I moved into the Fountain Place Apartments Thursday, after four-and-a-half years on the wait list. Also after a bit of confusion regarding my actual position on the wait list; I discovered Wednesday there was actually five people ahead of me instead of the one mentioned by the building manager. Fortunately for me none of them could be gotten a hold of. Even more fortunately for me was that I moved in just an hour ahead of the rain, which I was getting kind of tired of because I don't enjoy spending holiday weekends soaking wet dragging armloads of chump change (bottles and cans) ... only to dry off overnight on a loading dock a quarter of a block down the street from a massive tweaker refugee camp. That's two bullets dodged in a flurry of signatures!
As you can see, it's a pretty big place. And a pretty nice one, too! After the last place I lived in — which was pretty much just a heap of walk-in closets full of assholes, nutters, and cretins wading ankle-deep in bed bugs and cockroaches — this turned out to be a more than merely pleasant surprise. In fact, it feels SUMPTUOUSLY POSH! Which appraisal reflects just how bad most of my living situations have been throughout my adult life. It's going to be a joy to furnish, but that will take a long time because I'm unemployed and don't have a motor vehicle. In fact, even though it feels luxurious to do things like sleep naked, pee whenever I want to, and take baths, it also feels a little weird: these past couple nights I would occasionally glance around me while reading a book by the light of a lamp I found a day before I moved in, and the bedroom would look desolate and eerie to me, like a cavern covered in mummy bandages. Well, once I get at least that room furnished, including a computer from Free Geek to watch movies on, it will start feeling more like home instead of like a squat.
The most important thing about this new chapter in my life is not that I have a climate control, a toilet, a kitchen, and a sturdy door with a lock ... it's that I can start really working with Central City Concern on improving my life. If I play my cards right I can get social security benefits, land a part-time job, and start pursuing marketable interests like my line of sauces, my candles and soaps, writing freelance, and maybe even coding games to sling on Steam for a few bucks apiece. I'm never going to get rich, but at least I can do a lot better than contenting myself with sleeping on loading docks and canning up enough money to souse myself to sleep in; I can perhaps also manage to eke out a living without becoming another wage-slave drone in the banality of the hive of the modern working world, too.
