I have a fine view right now, sitting here on the ground leaning up against a lamppost’s concrete base. I am watching two backhoes work at rending and tearing a place I used to live in, a place the word “home” could never be applied to. 

A “home” is light and airy, warm and convivial. A home is a nice place to rest your head after a long day of working hard. It’s somewhere you can feel safe and stretch your legs out when time allows, or have friends over and enjoy being in someone else’s company for a little while. In short, it doesn’t suck, like this building does — or did, because now half of it is lying in zillions of tiny pieces and the other half has been cut open for examination like a $20 burger or the cavernous cadaver of a corpulent fuck you never really liked. 

“Overwhelming pleasure” is a phrase I could use to describe what I’m feeling right now. I could also say I’m “wracked with ecstasy” or “writhing with euphoria” or some other pseudo-Freudian cliché, but the truth is that those phrases don’t really capture the deep satisfaction I am also feeling at watching a building I hate, a blight on both the landscape of the campus and on the minds of the thousands of students who were forced to live there. Yes, I am thrilled to announce that the Campus Apartments, long and always considered the worst place on Cal Poly Humboldt’s campus to be banished to, have been unceremoniously and totally destroyed. 

I spent eight months of my life trapped in that place. From August 2022 to April 2023, I enjoyed all the amenities that hovel had to offer: a kitchen a tad smaller than the size of a parking space, shared with three of the smelliest, most selfish assholes I’ve ever met. A bedroom designed by an architect who had surely only ever lived in Japanese capsule hotels. Enough sunlight reached that room to please even the most sensitive of vampires, who probably also enjoyed sleeping one foot from the ceiling, just like in their caskets back home. 

Nothing in that shithole ever worked right. CPH has always been proud of the access to the natural world their campus provides, so that should explain why, one day, a waterfall erupted from the ceiling above my shower. For two minutes, gallons flowed from a little crack into the tub, and no maintenance guy could ever find out why it happened, which it continued to at odd times. It had nothing to do with what my upstairs neighbors were doing or flushing, nothing to do with what I or the assholes were doing. The waterfall was divorced from all logic and reason. 

The backhoe hasn’t yet reached my old apartment, but its time is ticking away. 

One night, the fire alarm went off three times, and all 300-odd residents had to evacuate out into the parking lot each time. Once was reasonable. The second time was pointless, because there was, of course, no fire. When it went off for the third time, several of us stood chattering in the cold passing around a bottle of bourbon and cursing, but we slept well after that because whoever was in charge simply turned the fire system off. 

The backhoes continue to snap apart its rotting bones into toothpicks, and with each passing splinter, I get a little happier. 

Looking back, I am amazed that I can come up with nothing redeeming to say about the late Campus Apartments. They were expensive; I paid over $700 a month to live there before I fled before the semester ended for off-campus housing. I did once get to write an article for the student newspaper on all of the mold problems the dorm-dwellers (including myself!) dealt with, and I remember that one being fun to write. I’m also currently pretty entertained by the contained fracas happening right in front of me, but watching something get destroyed is hardly a quality unique to one place. 

If I have to say one nice thing about the ol’ shitheap, I guess I’ll say I’m glad it gave my roommates a good excuse for being assholes, because everyone is when they live in a cramped tunnel that gets no natural light and mold in the corners, and I’d hate to think poorly of anyone if I can avoid it. 

Goodbye. I won’t miss you.