The freedom of living in a terrible apartment in Canoga Park in the 1980s


My main goal in life has always been freedom. I wanted to get away from home as soon as I could, which I did at 18, and I've done all that I could to be independent since. And it included living in some terrible apartments, like the one I had in Canoga Park in the 1980s.

Nowadays, living in my suburban Phoenix house, it's hard for people to imagine that I ever lived in these horrible places. They turn up their noses at the neighborhoods where I was in my twenties, and wonder what I was doing there. And it was all about freedom.

I didn't want roommates, I've never been married. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted, when I wanted, to answer to no one. While I was going to college I lived alone in a little tiny converted garage, which I made pretty cozy, in a neighborhood that to this day is not exactly something to brag about. Everyone else I knew was living in better places, in better neighborhoods, but they weren't doing it alone. Living alone is expensive.

I still have bad dreams about how horrible my apartment in Canoga Park was. And although I'm standing in the kitchen in the photo, I very rarely ate there. I tried my best to clean up the place, but it was filthy. Cockroaches had taken over the complex, and even though I arranged to have the place sprayed regularly, and kept plenty of cans of roach spray around, I learned that so many of my neighbors were living in such filth that there was really no hope of my not living with roaches. They were everywhere, even crawling on the bed with me sometimes (the roaches, not my neighbors). So I wasn't really alone!

I had just gotten a good-paying corporate job in Woodland Hills, and my plan was to get out my apartment in Canoga Park as soon as possible, maybe move to Thousand Oaks, or Agoura. But the department where I worked was eliminated in 1989, and I was suddenly out of a job. I looked around me and decided that California wasn't going to work for me, so I moved back to Phoenix. I was fortunate enough to get a good corporate job there, and in my mid-thirties I bought the house where I still am today.

Freedom and independence have always been vitally important to me. Now, as I drift into the second half of what I figure with be over 100 years of life, I think about how hard I've fought for my freedom, and I will continue to do so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more