My Neighbourhood

I love my neighbourhood. I’ve been living there for just over 4 months and have enjoyed every minute of it.

My building is not too big, maybe 25 suites in all, so there aren’t so many tenants. It’s like every other big city though, none of us know each other, so what I do know about them comes from seeing them at their windows or hearing them through the walls.

The people across the hall have sing-along sessions every week and from what I can hear, they actually know how to play the guitar. Sounds kind of folky and sounds kind of nice. The guy to the right of my apartment, I have no idea what he does for a job, but whatever it is he needs to unload on Friday nights which means he opens all his windows and cranks Diamond Dave Van Halen til about midnight. During the day on Saturdays he’s usually playing other 80’s rock classics so I’ve become reacquainted with Europe and some AC/DC I’d completely forgotten about. The girl above my apartment, let’s just say she yelps like a dog when she’s ‘excited’ and she gets excited A LOT. Usually at 3 in the morning, but also at 7, 8, and 10:30 in the evenings. Sometimes it’s 6:30 on Saturday mornings or 2 o’clock Sunday afternoons. I’ve never seen her, I assume she sleeps a lot as she must be tired from all the activity.

My building is on the corner of a busy intersection and my apartment is the corner suite so I get to hear everything going on outside. Every night around 12:30 some guy walks by under my bedroom window playing a harmonica. I hear lots of animated conversations but can’t understand most of them as they are usually in Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. It makes for pleasant white noise when I’m kicking around, but I’m always surprised when I finally do understand something being spoken in English. The street also seems to be the strip for drunken party-goers and a lot of them like to talk loudly and laugh about their exploits. One early morning three girls were laughing and yelling about how funny they were. Next thing they were all puking just under my window and chanting, “We’re funny but we’re not pretty, ha ha ha ha.” I hope they got home alright.

The best burger joint in the world is two blocks away, serving bison, muskox, and ostrich burgers. When you order their fries, you will be constantly reminded that they are hand-cut. “Here are your hand-cut fries.” “How are you hand-cut fries?” “Would you like some more hand-cut fries?” I finally asked if slave labour was cutting the fries by hand in the kitchen. Whoosh, over her head. “No, the fries are put through a hand-operated machine by one of our employees.”

Rumour is that the Hell’s Angels operate the super expensive Super-Valu three blocks away. I prefer to do my shopping at the little hole-in-the-wall grocery store where everything is way cheaper. From the outside it looks like a fruit and vegetable stand, but when you get inside it stretches way to the back and is packed with tons of shelves lining tiny aisles that you almost have to walk through sideways. At Christmas all the employees wore Santa hats and threw a store 30th anniversary party, clearing out the bread aisle to make room for a dance floor.

The angriest people in the world work at the video store around the corner and I’d say they go out of their way to be miserable except that it appears to be in their nature to be permanently unhappy. They should be happy, they all have excellent hair.

I’ve got a crush on the guy who used to work the nightshift at the corner convenience store. It made getting my morning coffees worth getting up for as my current job doesn’t inspire me to do so. He hasn’t been there in the mornings for weeks now, I wonder where he’s gone.