The "Like An Animal In The Zoo" Incident Of 2016
This Is How We Live Now—In An Apartment!
I have lived in apartments approximately fifty percent of my adult life. K.L. Rockwell and I have also owned two homes and rented a third. Okay, she “owned” them, but I got to live there.
I can easily sum up my feelings on house livin’ vs. apartment livin’:
I LOVE living in apartments.
I HATE owning homes.
Some of us are owners, and some of us are renters. I’m a renter, and I’m okay with that.
Apartments create a community. A community where we avoid each other like the plague. Where we live next to one another, look out the peepholes, wait for our neighbors to leave, and THEN we leave. It’s all very congenial.
If we happen to cross paths on the stairs, we smile, attempt a nicety, and be on our way.
I know you New Yorkers and big city folks know all this. BUT, little city folks often do not. Apartments are strange and mysterious places to many of them.
If you live in an apartment in a small town such as Newport, people will feel sorry for you. They will say, “Maybe one day, you can be like us and have a house!”
Umm. No thanks.
I prefer my rules, regulations, quiet, and appliances that actually work.
Plus, I can’t do home maintenance. I come from a long line of crappy home owners. My father couldn’t do home maintenance, his father couldn’t do home maintenance, and neither could my great-great grandfather. It’s a curse.
But this isn’t about that.
The Animal In A Zoo Incident Of 2016
In 2016, we lived in Covallis, Oregon, in a really nice apartment. It was part of a mid-sized complex of freestanding buildings.
Corvallis is a college town of around 60,000 people, home to Oregon State University. Most of our neighbors were from China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. There’s a big contingent of foreign students. (We were subjected to some of the best smelling food in the world while I was making Tater-Tot Hotdish.)
The apartment complex had a pool, workout room, was up in the woods, and was only like $1400 a month for a big two-bedroom.
Pretty sweet. Nice and quiet. I loved it.
As people do in college towns, our neighbors came and went. U-hauls were a regular sight. There weren’t many long-term residents at The Oaks.
One late summer day, when the birds were chirping and the temperature hovered around seventy-two degrees, in late 2016, there was suddenly a ruckus outside.
There’s nothing we apartment dwellers love more than a ruckus. You know, some entertainment.
And then… YELLING!
Nasty yelling.
We didn’t get much yelling at this place. It was usually pretty quiet.
So, K.L. Rockwell, Fineas Rockwell and I crawled over to the open window and looked out on the parking lot. We loved to spy.
There sat a nice Jeep pulling a U-Haul trailer. The kind we pulled over the Rockies when we moved to Corvallis.
And there was also a guy standing there YELLING, apparently to nobody, and pulling at his hair.
At first we couldn’t make out what he was saying.
And then, like the one lonely violin note that rises above the orchestra in Mahler’s 3rd Symphony… we heard it:
Here’s what we witnessed him shout:
“I can’t live like this! I can’t live like this! In an APARTMENT!”
“I can’t live…” wait for it… “I can’t live LIKE AN ANIMAL IN THE ZOO!”
He threw his hands in the air. He cried. He couldn’t believe he was going to have to live like the rest of us.
“Like an animal in the zoo.” (his words)
This guy must’ve been living in some kind of sweet McMansion in Woodbury or something before moving out to Oregon and realizing that the most he could afford for $1500 a month was one of these tiny little 1300 square foot apartments.
I yelled out the window, “Shut the FK up!”
He didn’t.
He kept going.
He shouted to the heavens! “This is how we live now! Like Animals in the Zoo!!”
He seemed to be a pretty loquacious fellow.
His poor wife, who we found out later, was pregnant, tried to calm this guy down. He pushed her away.
We discussed calling the police.
His wife was crying.
He was crying.
He just couldn’t live… “Like an animal in the zoo. That’s how he lives now. Like an animal in the zoo!”
After about thirty minutes of his ranting and raving, various residents screaming out the window for him to shut the fk up… he finally did.
He cried and moped and went into his brand spanking new apartment.
His cage.
Like an animal…
… in the zoo.
Over the next year, everytime we saw this guy, we giggled.
And of course, we would say, “There he is, the poor man, living… like an animal… in the zoo!”
I wish I were making this up because I think he was a professor at Oregon State University.
PS: I have also written a song called, “Like An Animal In The Zoo,” which I will be releasing soon.
Best of both worlds - condo living! My “ animals” close-by for friendship and help… and not having to mow a lawn or shovel that four letter word - SNOW.
I yelled out the window, “Shut the FK up!”
😂