So my apartment has three of the seventy qualities I require in a good apartment, namely big windows (lots of light), easy access to a 12-mile bike path, and multiple levels so that my cats may stampede up and down the stairs like Abbott and Costello on cocaine. The remaining qualities—a dishwasher, air-conditioning, not being next door to people who spend every waking moment in their backyard drinking and brawling—these qualities my apartment does not have. Thus, I’m on the hunt for another. This is a chore. The average apartment in my area is approximately $300 a month more than I can afford. The ones that I can afford, I do not want to move to. An apartment around here priced at $600 a month is generally code for “Herein lies an un-air-conditioned former opium den with vile carpeting, missing window panes and the original furnace, stove, toilet and sink from 1948.” Oh, I could find a snappy little studio apartment for that amount, a place probably with central air and nice oak floors and everything, but I would pay the real price for the apartment every single day as my two cats buzzed around me like wasps in a nest I was beating with a stick.

And that’s another thing: cats. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find an apartment that permits cats? Approximately as difficult as it is to find a place that allows camels. Racing camels. A place that allows camel races to take place every night along with betting. Yes, you would think I was trying to transform any given apartment into a camel race track complete with grandstand and liquor sales, from the way some landlords react to my question about cats. Granted, my two cats are about as destructive as living things can be, given twenty-four-hour days, but the landlords don’t know that they’ve ruined everything from a bicycle seat to paperback books to a beautiful blue sofa by clawing them to bits/barfing on them.  

Then there’s the problem of my roommate situation, i.e. my brother. Nothing against my brother, but I’m about to turn thirty-two, and certain things are less acceptable as you traverse the grim, lonely path into your mid-thirties. I could sort of understand it if I were in my mid-forties, recently divorced and out of a job or something, but I’m young (sort of) and have my whole life ahead of me, and I’m way too young/old to be kept up at night by the endless tromping up and down the stairs of my sibling.

Though I suppose this is all just in preparation for the coming wave of poverty that will force Americans to live like folks in other countries have been doing for years—i.e. fourteen extended family members in a small hut. Frankly, I don’t know how they do it, but I guarantee I would be the surliest human being alive if forced to share a hut with my family, much less a sprawling forty-acre estate. Which is sort of what I’m looking for in an apartment, by the way—forty-acre estate, sans family members, waterfront view. Know of any good ones for $600 a month?