usually in the late evenings…completely out of key, I might add.

The guy downstairs, meanwhile, while he kept quiet for the entire day, often liked to have loud parties from about eleven pm until four or five in the morning, replete with booming techno music and what I think was probably a karaoke machine. The guy downstairs, was a real macdaddy, too, and he had all kinds of ladies over to his place and their screaming and thumping and headboard banging often carried up through the floor. Now, I would never begrudge anyone their intimate moments—no matter how ruckus—believe me, but the thing that irked me was that he decided to hook up with the lady next door and so there were a few nights when I heard her slaughtering Celine Dion on the karaoke machine and believe me it was fucking ugly.

I could even have lived with this, all this noise, if it were not for the guy upstairs. This motherfucker was a real piece of work, believe me. He used to come home every day at six pm and turn on his TV and blast the fucking thing so loud that whatever I was doing, if I was watching a movie or listening to music or whatever, whatever I was doing I wouldn't be able to hear my own speakers over his speakers upstairs and through the ceiling. Not only this, but intermittently he would turn of the TV and take out his acoustic guitar and strum these punk rock chords and get so excited while he was strumming that he would stomp his foot on the floor (right over my desk, usually); boom boom boom. Then, around ten pm (just as the guy downstairs was getting ready for his techno party) the guy upstairs would start blasting punk rock music to get himself in the mood to go out and get wasted. He would come home at three am every night, stumble up the stairs, and then play his guitar again and stomp his foot.

I used to wonder, who the fuck blasts punk rock music and strums punk chords on a guitar when they are 40 years old (as I made this guy to be)? Isn't it time he mellowed the fuck out and bought some goddamn Kenny G CDs? I mean his youth was twenty years ago and it's time he let it go.

Anyhow, Suntooth was the one who first suggested that I approach this guy upstairs to tell him how much his noise production was fucking me up. I mean, I was wearing earplugs from six to midnight ever night that he was home (and often later when the guy downstairs was partying) and I was always agitated and complaining and that can just be boring. Suntooth is really good at badgering neighbours and landlords about stuff and making them comply and I tend to be more shy and long-suffering; but I knew she was right and I decided to devise a plan for how to talk to this guy.

The thing was, though, that I didn't want to just go up to him and give him a list of reasons he pissed me off—cause how petty is that? If I went to his door and said: "your TV and also your foot stomping and also your love of punk rock even though you are 40 and also your drunken attempts to climb the stairwell at 3:00am are all totally obnoxious and you need to change your whole life for me" …well I reckon that wouldn't wash so I decided to just pick the one aspect of his being that I thought was the worst and ask him about that. I thought about it for a while and decided his TV was the thing that drove me the most crazy.

Thus, one evening when his TV was particularly loud, I went up the stairs, lingered for a moment outside his door, the summoned my courage and knocked. For a long time there was no response. I mean that for almost five minutes there was no response, then, finally, the door began to open, just a crack, like he was looking out over the chain, and his face appeared.

"Look," I said, "I'm really sorry to bug you but your TV is really loud and …I know I make noise too and everything and if I ever bothered you, you could totally tell me…but I mean could you maybe please turn it down a bit or at least turn down the bass or something because it's really loud…"

The guy stared at me for a moment and then said: "well, if I don't turn it up this loud then I can't hear it when I am in my kitchen." And I stared back at him, somewhat with my jaw agape for I didn’t even know how to respond to such a thing and as I was searching for the words he said: "alright fine." and he closed the door and I went back downstairs and he didn’t turn down the TV and I put in my earplugs and started to search for apartment listings on Craigslist.

After another month or so of listening to his TV and hearing him painfully cover the same three chord pattern in the same order for nights on end I decided to write him a note and tell him my feelings. In this letter I basically evoked the concept of freedom versus licence by saying that while, I respected his desire to live his life as he pleased and not bother anyone, he had to realise that I also wanted to live my life and his sonic assault from six pm to midnight every night was disturbing my chi (but I didn't actually say "chi", I promise). Moreover, I invited him to come and hear how the sound carried through the floor so he could see what I meant and I told him we could have a beer and be friends and I wanted him to tell me if I ever bothered him, etc etc etc. I was really polite and respectful and I left the letter in his mailbox and he read it (I assume since it vanished from the mailbox) and I waited nervously for him to show up and talk to me but he never came and he never acknowledge in any way that he'd gotten the letter and he also didn't change his lifestyle at all and so I decided to move to a new place and here I am.

See, the thing is that there were six units and the only one who ever seemed to be bothered by the noise was me. I was the asshole and they were the ones who were content to blast their TVs and radios and stereos and computer speakers and so on and so in the end it was me who had to leave. But, as an aside, I think the practice of buying big HD TVs and super bass woofer speakers and all that crap when you live in a downtown apartment is just disrespectful and selfish. It's perfectly fine to own that stuff if you live in suburbia and no one can hear any fucking thing you do but that high tech stuff just isn't designed with urban spaces in mind…or urban spaces weren't designed with it in mind. Something has to give.

2:

So I moved. I moved two blocks and I'm happy here so far. This was the only place I looked at, actually, and (despite months of scouring Craigslist and the paper and McGill's classified ads, etc., I just found this place by walking by and seeing the little paper sign in the window. A louer. It's really quiet here and I get a ton of sunlight and these things make me happy. Also Suntooth is now living a half a block away, which I really like because before I had to walk 20 minutes over the tracks to see her (as I told you before) and…well whatever.

The thing was that, because I was only moving two blocks, and also because the landlord here performed the unprecedented in the history of all humanity act of letting me take the place two weeks early, I decided to move everything by hand with my little dolly cart.

It's a very interesting exercise to move everything you own (especially if you are a packrat like me) because you really get a sense of how much crap you have and how much all of it weighs and how difficult it is to move large furniture items down a very tight stairwell by yourself and push them down the street on a dolly over a series of cracks and bumps that become all too familiar and past a series of stoops with the same drunks sitting on them every day in the sun jeering you but it was all worth it. It was worth it just for the fun challenge of trying to move things like a giant bookcase and a six drawer wood dresser down a nearly impossible stairwell and no one will ever know the miracles of spatial dynamics I performed in that stairwell alone with the sweat pouring out from me and pooling on the steps.

Why pay for a truck, and why bother with the hassle of waiting for movers on July 1st in Montreal?

The only thing I needed help with was the fridge (Suntooth tried to talk me into hiring a mover for that one but I refused). "It must be a guy thing." she said after as I proudly showed her my bruised body and the veins bulging out from my forearms. It's pure testosterone. I carried a fucking fridge down a stairwell with my hands straining on an old rope and my feet sliding on the ice water dripping out from the fridge pan and I pushed a fridge down the street on a dolly grunting all the way over the speed bumps and curbs and Y. helped me and to thank him I gave him a jar of strawberry jam I had just potted and some baby spider plants. It's a testosterone thing.

3:

And I left off moving for one day and went with Suntooth up to St Adele to visit her grandfather and her extended family was there and we at barbecue at some strange high security nursing home and then snuck off for a spell and skinny-dipped in a nearby lake in the middle of the afternoon, just missing a thunderstorm that we watched with little concern from the water as the black clouds rolled up over the sun and our pale kicking bodies suddenly grew darker in the water. And just as I exited a boatload of children motored by and they cheered at the sight of my bare ass. And later we sat under a canopy at a tiny beach surrounded by the Laurentians with all their frilly green covering and their luxurious cottages and we carved up some avocado and baked potato as a light dinner while we waited for the rain to pass.