In the past two years, I’ve gone from having a freak religious cult for neighbors to having a chicken waving, chanting, hooting and hollering idiot living next to me. Is it a case of “like attracts like”? Who knows? It just seems that my luck with neighbors in Brooklyn kind of blows hairy donkey balls.

I live on the third floor of my building and outside my bedroom window is a kind of a pit-like opening, made up of several of the surrounding buildings meeting up. It’s one long shaft straight down and all there is to see are the windows of other apartments in the surrounding buildings. The whole space is only about 12×12 feet and this shaft manages to act as a natural amplifier, bringing all kinds of interesting noises into my bedroom and blissful beauty rest at any odd hour of the day or night.

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After much toiling, bleeding and quiet, nervous talks with the cracks in the ceiling, I have finally vacated that black hole from Hell that I’ve had the unfortunate karma to call home for the past year and a half.

On Saturday, tired, hung-over and bleary after passing out fully clothed and with shoes on after getting a shade more than slightly pasted at a bar, I dragged my aged ass out of bed and started shuffling boxes down the street. It was absolutely fucking horrible, but worth it just to be rid of the place.

By Sunday, I was able to wrap things up and lock the doors for the very last time by around noon. Turning that key for the final time, I should have at least hired a mariachi band and some confetti throwers to mark the occasion but whatever. It’s over and done with. Some other Caucasian twenty-something who makes too much money and is willing to live in a pit will move in and the cycle will continue. Such is the power of New York real estate gentrification.

I for one am slowly and surely becoming fully fucking sick of the New York renting game. For years now, I’ve opted to live in the ghetto in exchange for square-footage and proximity to things that are “cool”. I spent one year in Queens, in a quiet little residential neighborhood where nothing ever happened, far away from anything that mattered and that experience taught me one thing–that I moved to NYC to be near and to do things that I consider to be “cool”. I want to walk out of my door and within minutes be frolicking in various states of lucidity amongst the things that I find “neato”, “keen” and “boss”. Possibly along with things that are “peachy” as well.

This desire has seen me live in some fucked up situations, this last being particularly trying upon my withered and trodden-upon soul. Two robberies and one mugging with a healthy slice of beat-down is just not worth it to me. Fuck cheaping it out, the next time I move, I’m hiring some guys to do the work for me and I’m going to relocate someplace nice so when I’m mugged, stabbed and left to die, slowly bleeding out onto the pavement as my neighbors dispassionately watch, I can go to the great beyond with some lovely Brooklyn scenery about my body and the knowledge that I leave behind a decent apartment.