My goddamn upstairs neighbor

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.

Why is that?
I was planing a trip through part of the civil was area next year… not sure if I was going to go as far down as that.

My neighbor has been quiet for a while now. That happens, Sometimes he is gone for days. Sometimes he sleeps.
Yesterday I went to sleep before him, and I heard him roll out the wall-embedded thing and let it fall on the ground. I had forgotten about that. This was the first time I was in bed before twelve in over a year. The last time was in rural Spain, where there was absolutely no reason to stay up late. The stars, the quiet of the night, pressed me down to sleep. This living room on the first floor on north-northwest, everything about being here is keeping me awake.

Its just my own prejudiced opinion. It revolves around the largest cities there and the snobbery, crimes, attitudes found in them. Out of every 10 people I meet from there only one or two maybe don’t annoy the crap out of me. So you might want other opinions beside just mine.

Permitted? Is that all it takes to just get up and move to another state?

neighborhoodscout.com/neighb … dangerous/

I grew up in #7 on this list of most dangerous cities in America. It’s connected to #20, where I went to college and have lived most of my adult life. Now, I live in this one strip of heavily policed white-ville that’s sort of in between them. I can leave my apartment and be in the center of either one in 15 minutes.

The place I live now if hardcore when it comes to arresting black people who play music too loud. All my old friends who still live in the bad parts of town are afraid to come out here because if your car has a dent, they’ll pull you over and search you out here. It’s madness dude.

I’m eating boerenkool met worst. How I have missed this food. It is raining dogs suddenly so the Albert Heijn has put Boerenkool met Worst in the racks. Once in a while a good microwave dinner is all I need.

Kris - then what I’m left with to wonder is if you also annoy the hell out of these South Carolineans, or if it’s a one way deal. Can you say anything specific about their annoying nature?

But back to my Boerenkool, not to let it get cold. Rain smashing against the window, dark setting in. Candle burning on this enormous standard I bought, and like. Silhouettes of houses on the other side of the canal, geese are quiet…

I went to charleston south carolina once. Every single citizen of that state has a bumper sticker of the known racist image that we know as the confederate flag.

It means that they hold dear in their hearts the time that slaves were allowed to be owned and they could get rich off the backs of others.

They’ve even got a confederate history museum, celebrating the side that lost the civil war in the US. You know…the side that built it’s entire economy on the backs of slaves.

It’s miserable. I was only there so that I could get on a boat that was going to Bermuda that happened to be leaving from the port of charleston.