The Best Part

It’s been an eventful couple of days. On Sunday night, my crap shack was evacuated due to a fire alarm. It was odd to see all of the people from the building together. It was like the Losers and Cat Lady Hall of Fame was having an induction ceremony right there on the spot. Me? I live here solely for the purpose of filling the blog with valuable content and this hole of a building is a goldmine in that respect. Anyway, the evacuation was a circus. I spent 20 minutes outside in the parking lot with the three girls who live at the opposite end of the hall from me. One of the girls is missing a leg. I felt it appropriate to name her One-Legged Woman. I have a song about her that I made up around Christmas time. I won’t sing it, but I will say that there’s a verse about how she hopped her way into my heart and stole the show. Anyway, she makes no effort to hide the fact that she has one leg. She doesn’t rock the prosthetic, and she pins the loose leg of her pants back, like she’s challenging people to stare at her as she passes by you with her arm crutches. The evacuation would have been extra hard for her, since she must have had to hop down from the top floor of the building to get to the ground level when the alarm went off.

Four fire trucks arrived at the crap shack and after a 30-second meeting of the minds, they determined that there was no fire in the building. In all honesty, I thought that they let us back in kind of fast, but whatever. It was two nights ago. Get over it.

The most disturbing part of the night came as I made my way up the stairs once we were allowed back in. I could have taken the elevator, but I don’t trust it when I’m in there by myself; if there is ever a time for the shitbox to break down (aside from the regular interval of it stalling out every two to three days between midnight and 6am), it would have to be when there are ten people crammed in there. So yeah, I’m walking up the stairs with about 20 other like-minded people and I start to notice some gross shit in the stairwell. First, I saw the standard cigarette butts on the steps. This is nothing new. Then I saw pills. They could have been Tylenol cold and flu, but I like to think they were ecstasy tablets. Aside from the standard dirt that’s piled up all over the place in the stairwell, I had one more discovery to make on my way back up to the twelfth floor. Somewhere around the seventh floor, I saw it trying to hide behind a pipe. It was torn open and discarded, which, in itself made me wonder about what kind of stuff happens in this building. There on the ground lay a discarded condom wrapper. It was a red Durex package; the tin-foil type, as opposed to the plastic ones (I prefer the plastic wrappers, myself, for no legitimate reason). I didn’t have time to take pics of the stairwell with all the people in it, but here are a few shots of the stairwell after it’s been cleaned.



Yesterday morning, instead of listening to music from my phone, I took my crappy looking discman to school so I could listen to J-Live. I had one of his songs in my head all day at work. I listened to it again on the LRT when I went home, too. I woke up this morning and checked my mail and who has sent me an email, but J-Live himself. He accidentally cc’d me on an email about the production and engineering for a song. It was an odd coincidence. I wrote back to him and asked him if he wanted to do an interview, and we're going to be talking on Friday. I think the coolest part of making an unknown hip-hop artist your favourite musician is that they’re totally accessible to you. Let’s see fucking Springsteen email you by mistake, Mike Larocque. Let’s see it. That’s what I thought.


This is easily my longest blog post ever.