the architecture of humiliation: my closest brush (so far) with the penny-sit-up

The Victorian penny sit up will continue to be remembered as a modern, compassionate housing solution for the underclass. It can also be thought of as the barbarian precursor to the Japanese capsule hotel which from my native-American-influenced view of space is the prime example of what I call the architecture of humiliation. Frugal and dedicated Japanese commuters will disagree with me so let me direct those people to the imagery surrounding the Chinese coffin home.

However, the Victorians, Japanese and Chinese all have relative cultural homogeneity as a cushion to deal with these horrible “living” conditions. Here in my “first-world” Californian rendition of architectural humiliation, gentrification and multi-national migrations add additional chaos contributing to hard misery. Diversity can also be quite ugly when people sensitive to noise are living right under people who are not. There is no common, prefectural cultural common ground to shame people into harmony. There is just egotistical entitlement, a horrible democratization of despotism.

For over a half a decade I have suffered the worst “living” conditions of my life. For the first time in my Californian life, my ability to sleep has been threatened on a daily basis for years. My personal space has been invaded (mostly by sound) in broad daylight on a daily basis for years. All of this has devastated my life by a new kind of neighbor in an old kind of building.

This is my second apartment rental from this new kind of neighbor. This neighbor is “home” all of the time and this neighbor sleeps far less than eight hours a night. The toxicity of this person is empowered and literally amplified by the creaking wooden flooring she uses to transmit silence-piercing sounds from her body and her cheap-ass, rickety bed. I am literally tied to this hag of a person, just like what it must have felt to be a foreign stranger in a Victorian penny sit up tied to a bench, squeezed together with female ruffians.

These entitled, self-centered ruffians clearly would have been in a freestanding, craftsman-style house in more socialist, post-war times in America. Imagine these ruffians renting a capsule hotel but treating it like a private home? These are “people” that are unwilling to accept the fact that they are surrounded by strangers who are very, very willing to know nothing about them. This lack of reality TV coverage is not acceptable to these people. They want you to know about their “lives.” Gender-specifically, it has taken me way too long to figure out that some lonely women can force themselves on others but they do it in such a “brilliant” passive-aggressive way they can deny that it is even happening. These are the horrible things I am thinking about the woman that “lives” upstairs from me. Thanks to the architecture of humiliation, she “lives” right on top of me.

Our penny-sit-up apartments are one-bedroom boxes stacked on top each other, facing a busy street, blocking the traffic sounds for the actual homes behind us. Yet this entitled and generous woman has invited at least four people or more to spend the night for days at a time. This is quite illegal and our property management company was notified (by me)—and their response was a suggestion that I call the police—and a letter was sent to me requesting that I stop banging on the ceiling. I can tell you from experience that the police will not take action for sounds that are not clearly disturbing “the peace”: sounds that mostly travel vertically disturbing one person (especially when that one person is a Black man) is not disturbing the peace.

In a sadistic way, this woman knows she is torturing me and she clearly finds the abuse secretly delicious. Imagine, with your American racist ass (without regard for your skin color), what it must feel like for a poor little “white” woman to genuinely and deeply disturb a tall dark Black man by simply adjusting her position in her fucked up bed at five in the morning—or taking just a few steps repeatedly at 2am on a creaky floor for 20 minutes—or having a non-whispering conversation with another person at 6:30 in the morning knowing others can hear that shit—or by lifting weights at 9:30 pm and shaking the ceiling by letting the weights drop to the ground—or by adopting a cat that runs across my ceiling all day—or by playing bass-heavy music from the same four songs for hours at a time—or by sitting a mobile phone on my ceiling and leaving it on vibrate for a call in the middle of the night.

Yes, this woman had carpet put down in her bedroom in a pathetic attempt to sound-insulate herself. Yes, this woman will move her bass-heavy speakers around to try to reduce the torture. Yes, this woman will not play her shitty music after 10pm (most of the time)—but that does not stop her from pacing the floor after 10pm to do whatever the fuck she should have done before 10pm. She knows none of these “mitigating” things are working. She is simply going through the motions to try to make “an effort” for some kind of conscience she might have. I am clearly not the first downstairs neighbor she has tortured. The only way to “defeat” this hag-bitch is to be just as barbaric as she is, inviting more quasi-homeless people than she does, playing louder music with a system bigger than hers, sleeping even less hours than she sleeps. Yes, this shitty white woman builds bad neighborhoods—and she is aided in no small part by cheap, wooden, Californian housing: the architecture of humiliation.

I refuse to be as barbaric as she is and will forever be. I will not “get in her face” and complain about what kind of person she actually is in a narcissistic effort to change the behavior of a grown-ass, rapidly-aging hag. She would actually like such attention from men like me. Now what I did do (by chance) was ‘wait’ until her “man” was disturbing me with his floor-and-bed-creaking visitations at 4am. All I did to stop that disturbance on that particular night-early-morning was ring her doorbell (and, yes, I was waiting for him to answer the door but nobody answered because that is the way of bitchcraft—the message I was trying to send to her is that I do not want to see or speak to your monkey ass but I am not too timid to speak to your “boyfriend”). But after I “stopped” the disturbance, I could not get back to sleep. Which means, effectively, she “wins.” By the way, I learned something that night: I could protest against her by not disturbing “the peace”: I did not bang on her door screaming (which most of you reading this shit definitely would have); I just rang her doorbell. Did they hear the doorbell? All I know is that the creaking stopped—and that is how I know she knows what kind of shitty piece of shit she will forever be.

Do you know how delicious it must be for such a lonely white-liberal, ugly-ass maiden to possibly have two dark-skinned men “fighting over her” in the middle of the night? Yes, kids, her boyfriend-man-visitor is like some reggae dude. Maybe more than one. No well-trained racist-based thinking would ever consider that at least one of these dark-skinned men never ever wanted know she even existed let alone “fight over her.” But now this lonely old hag came exquisitely close to letting fly the fantasy of the possibility. (I can think of few so-called black adult women who will forever misread what I am trying to say in this paragraph, desperately looking for some deep complex in spite of my efforts to keep my meaning on the surface and quite simple.) Now confuse this white-lady fighting fantasy with the self-image of the same white maiden that appears so charitable to the colored less fortunate (and a few adult white kids that might be the hag-lady’s children), all crowding into her shitty one-bedroom apartment just outside of Santa Monica. Of course you don’t want me to be “right” about her: you would have to deal with the realization of being trapped in a bitch-made world.

I remind you, reader, I call this behavior from a female tenant new because most of my lady neighbors in my adult life were taken away from where they “live” to make noise in the middle of the night somewhere else. Most of my lady neighbors took vacations and were gone weeks at a time. Not his hag, folks. Not this hag. She clearly has low-budget “boyfriends” who have no trouble engaging in intercourse in front of an audience behind thin screens of acoustic privacy. Sorry, but this is caveman shit, folks. Straight up reggae caveman shit. This aging lady is clearly fighting for her “life.” She refuses to accept her fucked up “living” situation at my expense. Never in my “life” has white oppression been so literal and intimate: she is literally down-pressing on my dented ceiling.

I remind you, reader, that this is my second new-neighbor experience. Moving away in a fit anger does not solve the problem. Los Angeles is full of wooden buildings, dressed up as multi-family dwellings—and Los Angeles is full of interstate and international migrants refusing to give up on their fucked up dreams of gig-economy pseudo-prosperity. Without going into too much more detail, I have stayed tied to my current shitty penny sit up for over half a decade because of my daughter. My current known “solution” to my housing problem when integrated into my other fucked up problems will increase monthly expenses by at least $1000.

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