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This happened two weekends ago:

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHNT” this wasn’t the simple klaxon of the fire alarm from within my apartment, the one that I associate with the celebration of preparing bacon. This was the shrill whine of “the building’s on fire”. I rose, grabbed a blanket, grabbed my phone, grabbed my keys, put on my slippers and descended two stories to the sidewalk. Nothing appeared to be on fire. Good.

I walked back inside, saw that the alarm control panel on the ground floor said “BASEMENT” and “GROUND FAULT” and called the landlord to call the emergency person to call the staff person to ask them to turn the alarm off.

Me: The alarm’s going off.
Landlord: Is anything on fire?
Me: No. (Good question though)
Landlord: I don’t have the passcode.
Me: Ok. Please call when you get it.

The fire department arrived. Asked if anything was on fire, I said nope and a gaggle of Irishmen looked about. While they were, a vagrant asked me for a dollar to buy a donut. I was arguably more disheveled than he but he asked anyway. I said no and he shuffled off.

The fire department left, giving me permission to go back inside. I smiled and said thank you. They sheepishly apologized for their powerlessness.

Every pass code I’ve encountered has been four digits. My building number is four digits. Hm? “4-0-1-4, enter, silence alarm, huh.” So that worked and the alarm went off. I went back to bed and 30 minutes later the alarm went off again. I entered the code again and this time the alarm stayed off for maybe 15 seconds. I entered it again when LBM (large black man), one of the people who works in the ground floor furniture store saw me entering the code and asked “You got a leak up there?” I said no and he said “something’s leaking through the ceiling and dripping onto the power box for the alarm system, setting off the ground fault. He knocked loudly on my downstairs neighbor’s door. He then knocked very loudly and no one came.

The alarm went off again and I showed the store below how to turn it off. On my way back up the stairs, my downstairs neighbor popped his head out of his door. “You!” I yelled. He looked at me. “You need to go downstairs and talk to the store, now. Something’s leaking.” He closed his door and I thought he’d come back out with shoes. He didn’t. I told LBM that he was there. He walked up the stairs knocked on the door, then hammered on the door. Downstairs neighbor opened the door a sliver *wham* LBM becomes ABM (angry black man) and throws the door open and charges through my downstairs neighbor’s seeming opium den. He comes back yells “YOUR BATHROOM IS FLOODED. WHY DID IT NOT OCCUR TO YOU THAT COULD BE A PROBLEM. YOU HAVE SET OFF THE FIRE ALARM AND DESTROYED MY CEILING. WHY WAS A FLOODED BATHROOM NOT SOMETHING YOU THOUGHT WAS A PROBLEM.” My downstairs neighbor’s response was….a blank stair. “CLEAN IT THE FUCK UP OR YOU WILL REPLACE MY CEILING”. I assumed he meant “would be responsible for paying to have it redone” but on reflection he may have meant “I will use your corpse as a cork”.

I almost enjoy scenarios like this. I get to show competence. I figured out how to contact the building super from frantic googling of our property manager’s parent company, I figured out the fire code, and helped write “Angry Black Man and the Downstairs Neighbor Whose Shit Flooded”. That said. The quietude of a place to myself would be quite nice. So the search continues.

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My lunch location is determined in the following nested if statement:

IF I have a lunch engagement
THEN go to engagement

ELSE free food available work
THEN eat at work

ELSE in a rush
THEN eat with 3 blocks of work

ELSEIF eat at home

None of the first three conditions triggered much this week so I tended to eat at home. The other scenario whereby I’ll eat at work is if I’ve packed my own lunch. I am remarkably incapable of packing a lunch that doesn’t depend on salad greens and having none, I didn’t pack my lunch.

On the way from the subway station to my apartment which clocks in at maybe 100 feet, a fellow that looked like a homeless Dudley Moore started following me and asking me questions. I blocked him out and as I approached my front door, the mail man was there. He dropped the mail into the bottom metal box for my downstairs neighbor but then held off dropping mine in when the fellow following me said “Hello” to the mail man. The mail man stopped, somehow presumed the vagrant following me was somehow associated with me and gave him my mail. I slammed the door behind me and got halfway up the stairs before realizing what had just happened. I recalled there being two pieces and both were in glossy envelopes, statistically he is now in possession of a credit card pre-approval and a note to the previous tenant to pay a parking ticket in Seattle, Wa. I hope they make good rolling papers.

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I have two sets of room mates, the inanimate ones like my printer and treadmill and the animate ones like Mike and the mice that seem to enjoy the coat closet. Each follows their own set of graces but recently the activities of the mice has raised alarm. Normally, they scurry around. Sometimes, they traverse slowly the living room floor as I imagine one would cross an unstable ice shelf, slowly until given reason to run. They don’t seem to consume my food nor poop anywhere conspicuous so I’ve ignored them until last week.

A mouse was on the counter top (which was new) and I managed to trap it in a flower vase and drop it in a lot two blocks away. The next day, I saw another mouse on the countertop and this one, faster than his friend, leaped onto the surface of the range (it was off) and dashed up the oven vent into the oven proper. This cannot stand. In my own house, I must be able to arbitrarily activate my oven without trepidation. The idea of having a toasted member of Mus musculus trigger the smoke alarms in short order will trigger nightmares. So, I put out non-lethal traps.

They’re pretty straight forward. A clear-topped steel box into which one puts some food is reachable via spring-supported ramps. Once the mouse crosses the ramp, the door closes behind them. Splendid. But I have Philadelphia public school mice. They are incapable of using it. Tonight, I saw two mice on two separate occasions approach the trap, sniff at it. Enter the one-way entrance and not quite make it through. You can call them clever but I think them fools. I will be rid of them one way or another and may choose less non-lethal options next.

I wonder if this is what conquering colonial powers feel like. “Just integrate and follow rules and everything would be fine. But you don’t so we have to put heads on pikes”. Is there another way for us to come to terms? Am I missing something? Am I letting my values override theirs? They carry toxoplasma gondii which is categorically an unwelcome guests.

Please mice, embrace the cracker and learn to use doors so we may live together in peace.