(8/18/08) high priced crappy rentals

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood before a big apartment building with a woman who was a real estate agent. The building was grey concrete and dirty, almost more like the backside of an industrial building than an apartment building. The building faced a big parking lot like a shopping mall parking lot. The sky was overcast in an electric grey way, almost unreal.

The woman told me I could have a one-room apartment here for $1,500 a month. I knew the place was small and kind of trashy, but I thought it was a good deal. I asked the woman, "Why is there so much vacancy in this place?"

The woman said, "Probably cause the folks are still cleaning up the guts." I realized that the woman meant that someone (I envisioned a big, fat man) had been murdered here, and that the police were still cleaning up what had been a pretty big mess. In the meantime, nobody wanted to live here anymore.

I wondered if the man had been murdered in the room the woman was trying to rent to me. I wondered how the woman could do such a thing to me.

I had made some sort of agreement with the woman and was now somewhere else. I now thought about subway logistics for this place. I knew the nearest train was the Q, but that the Q was a far walk away, and that I would be on a stop that was farther away from work than the one I would get on at my current apartment.

I was on the phone now, discussing all this with the woman. The woman was trying to convince me how easy it was to get to the train. But as she was explaining this, I could see the neighborhood in my mind's eye, as if I were looking at it all while standing at the edge of and on the underside of a highway overpass.

I realized how bleak and trashy this whole neighborhood looked. I knew this was a bad neighborhood, full of crime. I couldn't figure out how the woman would try to rent out such an ugly place in such an awful neighborhood for such a high price.

The woman was explaining something to me like how to walk to the subway to avoid danger most effectively.