One of the things I could not have known about my current flat before moving in is the life of the alleyway.  I have enjoyed the occasional perv from my bedroom window of the student housing on the other side, it's true.  But aside from that The Alley has been a source of endless annoyance.  I know it sounds bourgeois of me, but why should I apologize?  My (literally) Bohemian days are long gone.

I mean, take the rag-pickers.  You'd think that the fact that we have not one, but two rubbish days a week would be a wonderful convenience.  Truth is, it just means that two nights a week, all night long, we get rag-pickers (bottle recyclers, mostly) sifting through our garbage.  It starts the afternoon before pick-up, and goes on all night long, as one after another enterprising recycler comes banging down the alley with a stolen grocery cart full of rattling bottles. They tear open the garbage bags and rummage through them, tossing the contents into the alley. 

By the time they're done it looks like the Canyon of Heroes after a ticker tape parade.

Not that they aren't providing a valuable service in the proces of trashing the alley twice a week. Despite what the City's website says, I have never seen a recycling truck come down the alley in the half year I've been here, no one separates recyclables, and there are no recyclable crates like in, say, Somerville where the city supplies them, to separate them into. 

We could make it easier for them by sorting out our recyclables for them, I suppose.  I mean, what does it matter if it's the City or the "freelance" recyclers who come?  Somebody's gonna take it away and recycle it.  In fact, the freelancers are the better bargain, since we don't even have to pay them to do it, whereas if the City does it we're shelling out forty or fifty grand or however much it is for an entry-level "Environmental Services Technician".  Just sayin.

The only drawback with having "freelancers" doing it is that the nightly competition is fierce.  It'd be better if each shopping cart jockey bid for a separate alley once a year, instead of fighting over them twice a week.  Get organized, bitches. 

Aside from the stolen shopping cart jockeys and video game junkies, we also get opera singers (who enter the Boston Conservatory rehearsal rooms from the alley at all hours) practicing operettas to and from.  It is a veritable late night La bohème back there.  

But probably the worse thing — and this was the ultimate deciding factor in my move to a new place — is, we have a neighbor who's about 103 and chain-smokes out his window all day.  The way the wind whips down the alley, everyone in our building who dares to open a window in warm weather has to breathe his rankness in.  I don't know what his brand is, but it smells like stale death.   

He lights his first at a quarter to eight and then it's one about every half hour from there, all day on the weekends. 

Before I figured it out, and started talking to my neighbors (the ones with the newborn have asked him to smoke in the front of the house so that they can keep their back-facing living room windows open in the summer — he has yet to oblige), I would walk into my room (the door to which is almost always closed to keep the dog out) and wonder, who's been smoking stale stogies in in my bedroom? It was that pungent.

Now, I used to be a smoker, myself, and ex-smokers, like religious converts, can be over-zealous at times.  But the truth is, I'm not a militant ex-smoker.  Maybe because I was never a militant smoker.  This was back in college in the late eighties, early nineties, and city councils were just starting to pass laws mandating non-smoking sections in restaurants — not non-smoking restaurants, mind you, just designated sections in them. 

It was a less than satisfactory solution, obviously.  It seems crazy today, but the notion that second-hand smoke was a killer still hadn't quite sunk in.  Even if 60% of the place was non-smoking, in the quaint little restaurants of my sleepy college town you were likely to be sitting next to a smoking table. 

I never got into the whole "smokers' rights" scene, but there were protests and picket lines.  Seriously.  Endless raging letters to the editor.  Conspiracy theories.  The whole bit.  I and most of my friends smoked (and not just tobacco) but something about how I was raised made it prohibitively uncomfortable to smoke defiantly, confrontationally, on the edge of the non-smoking section, when it was obvious I was ruining someone else's meal.

But whenever we went out my college roommate made it a point to be seated as close to the nonsmoking section of the restaurant as possible, and to chainsmoke all through dinner.  He was just waiting for the moment some prim, professorial type would wrinkle his nose at us and ask if we would mind not smoking.  I always obliged immediately.  Not Jase.

Out came that slow, Arkansas drawl:  "I'm sorry, but we're seated in the smoking section," he'd say glibly, with a curt smile, a little shrug, and a long draw on his Camel. 

Well, the worm has turned.

One Sunday morning, awakened by the smell of stale death again, I found myself so desperate I started searching the internet for advice (always a bad idea).  "Buy a fan," or "move" are about as good as it gets.  "Talk to your neighbor about it" had already been tried, and by people with a really compelling reason to ask him to smoke elsewhere (a newborn in the house).   

Some of you will react like my mother used to whenever we'd whine "it's not fair!"

"Well," she'd say, brightly. "That's life in the big city!" 

And I don't guess I disagree.  I've lived in cities (big and small) most of my adult life, and there's much to like about them.  But cities are by their nature noisy, smelly places.  You'll always have annoying roommates and neighbors.  There will always be screaming drunks and crazies, boomboxes and blaring horns.  Still, for me The Alley — this alley — has tipped the scales.  It's got it all, often at the same time, like, all the time.

My hope is that the new place, which also borders a narrow alley, will be slightly less... lively.  The fact that the new alley abuts beautiful Ramler Park is reason to hope.  It's almost like facing a courtyard — which is how most old-school European apartment buildings are designed: to face inward, providing some small sanctuary from the noisy, smelly city streets — and, I should add, the alleys, too.