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Kim trudged the stairs of her four-story walk-up, groceries in hand,
and cursed her stupidity for choosing an apartment with such an obvious drawback. Her previously romanticized notion
of living in such an historic neighborhood known as Haight Ashbury, or more familiarly "the Haight",
was quickly forgotten during her first week of residing there. This was largely due to the tedium of walking past
all the endless head shops, deadheads, ex-hippies, hippy-wannabes, homeless teenagers, teenage drug dealers, adult
drug dealers, and every kind of freak to be found in the City by the Bay.
Oh sure, from the outside her new home looked rather lovely: a pale yellow and blue, stately Victorian, with it's
gingerbread trimmings and narrow front yard, overflowing with all sorts of exotic foliage that she couldn't even
begin to name, save for the wall of deep-red bougainvillea that drew her to the house in the first place. But upon
entering, she knew right away that it was all a façade. The rickety stairs, coated with a layer of dust,
the windows that hadn't been cleaned in who knew how long, and that endless climb up, up, up to what was to be
her apartment, all filled her with a keen sense of dread.
There were, however, two deciding factors that cinched the deal, despite all the obvious drawbacks: one, and this
was really all she needed to hear before signing the lease, was the rent, which was easily two hundred dollars
cheaper than any of the other apartments she looked at; and two, the fact that the apartment was once the home
of Jimi Hendrix's girlfriend; which surely must have meant that the legendary entertainer spent at least some time
there. Kim wasn't usually so easily impressed by such things, but the idea that she'd be living in an apartment
with a past like that did sort of blur the rest of the place's many faults. But that had been a week earlier, and
her mind was now focused on all the things wrong with the place.
Huffing and puffing as she entered her apartment, she was greeted to the chill that seemed to permeate her new
home. The fog that rolled in from the ocean, and across Golden Gate Park, had this insane habit of finishing it's
journey in the Haight and staying put for most of the day, thereby preventing the sun from even attempting to warm
the place up. Kim shivered and dropped her groceries on the hardwood floor to the side of her refrigerator.
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