doorgate chapter 1

it begins

in retrospect, i wish that i had saved every email that went into this one. we live in this storefront apartment and we have these neighbors. when we first moved in one was friendly one wasn't so much. then we kindof greeted each other in passing and now we are duking it out over the front door. you see, our building is definitely a pre war building and being so, it is old as hell. it is sinking in the middle and every winter i have to shovel the roof to keep the roof from leaking. there is no insulation in the ceiling so when the heat rises, it literally melts the snow and then when the heat goes off, the snow re-freezes. repeat process several times and i get a water damaged bedroom.

anyway, i'm getting off message. my building also has a problem in which every summer, the humidity warps the door frame. this warping makes the door not close entirely on its own. this has been the case for the last nine years that he nice lady and i have lived in this place. for nine years every summer the door won't close on it's own. for nine years we have lived across the hall from the same neighbors who have oddly enough before this little row had started left the door unlocked on their own. you see, neighbor1 and neighbor2 both work in film and television. they work odd hours. so during the span of our time here, when i would hear one of them leave for work at 3:30 or 4:30 in the morning and when i leave for work at my usual workaday time, i would sometimes find the door unlocked. i'd lock it and move on with my day. sometimes i would hear them come home from from work at 12am or later and when i leave for work at my usual workaday time, i would sometimes find the door unlocked. i'd lock it and move on with my day. ergo, we could say that i didn't get bent out of shape when i would find this happening. it was no big deal.

we live in a nice neighborhood. you see, i'm paranoid. very paranoid. the most paranoid person i know. ask anyone who knows the bastard and they will tell you that ,"the bastard worries too much about useless nonsense, he's paranoid". so with that as a baseline, i am paranoid enough to know if the neighborhood was bad. i grew in a neighborhood that was nice-ish. when i was a teenager, you could walk down to the other side of the tracks and you'd find crack viles crunching under your feet like autumn leaves. i went to high school in jamaica queens. every winter roving bands of hooligans would chase us down and pelt us with snow balls. not so bad? well one year it snowed so bad that hey closed the school and sent us home. then i had to walk down to the bus on hillside avenue and i got jumped, nay walked on, literally by 20 black kids. that shit hurts. there was a yearly race riot in the neighborhood every spring in which roving bands of kids full of hormones would run around and beat the shit out of the white kids who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. you know when that stopped? one year when the mofo was in the school across the street from mine (in the same neighborhood as myself and the dub went to school. i should gone to st francis prep) someone walked into the lobby and splattered someone's brains across the lobby. then it stopped and i could enjoy my senior year free of beat downs. i was held at gun point on more than one occasion (one of which i may post on sometime). so what i'm saying is, if my neighborhood was bad, i would know it. i took enough sociology to know how a neighborhood decays and we're not decaying (we're a few pawn shops and dirty book stores away from that). my son goes to a good school, we live in a middle class neighborhood. there are plenty of kids and the one big downside for me is, it's noisy. i have struggled long and hard with my frustration over the noise in my neighborhood and i have gotten into a decent place with it. what do i want? i live on a main drag. drunks happen at 2 in the morning. assholes who think loud pipes save lives start their bikes up at 3 in the morning, what can you do? it's out of my hands, i try not to let it bother me.

more in part two, i'm getting off message here

—the bastard