I used to be embarrassed about how loud the furnace and air were in my old house. It was so loud. "My friends' furnaces are not nearly as loud as mine," I'd say to myself. Sitting outside in the summer was the worst because the air conditioning unit was so loud we could barely hear each other speak while it was running. I was embarrassed by the unfinished laundry room and the jacuzzi in the basement bathroom that remained forever uninstalled. Where were my parents even going to put it? We ended up selling it before we moved.
We lived in an older neighbourhood. Our bungalow was 799 square feet and was built in the early 1950s. I painted my bedroom two different shades of dark grey and my baseboards a mixture of not-quite-black and not-quite-brown. Our bathroom was the size of a closet; the walls were dark red and persistently mouldy. We used bathroom-specific paint, but it never worked the way it should’ve. I have frequent dreams about that bathroom. I'm usually just showering or going pee in them, but I'm unhappy because it’s mouldy, cluttered and red. Sometimes in my dreams, other people need to use my bathroom, and I’m nervous about them seeing the black spots on the wall and ceiling, and the hard water stains in the toilet bowl. I also grew up under the rule: if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down, so I was always scared no one would flush when company was over.
I was set to start kindergarten the year we moved into that house. I have a clear memory of the day we moved in. I remember sprawling out on the living room floor with all four of my Ninja Turtle toys. I excitedly threw them across the room and bathed in the emptiness of our new house.
I loved that house for a very long time. We lived in it for 14 years before we decided to size up and move to a better neighbourhood. Our neighbours were all deranged, which is partly why we wanted to move.
We got a new next-door neighbour shortly before we moved out. He had a German Shepard and he had just gotten out of prison for killing someone. He and my dad hit it off instantly.
The neighbours directly across the street were deranged in a mostly non-murderous way. They were a family with two sons, and I used to spend a lot of time with them. I desperately wanted to be one of the boys (plus, I had an affinity with Sam Puckett from iCarly. I loved her gruffness. I thought she was hilarious and cool, so I tried to be like her). I think this made everyone hate me, now that I look back. I wanted to shoot BB guns and play Tony Hawk Underground. I wanted to skateboard and throw a football around. I wanted to be like them. They didn't like me, though. I didn't like them either, to be honest. They'd dare me to walk across the street into traffic with my eyes closed, and they'd knock the wind out of me by chucking footballs directly into my stomach. One time, my family went over to their house for dinner and I felt so nauseous, I puked into my hand and a little bit onto the dinner table. "Ew! Gross!," the older boy exclaimed. I puked a bit more in their bathroom and left shortly after.
Side thought: I puked a lot when I was younger - at every birthday party, Thanksgiving, and at odd events like dinner with our neighbours. Maybe I’ll dive into that sometime.
I tried coffee for the first time on their front steps. The younger boy let me try some of his; it was vanilla-flavoured. I was shocked that he drank coffee at our age, and I knew my mom liked it so I wanted to get into it. I didn't drink it again until I was in high school. It was a social thing for me, an adult thing I could share with my mom. I didn’t know why people liked it - it was awful. But I drank it every morning with Mom once I could stomach the taste.
One of our other neighbours, whom I'll call John, lived in a bubble - literally. He built a massive, plastic structure around his front yard that resembled a bubble and he had cameras everywhere. "Bubble Boy," my dad would call him. Dad loved him because they'd party together, and I hated him because they'd party together.
I think John meant well most of the time, but it was hard to tell. He had a spy pen that he'd keep in his shirt pocket. My parents were freaked out by it at first, but they stopped caring after a while. He'd yell something to me across the street every time I’d walk to school. One time at Halloween, he yelled, "Hey, Smashing Pumpkins!" to me and pointed at a crushed pumpkin on the sidewalk. He liked music like that. He was a bit younger than my parents, so he was into 80's and 90's music. My parents were into stuff from the 60's and 70's. They argued a lot about what to play at their bonfire parties. John liked In The Air Tonight and my parents liked You Can't Always Get What You Want. My dad always got what he wanted, though.
I didn’t grow up in a musical family. My parents played the same rotation of songs every time they partied, and they partied hard: Tiny Dancer. Gimme Shelter. Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting. Sympathy For The Devil. American Woman. Rocket Man. Simple Man.
My brother illegally downloaded a bunch of songs onto my MP3 player for me when I was in elementary school. Two of those songs were Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird and Simple Man. I think he put them on as a joke, but I loved Simple Man because I thought Robert Pattinson sang it.
Mama told me when I was young
"Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say
And if you do this it'll help you
Some sunny day"
At eight or nine years old, I adored Twilight, and I knew he sang one of the songs on the soundtrack. I had it in my head that Simple Man was the song he sang in the movie. I remember one time I was walking into the grocery store with my parents while listening to music on my MP3. I skipped to Simple Man and handed one of my earbuds to my mom. “Listen to this, Mom,” I said, “it’s Edward from Twilight.”
My brother also put Shots by LMFAO ft. Lil Jon onto my MP3. I listened to it every day until my sister gave me her old iPhone and an iTunes gift card.
I grew to hate the songs my parents would party to. The Rolling Stones made me anxious and Elton John depressed me. I still can’t listen to classic rock without attaching it to those times in my childhood. Simple Man was mine, though. It was mine to claim.
I also thought my family’s pastor was in Kings of Leon, but I’ll save that for another time.
John played drums and guitar in his dirty, cluttered house. I had only been in it one time and it reeked of cigarette smoke and Lucky Lager. It was an old bungalow like ours, but it was messy and the furniture layout made no sense to me. Why is the dining table there? What is all this stuff? He invited me and my parents over a lot, but his house made me anxious, so I never joined them again after that one time. John was skinny and tall, and he hiked his sweatpants nearly up to his chest. He looked as if Steven Tyler wasn't famous, like if he was a janitor at a junior high.
A few years before we moved, he and my dad had a falling out for whatever reason. I guess my dad was trying to clean up his act and he knew John was a weird guy. They stopped hanging out and my life was somewhat rid of him.
Our other next-door neighbours stole our cat. Her name was Daisy and she was a strong, grey girl with a lot of baggage. She became traumatized after surviving an owl attack. She fought it off with all the might a kitty could have, but she was never the same after. She became weary and mean. I remember telling someone this story once and they said, “I don’t blame her. I’d be mean, too.” I don’t blame her either - I never have. I don’t remember what she was like before the incident, I just remember how much I thought she hated me. One evening she ran out of the house, and according to my parents, our neighbours found her and took her in.
Our new neighbours are pretty neutral. In our new neighbourhood, we are the deranged ones. I learnt that you can take the family out of the kookiness but you can’t take the kookiness out of the family. My parents still try to find drama everywhere. My dad often stares out the living room window and says, “There’s somethin’ weird going on out there…”
“What do you mean?” I’ll reply.
“That person has been sitting in that car for 20 minutes.”
“I think they’re just waiting for someone. It’s really not weird at all.”
“It’s weird…Maybe it’s drugs?”
And then he will return to his day.
My parents' new house has two sinks in our huge bathroom that we can't keep clean. The grout between the floor tiles is turning black, and the bathtub has a copper-coloured mould growing in the caulking. The garbage is always full and the mirrors are covered in toothpaste spots. We quickly learned that double the size means double the mess and that bigger does not always mean better.
I moved out of my parents’ new place two years after we moved in. I still go back and forth, though, to save money. I always leave their place with bags of random groceries. On a normal day, I’ll leave with some potatoes, a box of Pasta Roni, a few bananas, and around three slices of fresh bread to have with my coffee in the mornings.
Forget your lust for the rich man's gold
All that you need is in your soul
And you can do this, oh, baby, if you try
All that I want for you, my son, is to be satisfied
Sometimes I can’t stand the thought of being alone, but I recently realized how much I enjoy it when I’m in the right mood. I had the house to myself while my roommates travelled Europe for a month. During that month, I caught myself staring out my bedroom window a few times when I was bored, looking for drama in the neighbourhood. The most action I saw was my neighbour, Budley, greeting the mailperson with a stick in his mouth. The neighbourhood I live in with my roommates is calm. There are no bubbles, cat thieves, murderers (that I know of,) or villainous little boys who thrive on schadenfreude. It’s silent. It’s what I’ve been waiting for. It’s simple.
I’m trying to live a quiet, stable life while balancing my job, my relationship, my band, my relationship with myself and my friends, and my relationship with my family. I’m able to (somewhat) control my environment, and I never have to listen to classic rock if I don’t want to. I don’t need to attach myself to the dirtiness anymore. Mould grows everywhere, even in the bathroom I share with my roommates, but it’s different. It doesn’t bother me as much.
I like flushing my pee. I like being alone. I like a clean house. I like having normal neighbours - I’m a simple lady. I drink my coffee alone in the mornings while eating Mom’s fresh bread. She’s with me when she’s not with me.
Then sometimes I’ll sleep over at her place and we will have our morning coffee and toast together.
Imagine you’re lying in bed and it’s a school night. You just watched the music video for Mine by Taylor Swift and you’re crying uncontrollably (it still makes you cry.) Your bedroom window overlooks your backyard, and there are holes in your window screen from the Virginia Creeper that aggressively grows on the side of your house. A massive ornamental apple tree also grows in the middle of your backyard. You love it. You used to climb it when you were small. This collection of songs blasts on repeat all night while your parents party in the backyard, and you’re so annoyed and anxious that you want to rip your hair out. You don’t know that one day you will be living with your friends in a part of town you’ve never been to before, and your Saturday nights will be exactly the way you want them to be. Your furnace is quiet. Your neighbours are nice. You are 22.