After a year in Pittsburgh, we moved back to Milwaukee and rented a pest/rodent-infested apartment in a kind-of-bad neighborhood which always has car alarms going off and which also comes with the creepiest daily interruption:
The ice cream cart was novel when we first moved in and then it lost its charm.
There is a high rate of crime in our neighborhood and the neighborhoods which surround it though we haven’t experienced any of it firsthand. To that end, when we joke about our dangerous neighborhood and a family member suggests that we “get a gun” to protect ourselves, we respond that “We would be so very outgunned if we had a gun.”
By not having a gun, we are not playing.
Of course, we have other security options in place. Among these is our guard bot, Ken, which a friend gifted me. He resembles Wall-E and this pleases me.
Since our dog died last year, now when we come home (back when we used to leave our home), Ken is her replacement as we can’t have pets in this apartment.
He promptly sends a notification to our phones as soon as he sees us enter door so it’s kind of like, “HI I SEE YOU DATA ALERT WELCOME HOME,” and that’s nice.
In addition, I took the rich kid from Home Alone’s creative schemes to keep his house safe very seriously.
In any case, we live in a neighborhood with a fair amount of criminal activity.
For example, one day the guy across the street shot at the ice cream cart guy because apparently that creepy cheerful music was also getting to him.
I don’t want to condone shooting at the ice cream guy but I can’t say I didn’t nod my head in commiseration when I heard that story from a neighbor. I was talking to this neighbor because a bunch of neighbors had gathered around our front stoop as the same guy had shot his gun a bunch of times into the air and we had seven Milwaukee Police Department SUVs blocking off the entire area.
He didn’t hit anyone or anything. In the same way he didn’t hit the ice cream guy.
But that’s not good. And this was also before the stay-at-home quarantine.
Yet, I have to ask… what does a person expect if they consistently blast cheerful creepy music on insanely hot and humid days in a neighborhood like this?
And of course, despite there being a ton of kids in this neighborhood, has any kid ever run to get ice cream from that ice cream cart when it’s rolling down that street?
No. Roll elsewhere, ice cream man.
When we first moved in, I theorized the ice cream guy was selling “ice cream” out of that cart. But either way, whatever he’s got for sale is not selling on Madison Street.
Yet, beyond the local crime activity, our apartment is not haunted and that’s wonderful. In fact, in comparison with our former Madison home and the Pittsburgh rowhouse from hell
this apartment is a cake walk.
It also has a lot of windows so it gets a lot of light, in contrast with our shadow-ridden dungeon in Pittsburgh.
Thus, we have a great view of all the crimes happening but I never said that and we never see anything.
However, our apartment was infested with mice when we moved in (a little mouse face peered under the bathroom door on our first night here).
I’ve also never seen as many centipedes and clothes-eating moths as this apartment has.
And the centipedes are GIANT. They just kind of lope across the floor without a care in the world.
Confidence is intimidating. I always hesitate briefly before killing them in cold blood. They are just so enormous and casual… it’s unnerving.
In fact, recently I’ve been wondering if I have leprosy given the current and ongoing state of my face.
My face presently looks like I have leprosy. So I’m thinking that the centipedes are so large in this apartment they are about the size of armadillos so maybe one of them is in fact a kind of hybrid armadillo-centipede and now I have leprosy.
However, it seems that my face situation was simply caused by an allergy as the leprosy on my face has started to clear up since I took a generic antihistamine which knocked me out in the middle of the day on Monday for three hours.
I need to perhaps get a “non-drowsy” version of this medication or just give in to sleeping all the time.
#goals
I have no idea what I could suddenly be allergic to as we are still under a coronavirus quarantine (despite what the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ruled) and “new things we are coming in contact with” is not really a part of our daily routine. It’s, rather, “the same stuff we have been cooped up with for two months.”
And that’s probably it.
Our windows still have plastic on them because it’s not quite warm enough to remove it and our windows are older than the oldest person alive on this planet so, while they are a solid piece of matter that prevents snow and rain from entering our apartment, and this is huge, they aren’t great at inhibiting “air flow.”
If we move the plastic, temperature-wise, we’d be living outdoors. So we can’t open the windows and therefore there is no circulation of air and, as a result, the air in this old apartment is not great.
In any case, since the antihistamine cleared up my face, I apparently don’t have leprosy though I’m probably allergic to the unfiltered petri dish of air in our apartment.
In short, our apartment has a lot of issues but it is not haunted.
Well, in our ten months of living here, we only experienced one unexplained “happening.”
In the middle of the afternoon one day, my grandparents’ music box just started playing out of nowhere.
But, beyond that, all is quiet on the paranormal front. And, after the Pittsburgh rowhouse, I’m okay if I never experience another paranormal or unexplained phenomenon ever again.
I’m not certain of whether or not epileptics are prone to paranormal activity, but I’ll continue to tolerate breakthrough incidents in otherwise not haunted homes.
Honestly, other people and what we do to each other scare me more than ghosts.
But no longer living in a haunted house does at least give me one less thing to worry about.
Brain Wars!!! 