Roger Toussaint You Need to Talk to My Landlord

Transit strike. Fluish thing.

Fine.

Some weeks suck.

Fine.

But what really gets me is blowing a fuse. Literally blowing a fuse in my house. Because my house is wired for sometime at the turn of the century. And I’m serious. It’s on whatever electrical wattage or voltage came before the standard U.S. one now. (I’m not looking it up.) So fuses blow when the toaster and a precarious combination of lights, computers, radios, whatever are on.

Fine.

What’s awful is having to venture down to the first floor and face the ancient landlady or her husband. She invariably comes to the door in a muumuu. A really worn one. And she demands to know the combination of electronics I used to create this outage. Then she acts disgusted at my idiocy. How could I possibly have the TV and the toaster on at once? I have to tell her there’s an outage so she can venture into the locked basement to replace the fuse. Because why would I be allowed to do it myself? Of course not. Because then I would have to face the frightening things down there. I'd have to face the birds.

“My son-in-law keeps them,” muumuu landlady once told me when I questioned the chirps I heard coming from down there. (No, not “down there.”)

I’m sure I’ve mentioned the birds here before.

Really, someday I’ll spill all the freakishness of my freaky old building and its freaky (some old) inhabitants. It’s very Hitchcockian. And Hunter S. Thompsonian.

Witness, Dickensian:

One time, the Con Ed guy was in my kitchen. We were chatting. He told me, “Be careful with open flames in this place.”

“Excuse me?”

“You guys still have the hook up for gas lamps in the ceiling,” he said.

Gas. Lamps.