Blogs | La Vista
I Live in Linda Vista
By Kevin Six | Posted December 30, 2010, 9:05 p.m.
When I went into the Reader's website to blog about my neighborhood, I was marketed ingeniously by the computer. Once I typed in my neighborhood, Linda Vista, the Reader showed me an ad that asked me if I needed to get off drugs.
I get it! Linda Vista is not all that cool. When I first moved here from Clairemont (more on that later), I told my friends I lived in Kearney Mesa or near Mesa College. Linda is Spanish for pretty; vista is view and mesa is table. So I's rather live on the table than in pretty view.
Linda Vista has a view if you're in the right part of it. I'm in the Village Woods condo complex, otherwise known as Nazi Germany. Our association president, Adolph Hitler, has a lot of time on her hands and it tightly wound.
Last week there was a knock at the door. No one ever knocks on my door because all my friends think I live in the Spanish version of Pretty Table. Call your neighborhood Linda Mesa and everyone in San Diego will feign comprehension. This knock was definitely on my door and not the someone who wanted drugs from my neighbor next door (much more on that later).
It was the cable guy with an emergency order to fix the stolen cable coming from the electrical box to my condo through the sliding glass door. The cable guy was as incredulous as I was when I showed him the cable running from my TV and into the wall, where it was legally set up and costs me a monthly fortune to try to watch a hundred channels of crap (but more on that later).
So the cable guy makes his note and I get a little crazy on Hitler - er - the woman who runs the condo association. I did research on the internet. I actually found an article on the Reader's website about condo associations. The news was not good.
I decided to go crazy and take everyone on the condo association with me.
The Village Woods condos began life in the 1970s as a swinging singles apartment complex named, as far as I can gather, The Village Woods. There are no woods and there's not a village for that matter. There is a pond, a bit of a waterfall, a nice pool and a clubhouse. That no one gets to use.
Hitler is in charge of who comes and goes to the pool. The association board, which has more power over the Village of Woods than the Nazis ever had over Germany, the Fascist Italy and the Communists over China and Russia combined.
Suffice it to say that the Association got electronic access control over the pool about the time my dues were in arrears enough for the Third Reich - er- the Board to make a rule that you can't use the pool if your dues are passed sue.
Thank god my mother died or I's never have seen the pool or sat in the hot tub!
Then there's the matter of the clubhouse. Now, in the Swinging Seventies (and believe me because I lived through them, they were only trying to find the magic of the 60s and failing miserably), the clubhouse and pool were probably choc full of hipsters drinking Margaritas, skinny-dipping and smoking God-knows-what all day and all of the night.
But forty years on, those swingers have become the owners of the sourest pusses you can imagine. I wonder if the same crotchety old codgers and angry old ladies are the self-same people who partied the illage into the Village Woods complex back in the day. Suffice it to say they have a complex now and that's just about it.
One old guy threw his walking stick at me as I sat in the hot tub one day. Granted, the word from the Reichstag - er- the management company had come that I was not supposed to be in the hot tub but, brother please. Throw a stick at me? While I'm behind a metal fence? I saw him later in the week and, oddly, he didn't want to talk to me. He just pulled outta Dodge as fast as his little dog would go. I pity that dog P.I.T.Y. that old wiener dog who will outlive his master by a good ten years judging from the size of the veins on his neck and the redness on his face.
But I was talking about the clubhouse and not all the neighbors who have and will soon die (more on that later). It would be easier for a nice Jewish couple to get married at the Latter Day Saint's wedding-cake-of a temple than for me or anyone else to get permission to use the clubhouse. And the Politburo - er- the Association Board spent a lot of money on paint, furniture and a kitchen. A kitchen that no one uses!
It's enough to make you crazy. But, as I have said, I am going crazy and taking the whole Fascist, Nazi, Communist, Sour-Puss, Spinning-out-of-control-old-board-biddy bunch of them with me. I have created a new political party. Some thing that will cause them to stay up at night. Something that will cause each one of them to doubt his or her sanity. Something that will place a turd in their carefully concocted and oh-so-out-of-touch punch bowl. Something that will cause them to sell their condos and move to - where?
Nazi Germany!
The Village Woods Fun Party!
The party advocated use of the pool by all Association Members even if they haven's paid their association dues. I advocates for the door to be taken off of the clubhouse -- hell you need a key and an electric thing-a-ma-bob to get that far; do you really need to call and ask for permission and pay a deposit ti use a room that, though it has been redecorated, is set in the timeless Seventies? No!
And you don't need to pay for electricity either. The Village Woods Fun Party advocates for large solar cells on all the roofs, a gray water system to water the plants and what's left of the landscape (don't even get me started on that) and parties every night until eleven o'clock. The Village Woods Fun Party wants to put sliding glass doors on the apartments -- sorry -- condos that don't sound like FA18 taking off when you close them; and we want your privacy to be protected even unto placing recycled Levis jean material in the walls where the contractor should have put insulation. Oh, and we want to let people paint their doors what-ever-the-hells-color they want to paint them.
That ought to do it.
