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I want to talk about where my apartment is located because that's the first thing you'd notice if you were coming to visit me. It's in South Boston, which some people call Southie. But I call it SoBo.
Just kidding. That would be ridiculous.
If you were driving to my apartment from Russia, you would need a car that was also a boat (like the ones they use for Duck Tours) to ford the Beiring Streit, and then you would take Interstate 90 all the way into South Boston. You would head south on some street (I forget the name), then west on Broadway. As you drove up Broadway, you'd pass Al's Liquors, which is where I go to buy $5.99 bottles of merlot when we're having dinner guests. When I get home I peel off the price stickers and tell the guests that they're drinking an $8.99 bottle of merlot, which leads to the following exchange:
Them: That's not very impressive.
Me: I think it' s impressive.
Them: What would be impressive is if you bought a twenty dollar bottle of wine.
Me: Well, it's definitely more impressive than if I bought a bottle of wine for five dollars and ninety-nine cents.
Them: I guess.
And at that point I have won.
Incidentally, the first place I ever got arrested was also called Al's, and it was also a liquor store, but it was on Martha's Vineyard. I was nineteen years old and I was trying to buy a 30 rack of Busch Light with a fake ID. The police arrested me and made me serve forty minutes of hard time in the local jail. I'm pretty sure that the two Als are different people though. If it were a franchise, "Al's" would probably be written in the same font (it isn't), and they would have other locations besides South Boston and Martha's Vineyard (they don't. At least not in my opinion.)
Our building is beige and there's a sign for Sun Shine Tanning. We don't own or manage the tanning salon. Somebody else does.
One of the first things people ask me and my roommate, Dods, when they enter our apartment is, "How come you guys aren't more tan?"
I guess they ask that question because we live above Sun Shine Tanning, but we always respond, "Because we don't do that type of thing."
We also don't:
-Go to barber shops that charge more than 18 dollars
-Get manicures
-Wax each other
-Go to salons that say "unisex," because what is unisex anyway? (It sounds gross, like someone who has a penis and a vagina and is wearing a unitard. (By the way, if you think it's impossible for someone to have cameltoe and a penis bulge at the same time, you're wrong. When I was skiing with my dad in January, we had to put on harnesses in case we fell into a crevasse, and my dad's harness made it look like he had a cameltoed penis bulge. But don't worry. The cameltoe was just the crease made by his fly, and the bulge was just extra snowpant fabric. (I hope.)))
Across from our apartment is a row of condominiums that look very nice but are actually what people in cities call, "the projects." That's what people who don't have much money live in. I think the projects used to be ugly, but somebody painted them all different colors and made them look like classy townhouses. Anyone who visits us thinks they're high-rent. But they're not. They're like Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, which looks really nice, but if you were to punch it, you would find out that it's plastic and hollow inside. The projects are the same way, except they're not plastic and there are actual people inside, and they would wonder why you were punching their house. Then you would really be in trouble.
If you keep driving west on Broadway, past our apartment, you'll come to a bridge, which goes over a narrow river that supplies Boston Harbor with a good portion of the pollution it needs to stay porpoise-free. On the other side of the bridge is a highway underpass that Zagat recently named the Number One Locale in Boston to Relax and Drink an Entire Handle of Zhenka Vodka, Then Use That Handle as a Pillow When You Pass Out in a Pool of Your Own Urine and/or Vomit. Boston Magazine also named the underpass the Number One Underpass to Smoke a Little Crack and Just Escape for an Hour or Two.
The reason this particular patch of shade is so popular is that it lies just across Albany Street from the Pine Street Inn, one of the state's largest homeless shelters. The Pine Street Inn does an excellent job of rehabilitating homeless people and getting them off the streets, but it also does an excellent job of concentrating the city's crazy people in a neighborhood that sits directly in between my apartment and my job.
So I see some weirdos roaming around. The other day I saw a guy walking backwards over the 4th Street Bridge for no reason. Unless you're driving a rowboat or practicing the moon walk, I don't think you should ever walk backwards because you never know when you'll crash into a chalkboard and get chalk on you back, and if someone has written 22A on the board, you'll have ASS on your back because the chalk would rub off backwards, and a 2 kind of looks like a reverse S.
And the other day I was walking home from work and a kid dressed all in black, with a hoodie covering his head, turned to me, and I thought I was going to have to wrestle him or something, but instead he said, "What day do we change our clocks?" which was probably the most bizarre thing he ever could have asked me. I told him March 21st, but I'm pretty sure that's not right.
If you want to experience night life in Southie, you can go to one of many bars, all of which play non-stop U2, or on Friday and Saturday nights, hire a band to play non-stop U2 covers. I actually welcome the opportunity to listen to U2 in bars because whenever "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" is played, I can use the line, "Oh, wait. Nevermind. There you are. I found what I was looking for. Were you here all along? Because I was singing this song - actually for quite a while - about looking all over for something I couldn't find, and if you were standing here the entire time, I'd feel like an idiot."
So that's my neighborhood. Of course I'm leaving out all aspects of West Broadway (the gas lanterns and the tree lined sidewalks, for example) that make Southie so charming. We really do love it here. In fact, we're thinking of taking up tanning.
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