Battle Hymn of the Apartment

As I move into my 21st home, I take a brief moment to look back at the places I've lived.

I am very uncomfortable with nostalgia. Somewhere in my early twenties, maybe after the hundred thousandth hour spent drinking and listening to myself and others rehash stories about our teen years, I made a decision to reject the instant nostalgia and story-i-fication of every event. Listening to 22 year olds swoon as they showered each other with cherished memories from four years ago quickly became one of my most white-hot hatreds. Also I grew uncomfortable with the way I pulled out a set of anecdotes about my past every time I met someone new as if these stories of drunken hi jinx somehow explained who I was, as well as the feeling that everything was a potential story to be retold at a later time to either impress, disgust, thrill or, offend someone.

It took some time to shake the filthy habit but I realise now that I very rarely, if ever, tell stories from my past. I don't package the past into little anecdote bundles. I've paid a bit of a price in that I remember almost no specifics from high school (a good thing?), my twenties are all bunched together in one messy pile, and I may be less fun at parties. In the end I think it has had a positive effect on my memories because instead of remembering stories I remember events ( as unformed as these memories may be). This the same reason why I'm disinclined to take photographs.

That being said, I will now dip my toe in the nostalgia swamp and regale you with some stories from my past. For each place I've lived over the last 20 years I will jot down the first memory that pops up. I will try to keep it snappy ,basted in my trademark wit and stuffed with my much vaunted humour.

St. Hubert - Before I actually lived here I spent a lot of time hanging out here. This may have happened during that time. One of the best things about this place were the four record collections of the four residents. Not that they were of record collectors proportions or all that exceptional, but as a 16 year old who couldn't get enough music and who drank it up skinny-guy-with-long-beard-crawling-in-the-dessert style, it was heavenly. The four, perhaps five, record collections came together one day to form a mighty Voltron-esque mega beast. We decided to play them all chronologically. Of course some albums stank (yeah, you, Rick Wakeman) so ground rules were laid down. One track from each side minimum and at least two members of the household had to be home at the time of the playing. First up was Louis Armstrong (?) and I'm pretty sure he got the minimum. I can't remember if we stuck it out to the end but it gave me a reason to rush home and probably introduced me to a few things I hadn't heard. 

Laurier - This was a busy place and I spent a pretty eventful year there. Not one thing comes to mind. Just a flood. I remember that I had started studying Fine Arts at CEGEP and my father bought me a bunch of wood (plywood and masonite) for me to paint on. I leaned it on the wall of my bedroom and cut it up as needed using a circular saw and painted quite a few paintings using it. All in my bedroom! I love living in a nice place like an adult but I miss having a place where using power tools and painting in my bedroom seemed completely reasonable. Less complicated times.

 I also had an old turntable you could stack records on and it would play the side, let the next record drop and reset the needle for the next go around. You could stack about eight albums. I would pull a speaker into the bathroom and take a bath for as long as there was hot water for refills and nobody needed to pee. This was great seeing as we almost never turned the heat on and even if we did it had little effect.

Verdun - My cat, Jack (greatest cat who ever lived), was not very outdoorsy, although he did occasionally go outside. When he did he usually didn't go too far. Jack was all about keeping his options open, though. His food dish always had to be full, whether he felt like eating or not. All doors and viable windows had to be open just in case he was suddenly struck with the urge to visit a closet, roommate's bedroom, or the balcony.

Through a series of unfortunate events, I found myself living (if barely) in a half basement apartment in Verdun. To keep Jack happy the window in the living room was usually open so he could jump up and get a little fresh air. One night Jack didn't come home before I went to sleep so I left the window open. I was a bit worried because he usually came running home when I called him. I was woken by sounds of him at his food bowl (which was on the corner of my bed due to a situation involving my lack of cleanliness and billions of ants). I looked up from my pillow and when my brain and eyes finally synced up I realised he had a small white mouse in his mouth. I've never liked mice. Unlike any kind of bug that you can squish without a second thought, mice provide a moral dilemma and thus are far more problematic as house guests. My first reaction was to spring out of bed and direct Jack and his mouse back outside. This was working and Jack ran toward the open window, jumped up and through, but hit his enormous head on the frame. This made him drop the mouse back into the apartment but didn't slow him down a bit as he ran off into the alley.

The mouse ran behind something and I started planning how to catch and release. These were paranoid times for me. Living alone didn't suit me and my drinking increased as my eating decreased. Sleep was uneven and my tendency to be self pitying and overly dramatic were in full bloom. I started to think, " The mouse is white. That's not a wild mouse. Where did he find it? Maybe it came from the nearby psychiatric hospital. A lab mouse. What kind of slow,degenerative,excruciating disease is it infected with? I better put on some gloves!"

I cornered the mouse behind a chair or box or something and through some clever tactics that I don't quite remember I scared him out from his hiding place so he ran towards me. The plan was to grab him and quickly release him back to the outdoors,whether or not he found his way back to the lab to continue the Ebola or extra-virulent-AIDS testing was up to him. But, about halfway to my awaiting hands , he took a sharp left turn and disappeared into a hole in the radiator. Where a panel should have been was an opening that led into the wall and down under the floor.

I stood slightly stunned, my heart racing from having almost touched a plague-ridden lab mouse, thinking about my next move. I quickly concluded that my chances of coaxing it back out of the wall were slim and picturing, if successful, the mouse leaping out of the hole and biting my face then escaping, never to be found, so that tests which could determine what had infected me and was causing blood to gush from every orifice could never be performed. I instead found a piece of cardboard and taped it over the hole.

I immediately felt terrible. This would surely lead to the slow painful starvation and eventual death for the poor mouse. This sympathy was quickly replaced with a horrible image (pretty sure from a Stephen King story) of the the mouse, which was surely pregnant, giving birth and eventually ruling a colony of mice under the floor, in the dirt floor basement. The queen mouse would grow to an enormous size evolving into a limbless, eyeless, eating machine. I slept worse than usual for the next couple of days.