I'd be happy to live anywhere else

19 November 2006

Yesterday's Globe had an article (link will probably rot tomorrow) about how Allston, Massachusetts has been honored by inclusion in The Absolutely Worst Places To Live In America. The book—whose author, a Boston College alumnus, can speak of Allston from personal experience—refers to my neighboring neighborhood as “a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor” full of “faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms”.

This reminded me of the first two years of my marriage, when we lived in a basement apartment at the corner of Allston and Kelton streets. One morning we woke up to find a pool of vomit on the path leading to our door; judging from the residue along the outer wall and windowsills, it had come from someone living four stories up. Unfortunately, I was unable to rouse the perpetrator by pounding on his back door (at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning), so I left a note of complaint with the landlord, complete with a diagram of the splatter marks. (To be fair, the landlord was letting us have the apartment at below market value, which, considering what market value was back then, was a sorely needed favor.)

I guess if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.

• Later: Immigration, then and now
• Earlier: Dept. of curious coincidences