2006-08-19 - 7:38 p.m.
Based on what happened to me these past couple of days, I figured out what would happen if a group of people got together and went on a colonizing mission to some other planet or galaxy a la Battlestar Galactica--something would die in some hidden conduit or pipe, or some forgotten food store would rot, or some minor sewer line would back up somewhere and due to the complicated immensity of this city-size space ship, nobody would be able to find it. The entire closed-system space ship air supply would stink worse and worse without relief until finally the people, unable to escape, would go crazy and everybody would kill everybody. End of mission.
You think that is far-fetched? I think it is utterly certain.
I've been complaining about this apartment for as long as I have been living in it, but so far, living here has been just a tiny bit better than my perceived effort and expense of moving, so I put up with it the best I can. My plan for improvement in my living condition does not include moving to yet another apartment. I've done that too much and no longer have any tolerance for it. I have to have a house of my own, sitting on some land. I've done nothing but talk and write about that for years, yet there still is no solution that I have discovered short of moving AWAY to another entirely different city, state, and climate, and with a unique job that I like HERE, that's too much of a trade off. So I continue to suffer ad nauseum with this place that has no room to put anything, no room to do anything.
And a place this cramped, crowded, and cluttered, is all but impossible to keep clean. Even something simple like vaccuuming the carpet is really an entire weekend's work, as virtually every square foot of floor space has something on it.
Now that you've got the idea of me as being a pig, let's now make it worse.
This apartment would be reasonably tolerable if it weren't for the kitchen. I insist that this building was never built to be an apartment house. I think, based on its serious age and also its good commercial location, only two major streets away from "Gower Gulch", one of the early film-making regions of Los Angeles, that it was built as a hotel. Either that, or temporary studio housing for performers and crew when they were on location. When I lived in Los Angeles before, I lived in the Villa Elaine, which in its original incarnation, prior to becoming a "home of transsexuals, transvestites, and drug addicts" as described by some writers, also mentioned here at the linked site, had been built as housing for movie stars and film crew when they came to Hollywood to film (at the time, filmmaking was still based in New York). So there's a precedent for that sort of thing.
By the way, that low-life description of the Villa Elaine is an exaggeration. Mostly the place was just "bohemian," and a home for all sorts of artist and would-be artist types. I lived there for many years, in one of the gorgeous brick, gardened, ground-floor, two-story townhouses, and apparently stars like Bella Lugosi, Mae West, and Milton Berle had lived in my very apartment in its early days. The current more "low" lives lived in the former "film crew" quarters upstairs, which weren't anything like the townhouses for the movie stars. And there was a transvestite, but only one, and there was a transsexual (who actually showed me her new, surgically-created vagina), but only one.
And not so many drug addicts as drug dealers (a different economic class), including one guy who apparently was some kind of drug kingpin. He invited me and my roommate to a birthday party that was being given for him (and hundreds of his closet friends!) in an airplane hanger down at the airport, and I have never, I mean never before or since been to a party like that! The several bands of live music, the refrigerator-size speakers placed everywhere throughout this immense airplane hanger, the people who arrived in Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces dressed to the nines, this guy really was something and he had some kind of heavy duty THUG power (yet was as nice as could be). This was no illusion. And he lived at the Villa Elaine like I did.
Okay, so much for the sojourn. I think my current apartment was built as a fairly luxurious hotel (that was then), with the rooms all being suites. The kitchens that we currently have were obviously added as an after-thought, they could NOT have been made as part of the original design. They are completely WRONG as to dimensions and convenient set-up for cooking. Basically, they are just largish rooms (like small bedrooms), with a kind of sink and counter unit built in against one wall, a small cabinet screwed up onto another wall, and a refrigerator and a gas stove placed up against the wall opposite the sink. Then a dinette table and two chairs was put in the middle of the room in the way of everything. There is absolutely no counter in the vicinity of the refrigerator and the stove, plus they are too far away from the sink and the only counter that exists in there. Basically, to cook anything requires constant crossing back and forth across this room in a very inefficient and exhausting manner.
Despite the fact that I have been here for six years or so, I feel that it is the kind of place good for arriving with only one suitcase, and staying no more than a couple of months, just enough to get settled into your Hollywood career (if it is going to happen), and then moving out into something better. But as for me, I tried to move everything I owned in, which was such a nightmare that I vowed i was never moving again except into a house of my own. And I have suffered ever since.
Lately, something has been happening with the refrigerator in which it rains moisture inside of it. This moisture builds up and floods the food crisper pan at the bottom, which makes it useless to me, as I don't want to eat anything that has been floating in a drawer full of water. Also, this water falls on top of and through the packages of meat, such as steaks, ground beef, or chicken, and carries all that bloody mess down into this same crisper pan. Great big yuck.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that this water was now flowing out from underneath the refrigerator. What could be seen was a blackish liquid. Very disconcerting. I'd tried to sponge it up, but it would be replenished again in a couple of days.
I did some Internet research to see if I could figure out what was causing this interior rain, and the diagnosis was that maybe some kind of drain tube inside got frozen shut or blocked. Of course, I have no idea where that drain tube is supposed to empty when it isn't blocked; as I said, this refrigerator is simply standing there in the corner of this room, not built in in any way.
I figured some day once I felt like I had enough energy to tackle the task, I would wrestle that heavy refrigerator away from the wall and out into the room so that I could inspect all the way around it. Of course, to do this would require quite a lot of moving things out the way first. This was going to be a big job, and not something I was eager to do. In fact, I did not do it for weeks. The flow of water seemed to have stopped, or at least slowed down. What remained was a dried up black mass, which I didn't bother to try to clean up, planning to do a more thorough cleaning of the area later. I have tolerated so much, so what's the difference with one more problem?
However, two days ago, I came into the apartment one afternoon and it had a distinct, unpleasant smell, kind of like sewage that had backed up. What was the source of this smell? I really couldn't tell. I smelled all around the bathroom, a likely place for a smell like that, but I couldn't detect anything. The smell increased more toward the kitchen, but again, smelling all around in the kitchen didn't yield much, either, although it definitely did seem like the KITCHEN was the source of the smell. Strangely enough, the smell seemed to be coming from the sink drain, although the smell there was not so intense as to make this definite. Since this smelled like sewer gas, I figured it HAD to be coming up from drain pipe, and thus the sink seemed like the guilty party.
However, once again, Internet research kind of nixed that. Unless something is leaking underneath the sink (and I saw nothing like that), the trap, which is the U-crook in the drain pipe, is supposed to remain full of water (due to the force of gravity) and thus this water serves to block any sewer gasses that otherwise could come up from the sewer far below. However, just to make sure there weren't any blockages, I poured Liquid Plumber down both the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink. The kitchen sink drained fine anyway, but the bathroom sink had been very slow, and this fixed that. However, the odor remained.
I even was smart enough to stopper up the sink with a layer of water to serve as a second "trap" and kept it like that all night as a test. I had a dream last night that the odor problem had been miraculously solved (that's how much it had been bothering me, that I even had a dream about it), but when I actually woke up, the dream had not come true. The kitchen stank as much as it ever did.
Logic told me that the only obvious thing that was wrong (and different) was the blackish-water under the refrigerator. It probably seems that should have been the first thing I would have suspected, except my smell-test didn't discover the odor to be very intense over there. And anyway, this smelled like sewer gas, not rotting food.
I realize, though, how poor westernized man is at using the sense of smell. Basically, we have become desensitized to odors, mostly masking them. I have heard of Asian mothers who can diagnose their children's sicknesses by smelling them, and I have long been fascinated by something I read once, that Australian Aborigines can smell water. I reasoned that other than air, water is the most important substance for humans to find, so it would make sense for us to be able to sniff out its location, but we can't. I wonder how different out lives would be if we could smell as well as our cats and dogs can?
So today, finally, I tackled the refrigerator issue. And yes, it was a lot of hard work and took a long time. I managed to get it out of its location and completely cleaned it all around, top, all four sides, and inside. I also, with a great deal of effort, got that floor underneath it clean and free of water. Right now, that space underneath the refrigerator is the cleanest place in the whole apartment!
Unfortunately, I found nothing that looked like a drain tube that had been plugged up, but I had the refrigerator off for a couple of hours while I did all this work, plus I lowered the temperature settings a notch, so maybe whatever was plugged up unplugged itself.
The whole time I was doing this clean-up, I didn't really smell anything bad, but I kept convincing myself that anything black like this that most likely contained blood and other particles from the meat that it had washed through would HAVE to exude some kind of organic scent. Rotten meat, sewer gas, I don't know, there must be a similarity, there.
I'm surprised at how dangerous it all was back there. The refrigerator is simply plugged into an extension cord and the extension cord is plugged into wall socket, like a lamp. The extension cord socket where the refrigerator cord is plugged into is also right next to the gas valve where the gas for the stove comes out of the wall. And the whole mess was in the water. That I didn't happen to get electrocuted, or some spark from the electrical socket never did ignite any gas from the pipe or valve, could be some indication that I am supposed to live a little bit longer. (Either that, or it's just dumb luck.) This whole Mickey-Mouse set-up shows, again, what an after-thought this whole "kitchen" is.
Since there is no other electrical socket anywhere near the refrigerator, I have to still keep this arrangement of the extension cord. However, I happened to have on hand some press-on plastic hooks, so I used them to "hang" the electrical cords along the wall behind the refrigerator, four-feet up, which keeps them way above any more water that might still leak out, and also way above the gas valve.
Now everything is neat and clean and the whole refrigerator is sparkling and gorgeous inside and out, with all the food nicely arranged and convenient. But I don't know what I will do if I detect that smell again tomorrow (right now all I can smell is the cleanser I used), or I find more water leaking out. Maybe I'll say "fuck it all, sign me up for Battlestar Gallactica." Except I know what will ultimately happen in that closed situation. Is there ANY solution for mankind's problems? Running away or ignoring them doesn't work.
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