I don’t need a tinfoil hat to protect me when I’m writing my conspiracy theory novels. No, I have chicken wire in my walls to keep out those sneaky signals.
I’ve said for years that I wanted to live in an adorable historic bungalow but that, since I’ve sold my house and can live anywhere, I also wanted to live for the first time in a luxury apartment. Little did I know when the cute camp counselor newlyweds moved in upstairs at my old place, that they would turn out to be insomniac elephant shifters who listened to their TV at 2 AM on full rocket ship volume and who—when awake—played basketball (or something) on my ceiling 20 hours a day while I tried to work, sleep, write, exist.
My lease was well over 60 pages long, but for all the rules that my landlord insisted on, which I followed to a T, none of them seemed to apply to the upstairs neighbors. Every time he spoke to them about breaking the rules, things just got worse. I suspect that he was telling them I was “the woman downstairs complaining about every little thing” while pretending to be the good guy. After six months of getting only 3 to 4 hours of sleep every single day they were home, I had to call it quits. I was absolutely miserable and exhausted, and it was starting to affect not just my work and sleep but definitely my mood. Oddly enough, the only time they were quiet was when they were consummating their marriage.
Writer that I am, I started thinking of all kinds of conspiracy theory ideas to match what they could possibly be doing nearly constantly to make so much noise and jar my ground-floor apartment to the point where there were visible cracks in the walls and ceiling. I have a wild imagination, but I never quite figured it out. I’m sure if I wrote them into one of my Secret Lives of Librarians novels that I’d come up with something. Probably demonic possession. Maybe nightly exorcisms. Or opening portals and leaping through them.
I kept thinking about how expensive it was going to be to move—spoiler alert: it was—but one night around 4 AM, after being shaken awake in my bed yet again from the repeated running the length of the apartment upstairs, I checked my savings account and decided, Hey, I don’t have to live like this! As soon as it was daylight, I started looking for a new home, someplace where I could get a good night’s sleep and not have to wear headphones 24/7 to concentrate on my work. The headphones, by the way, weren’t enough to shield me from the tremors from upstairs. Even if I couldn’t hear them, I could feel them.
The very first place I looked at was love at first sight: a 100-year-old bungalow with wood floors and all the little quirks of the architecture of the time. A totally refurbished kitchen, upgraded appliances, a sweet little garden space—tiny, but with a lot of potential—and an outdoor kitchen. Oak trees in the backyard. An empty lot next door. A quiet, tree-lined street out front. A five-minute walk to my daughter’s house. A three-minute walk to an assortment of bars and upscale restaurants, and another minute to get to the theater that serves dinner and drinks.
The competition for it was intense, and I definitely paid more than I wanted to, but that was the price of a good night’s sleep and peace of mind. I had manifested exactly the house on my vision board. In so many ways, I had lucked out. The owner told me the previous tenant had fallen through and he had to go through the rental process all over again. Otherwise, I would’ve missed it.
Now that’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind! One in my favor!
Had my horrible upstairs neighbors been wonderful, I would’ve stayed in a place I liked but not a place where I could really thrive.
But back to protecting myself from conspiracies and conspiracy theory possibilities not in my favor.
When I moved in, I had to make sure there was good Wi-Fi service because I was a full-time teleworker at the time and a writer in the evenings. The house was wired for internet in two places, with linked routers so that I could have Wi-Fi anywhere in the home. Now, it’s a very small home, but without the connected routers, no signal would get through those walls.
You see, when the house was built a century ago, it was standard to use a chicken-wire-type mesh with stucco in the walls. They couldn’t have imagined in 1923 or so that a standard building material for bungalows in Florida might be a hindrance to the signal technology we depend on in the 21st century. Essentially, I live in a Faraday cage. Without the signal being connected throughout the home, the signal on the eastern side of the house would never get through two walls to my desk on the western side of the house.
So, no tinfoil hats to keep Big Brother from reading my brain waves. If they want to know what I’m thinking, they’ll just have to read my books.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal—or face the consequences.
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