My goddamn upstairs neighbor

Nah, it’s a parking lot. That’s the point. I’m at the end of a cul-de-sac where 4 buildings contain about 40 aparments. They’re 3 stories, so they’re relatively close together as far as their footprints. That means that at least 40, but probably 100 or more people live within oh I dunno…an 800 or so foot radius of me. And they all turn around in this cul-de-sac all day. The intersection when you come out of the apartment has like 70k cars a day. It’s a heavily trafficked part of the city. We have gridlock every day, and multiple car pileups at least once or twice a week on about a 2 mile stretch of highway that connects to this place at an intersection with another heavily travelled road. So that being said, I dunno about you guys, but if I had kids between the age or 4, and 13…and I caught them playing in the street or in the cul-de-sac from hell just standing and playing in the middle of traffic essentially, I’d beat the shit out of them or whatever until they stopped, and did something safe. There are crazy people in here man. 800 apartments means at least one tenant has eaten one of the geese. My neighbor, a woman, brags about how she’s run over at least 9 ducks in the last year. So if she can hit those ducks like that I’m sure she could his a kid. The parents are negligent. The stick their heads out the door and look at the kids once in a while and then walk back inside. I almost ran over a bike the other day and was thinking, “Am I gonna be the guy who runs over a bike and then sends a bill to the parents with a threatening legal letter attached asking for payment for the scratched paint I recieved while running over the kid’s bike?” If it happens on accident, they’ll get that bill. I wont do it on purpose.

So thee’s the angle of, they could get run over, and the one about their bikes getting run over, and the point about all the traffic they’re mingling with, and the fact that their unattended children playing in the fucking street all day. Those are all bad things.

To top if off the place literally has 2 pools a gym all kind of shit. There’s several boat launches here that lead to a series of 7 lakes total. Patches of grass big enough for a football game. Everything. But they don’t wanna do any of that shit. They wanna linger behind my car while I"m backing out of the space.

I’m sorry but this thread really made be think about the frustrations I’ve been having with these people who are viloating my lease by putting the burden on me to not squish a small child who’s apparently trained to do nothing but stand bihind my car while I’m backing out. The other day I walked out and one had just pulled up and propped his bike on my car. No damage nothing bad but I was like, “hey little man, do me a favor and don’t scuff people’s cars with your handlebars”. He looked terrified. He was probably 7 or 8 years old. Then an old lady came out and said, "we’ll watch the cars if you don’t throw any more cigarette butts off your balcony. Then I said, “ma’am, I’m sorry, but 1) those aren’t mine, and 2) cigarette butts on the ground messing up your esthetic experience here is not comparable to damaging someone’s property”. She just got all wide eyed like she was gonna not say anything else stupid like that. She violating her lease, and mine by putting her chairs and a small table outside her door. She has a patio. The area outside the doors is a common area, and therefore per her lease she cannot leave articles there. Then I got some other asshole hanging up sheets to privatize hi balcony except guess what? You’re not allowed to do that. It makes the place look like a fucking slum. The buildings are all supposed to look the same…nice. Hanging sheets as sin blockers or whatever on your 3rd floor patio facing the street makes that shit look like the hood. They’ve gotta start enforcing people’s leases here or I’m gonna move.

Dogs make great companions.

PK - great story, that made me laugh. Tell me about your mother.

Reason - I have privatized my balconey in this way. My balcony does look somewhat slumlike. Its very comfortable and sunny though.

This morning the guy was playing some first person shooter over his stereo. I aimed my speakers at the ceiling and blasted Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Stagger Lee”. Soon enough the shooting stopped.

Sounds like he’s either following the fashion for bare floors without carpets or he is deliberately stomping not the floor to piss you off.
Have you done anything to upset him?

I have to sympathise - I suffer from other people’s noise.

You can try to move - or move him. Either scare him off or kill him
THe Rammstien idea sounds good, but the trouble is you have to hear it too!

Like!

Well yes, not mourning the rats. And there may be more things. But he’s been like this since I live here, and he claims he gets noise from all directions. But then he denies making noise himself.

This is why I opted for different music today. The method does seem to work. I prefer it to having to go up and talk to him about it again, as this only adds to the discomfort of being extremely aware of my neighbors, and being acutely aware that they are aware of me. Moreno’s suggestion is very good and I would like to see the look on his face if I proposed this, but I don’t want to deal with his emotions.

He’s very emotional.

Understandably, it’s necessary to periodically run very fast from one end of the apartment to the other, and then back. Possibly he is keeping a herd of buffalo as well.

If that was my neighborhood Reasonable I’d be yelling at people on a daily basis.

Makes me damn glad I was raised in a house and live in one. We have had annoying neighbors but, nothing constant. I don’t see how you guys manage sanely.

Kris, I was raised in a house. But, it was in a place where you could hear gunshots all the time, and anything left outside was sure to be stolen, and the stuff inside would get stolen once a year.

I’d rather live in the best part of town in a small apartment than have a house in the ghetto.

Well a main reason we moved out here was a similar type of neighborhood. We decided to sell all and our fledgling business for the sake of our boy. Is it not amazing how you can become numb to gunshots?
The day came when I heard a shot, and went normally to pick our kid up at school. Upon arrival there was the average 6 cop cars. The kicker was an ambulance. We woke from normality and moved within 3 months. But, we do miss a few neighbors.

Neither do I.
Living in the city alone is a recipe for insanity. When I was living together with a girlfriend I would not be so distracted by the noises through the walls and ceiling. But without that constant reference point, I have to actively work to maintain a form of calm during bigfoot’s enthused excursions through his cave. I also had to accept discarding the positive feelings I used to have about the guy. These make it too fatiguing to be frustrated by his shit.

I was also raised in a house, but I can not afford to get one in the city, they’re about a million a piece.

Yeah, if I want a house in the section of town where I live, I think I can get a 900 square foot garden home for about 250k. There are condos behind me smaller than that that get up into the 300k range. An actual, 3 bedroom house would be more than that. I can see a row of multi million dollar ones on top of the hill behind my balcony. You’re not even allowed to go in there it’s gated and guarded 24/7. They take down the license plate numbers of the pizza delivery guys up there and you’ve got about 10 minutes to get out before the security trucks start looking for you. I used to deliver pizzas back in the day. They’d stall you at the gate for 15 minutes asking you questions, then the customer would complain that it was late.

Shit, my apartment is 606 square feet and just 1 bedroom, and this fucker is over 700 a month.

Cripes, we have a house and 10 acres paid for. It cost 77k
30 minutes from cities around us. There are good homes away from the cities that cost less. Try setting your sights further out. Mortgage payments can be as low as two or three hundred a month. Get decent transportation and you are set. The folks out here are also a better quality in general.

I can get a condo built in the 80s a few blocks from here out of foreclosure for 115k. It’s 900 sq ft and 2 bedrooms. That’s as cheap as it gets.

Birmingham isn’t like most places in MS. If you move out of the good area here, then you will without a doubt be a victim of crime. Anything you save by trying to move to the country will just get stolen out of your house when it’s burglarized. The crime rate here is phenomenal. If you want to get to the country, you can go a few miles further from the city from where I live, but then it’s just a bunch of rich people who wanted to live in the country building more million dollar houses behind gates.

You know that guy lee greenwood? the dude who sings “proud to be an american”? He’s got like a 19 million dollar house about 6 miles from here back in some woods with a pool shaped like a guitar. It’s safe there. 10 more minutes down the road…meth houses.

This is what I’m surrounded by.

libertypark.com/

eddleman.com/communities/highlandlakes.asp

greystonedreamhomes.com/

mtlaurel.com/

eddleman.com/communities/brookhighland.asp

athomesbirmingham.com/for-sale/i … _DZ_aJX-uY

zillow.com/mountain-brook-al/

There are plenty of other places. Our govt has yet to require moving or travel permits. Skip Southern California though, a waste of space and skin.

Kris, if you move to a part of bham with a 77k house, you will be a victim of crime in a very short period of time. Hopefully they just take your property, a lot of people are killed here.

bhamwiki.com/w/Birmingham_homicides_by_year

Those stats are just for the city limits. They don’t include the vast majority of the outlying ghettos, where the real crime is occurring.

So you are not permitted to leave that state?
You would not stay in a burning house would you?

Okay. I never even thought in those terms. You don’t get that in this country, ever unless you are an industrial farmer or bona fide wealthy.
My grandmothers sister bought the house I grew up on for something like 40.000, it’s worth well over a million now. Euro’s, she got it in guilders, which was about .4 to the euro on the transition in 2000.

Yes. There’s basically only once place I can go - the coast. That’s the only rural bits Holland has going for it. It’s a beautiful coastline, entirely unbroken for over a hundred kilometers and all broad, white sand beaches. So I need to get a car. Last time I had a Golf 3 TDI. It was fast and comfortable but made a lot of noise. Back when I got it diesel was still very cheap, and I used to drive for thousands of kilometers on a regular basis. Now it doesn’t make much sense anymore.

How big is that radius? What’s the greater area like? I was never in that city but I was in Savannah, and I got a quick impression of what it was like there behind the highway offramp and the greyhound station. A mild concussion and a good story richer I got in the bus to New Orleans. That was before Katrina, it was a pretty nice town, or had very large decent parts. Not anymore, I imagine.