Tag Archives: fire

Conveniently Inconvenient

1 May

May 1, 2021

Dear readers, Mr. and Mrs. Blog are once again looking for a place to live. For reasons I prefer to keep to myself, our old place was no longer meeting the needs of a pair of globetrotting iconoclasts such as ourselves (and our cat.)

(On a completely unrelated note, if anyone would be interested in buying a slightly singed and smoke damaged sofa, or some only partially burnt pants, drop me a note. Ha ha, I kid because it’s true.)

Well, as part of my brilliant plan to see every lousy house in Brooklyn, a plan which I pinky-swear is not at all motivated by my lack of money but only motivated by sense of ironic humor, I toured a home which, after some long thought and soul-searching, I declared was a house that people only move out of, not into.

But that’s not to say that it didn’t make me think. Below is a rough sketch of the layout of the last apartment I saw. It isn’t to scale, but it is close, and I did not exaggerate it one bit.

BEHOLD!

You are reading that correctly. The bathroom is in the kitchen, directly between the stove and the dining room table.

Now, if you spend as much time in the bathroom as I do my cat does, you can see the obvious convenience.

On the other hand, without being too graphic, there are some, um, “obvious drawbacks” to having the toilet three feet from your breakfast burrito. And speaking as someone who hosts lavish dinner parties, it can be unseemly when the Archbishop excuses himself from the Vichyssoise and the rest of the party can clearly hear his “business affairs.” Let alone smell them.

This is not the first time I have seen an apartment where the bathroom is uncomfortably close to the kitchen, but this is the first time the bathroom has actually been in the kitchen.

(Meanwhile, I have a singed loveseat to go with the burnt sofa, and there is a charred sport coat with most of the lapels still intact that matches the only partially burnt pants. I’ll toss in some waterlogged sneakers too.)

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A Tale of My Father: The (Almost) Burning Man

26 Mar

March 26, 2018

My father was a man who had quite a lot of stories, and I can vouch that they were true. Stuck in a rioting hoard of women on Black Friday, calling Macy’s to complain about their Santa at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, or refusing to take off in a small plane from the shortest runway of an airport high on cliff, he had some interesting things to talk about. 

This one is short, and though it happened long before I was born, it could have had a dramatic impact on my life.

When he was younger, my Dad-to-be and some of his friends took a road trip. The details of when and where aren’t important and I’ve long forgotten them if I even ever knew them. I want to say they were teenagers but knowing Dad and some of his friends, they were probably in their twenties but acting like teenagers. 

So they were driving and it was getting late and they stopped for gas. One guy got out and was pumping while Dad and the others took the opportunity to stretch their legs. Well, they guy pumping the gas thought it would be a hysterically funny joke to turn the nozzle on Dad and soak him with gasoline. And another friend thought it would be even more hysterically funny to chase Dad around the car with a lit cigarette lighter. 

You can see where this is going.

Almost, almost!

Natural selection nearly took a hard left turn that night but either Dad was a faster runner back then, or his cries of “what the FUCK are you doing?” got through this friend’s thick skull and Dad escaped immolation and lived to laugh about it later.

It’s a wonder I’m here to write about this.

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