Looking for apartments...

...in Los Angeles is pretty much a hideous experience. Going from place to place begging a merchant to allow us to buy his product is getting tortuous. All I want is a place for my stuff. It has to be big enough so that I can sleep near my stuff, it would be great if I could cook and eat without leaving my stuff and of course I'd like to be able to hit the head with as much privacy as possible somewhere close to my stuff. Other than that, I won't be doing anything crazy...activities that damage apartments tend to damage your stuff as well and this is, after all...about my stuff.

Without my stuff, I could wander from place to place like a grasshopper and, as the song says, I'd follow the sun. I'd rather do that than live in a hole in the wall, but I can't do anything without my stuff. I'd have to be able to change clothes more than once a week and I'd have to have a bunch of stupid things that people gave me. If they wouldn't have given my these things, I could probably use truck stops and creeks to bathe in but I can't just leave behind the little statues that my dead Aunt Mamie gave me. That's against ALL the rules.

Even if I think about food, any decent cooking spot would require some degree of permanence so I'd have to have, at the very least, a Little House on the Prairie and then I might as well go ahead and get an apartment because I don't think prairie houses have electricity. I could wander from place to place like the kung fu guy but not without a nice pot of coffee first thing in the morning and when I wake up, I'm not in the mood to deal with campfires. So, it seems as though I really need to have, at the very least, a hotel room to live in if I'm to get my morning cuppa as easily as possible.

Oh, at my age, I have to consider the fact that I could die in any apartment that I live in. So when I look at the carpet, the closet space and the access to that wonderful southern California freeway system, I also have to see if the bedroom is one that I could comfortably die in. I wouldn't want to have a Denny's outside the window of my death room nor would I want to die next to a McDonald's. I want the people carting my body off to be paying attention to what they're doing. If one of them starts to think about a Grand Slam or that new Angus Burger with swiss cheese and mushrooms, they could drop my carcass and I probably wouldn't land in a complimentary position.

Also, my daughter seems to like hardwood floors but to me they're simply a manner of death. I could slip on one of those suckers, break a hip, go to a nursing home and die of pneumonia. For the same reason, I have to consider things like stairs, shower stalls and new linoleum.

One other thing about this new apartment...and I will be explaining it to my daughter today...this will be OUR apartment. I am currently in HER apartment. She never fails to let that be known and I can barely take a step without incurring her wrath. I either put the cups in the wrong place, ate all the cheese or left a towel on the floor while I was getting dressed after a shower. I would have picked the towel up after I was dressed, but I was naked and more concerned with the other chick in the bathroom than the towel on the floor. Anyway, it will be known that a new apartment means that there's a new sheriff in town and I come with my own way of doing things and a much larger supply of anger and bitterness to tap into. Put that into your toaster and toast it.