After 30 years of living in a house in the country, I’ve moved to a small apartment in the city.

It’s dorm life all over again, but with bad knees and fewer escapades involving random male stupidity.

I grew up in the country, where we boys could run, holler, spit and throw things all we wanted, provided we did so outside. Mom didn’t care for such frivolities indoors.

That was fine. We had a barn, a pasture, fields, woods … even if it was raining, we could tear about as wildly as we wanted. We were in the country with acres and acres of freedom to be noisy.

When I went off to college, I had to share a space about the size of my bedroom back home with another guy, and there were something like 20 or 50 (some days, it seemed more like 100) of these two-guy bedrooms all along our floor, which repeated on all the other floors.

It was a whole building of noisy, smelly, rambunctious, doofus boys who thought they were men but acted like 8-year-olds whose moms and dads said they had to run to town. “Try not to burn the house down before we get back in 15 minutes.”

You’d be surprised how much damage 8-year-old boys could gleefully commit in 15 minutes. Unless you’re a mom of 8-year-old boys, and then you wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Now, Mom and Dad would be back at the end of the semester, and we had more like 15 weeks to try not to burn down the place before they got back. But we might drop water balloons out windows (or even inside windows) or toast moldy bread for the aroma.

In the meantime, we cranked our music, pelted each other with insults, ran down the halls, and pretty much made enough racket that every guy in every room could hear us through the walls.

It was dorm life.

Fast forward to buying my own home. As the years rolled on, I was less inclined to run at any time. I preferred to sit in my easy chair — and crank up the TV. Why do football announcers whisper so much these days?

If I thumped about the house, who cared? No one else was living on the other side of the thin walls. The neighbors’ houses were a good distance away. If I wanted to belt out a song with the radio, no one downstairs beat on the ceiling with a broomstick to make me stop.

Then this year, I downsized. I moved out of the big, ol’ two-story house into a three-room apartment among other denizens of the complex. It’s giving me flashbacks to dorm living.

At least this time, I have a private bathroom. No more lining up beside a dozen other hairy, towel-clad guys to shave in the morning. (I’ve since given up shaving, possibly from the trauma of group de-whiskering.)

There’s always someone home a door or two away. I guess it’s comforting to know that I am not alone — but I often wish I was.

The sportscasters continue to whisper, but I can’t crank the TV volume because of the neighbors on the other side of the thin walls and in the apartment below my thin floor. I turn on the subtitles so I can read whatever it is the guys on TV are whispering about.

The lady downstairs shouts into her telephone, but since she’s from another country, I couldn’t eavesdrop on her life if I wanted to — which I don’t. After 30 years of living in a private house, I’m not a very social critter anymore.

None of us apartment dwellers are inclined to run the hallways, but the thumps of canes, walkers and heavy limping reverberate off the walls. My college dorm walls used to reverberate too, mostly on Friday nights. Here, Friday nights sound much the same as, say, Tuesday nights. We’re not an exciting bunch. Just a bit creaky, slow and hard of hearing.

But it feels like dorm living again, nonetheless. There are neighbors behind every door and under every floor. I’m afraid to walk across the living room after 8 p.m. — or open the closet. I might discover even more neighbors.

Now stop smacking the ceiling with the broomstick or I’ll dribble my basketball in the kitchen again. It’s not my fault that sportscasters whisper.

Move in next to Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. But speak up — the old boy’s hard of hearing.