And so do I ask you, oh Vancouver-area readers, if you have the will, the means and the opportunity to aid me in effecting this one-man exodus on either of those two days. In addition to the fine conversation to be had, those who take part will be richly rewarded with food and drink specially ordered from a business establishment of their choice! What wonders to behold!
Anyone who feels like they might have even so much as a few hours free on either day, let me know; I expect it to be more or less an all-day process both days, and any help would be appreciated.
For the past ten years, I have, over and over again, been forced to move, quite against my will, as a result of the actions or decisions of others. Each time, I have found myself thrust into a new living situation without very much control over where or in what situation I would end up. This time, though, I had thought? This time could be different.
I had spoken to a friend of mine who was in a similarly horrible living situation. While not wishing to air his dirty laundry, even anonymously, suffice it to say that at around the same time, it became plain that he would also be needing to move. He and I spoke, and agreed we would get a two bedroom place together for December 1st, and indeed, had begun looking at a number of prospective apartments together. Things were looking quite promising! And then, abruptly, he went silent on me. No phone calls, no e-mails, and no response to any of the same from me. Finally, on the night of November 1st, I learned from his mother that he had decided to get a place on his own.
This did not sit too well with me.
For starters, it meant that I had no room-mate, and insufficient time to find a replacement. And housing costs in the greater Vancouver area make a one bedroom apartment of the sort of size I would be comfortable living in prohibitively expensive. To say nothing of the personal offense, of which – again, out of a desire not to air his dirty laundry in public – I will not here speak. Secondarily, there was the creeping horror at the realization that there was a very real possibility that I would need to put out an ad on Craigslist or somesuch in order to find a replacement. This was the very dark path which led me to live with Vince in the first place, and there is no joy whatsoever in the notion of opening the door to that sort of horror once again.
I can afford a two bedroom place on my own for a month or two, though, and I hope that in that time, I can find someone stable and secure enough that I could in good conscience allow them to live with me, but this still represents a significant risk and significant inconvenience, relative to the “clear sailing” state I had looked forwards to existing in by now as of this time last month. And so I’m actively apartment hunting, hoping to secure something worthwhile by this weekend.
I figure I might just as well toss this out there, on the off chance that the fates might yet conspire to redeem this situation for me with nothing more than a few lines of text: Is there anyone among my readership who is in need or in want of a new home in the Burnaby/Vancouver area in the next two months? I find that I prefer the notion of finding someone with whom I stand the chance of having some degree of familiarity with prior to cohabitation to that of living with a complete stranger whose only connection to me is the quirk of happenstance which would have them reading my ad before I happen to accept someone else who does likewise.
Rather, my landlord was apparently held to blame for not making any effort whatsoever to control his unruly tenant, Vince. I had expressed a similar sentiment, of course, pointing out how deeply I resented the fact that I had not had it relayed to me that Vince was doing all this terrible crap, and thus was unable to do anything about it. But my landlord simply did not care to become involved, and so let the matter fester.
And so the decision was made to kick out my landlord's remaining tenant - that being me - in order to punish him; he would lose the rent revenue, and need to go to the time, trouble and expense of preparing the suite for a future tenant.
The ironty here is that he was planning on selling the place some time next year anyways, and he likely views this as a blessing; he can now do so earlier, and get out of this landlording business that he had plainly grown bored of anyways.
And so, a punishment comes down solely upon my head to punish two people who will feel no ill effects from it, and who stand to learn nothing from it. Meanwhile, I lose my home of six years.
I can't pretend not to feel a little on the bitter side from all of this.
Another tidbit which has come out of this seems to serve as the final puzzle piece which reveals the whole puzzle to me; I'm told that Vince told someone on the Strata Council about the bedbugs before I did (which, it was suggested, might mean that I was trying to keep secrets and thus deserved to be kicked out on my own faults). This startled me as I recalled clearly going and talking to the noxious president of the council the very day I first learned I had them. So when did Vince have the time to tell anyone?
As it turns out, he knew about them long before I did, but never told me about them, but DID tell others about them. When I told him I had discovered them, he claimed not to have any in his room and affected surprise. Later, when exterminators came around, he still claimed to have none, and so there was no reason for them to enter his room. Later still, when I confronted him about their re-appearance, he again affected surprise, claiming never to have seen them.
During my cleaning out of his crap, I not only found nests of them in his room that plainly went back a very, very long time, I found dozens of empty tubes of hydrocortisone cream (which I may be mis-spelling, but I don't have a spell-checker at hand here and now). This is an itch cream.
It now becomes clear: He got them before I did, and did everything in his power to hide this fact for a full year and a half, even if doing so meant preventing them from being eliminated and meant constant itching for a year and a half.
It's never been more clear that he is actually mentally ill.
Now I just need to exterminate them all in the time I have left before I have to move, in order to make sure I don't carry Vince's curse with me to my new home. Because if even a couple of them cling to any bit of furniture I bring with me, I could continue to syffer from Vince's madness for many, many months to come.
It’s been a week and a half now since my erstwhile former Room-mate, Vince, vacated the premises, and believe it or not, the hits keep on coming.
I realized, naturally, that he would steal a certain amount of my stuff on his way out. Whether out of vindictiveness or simply out of selfishness and greed, he would take things he thought he might like. Naturally, I was correct, though the list of things that have gone missing is as mercifully short as it is baffling. I had recently acquired a large vacuum cleaner which I’m rather fond of, but retained my smaller, older one to get into the small spaces which my behemoth of an upright could not get into. Vince, in an unmitigated act of irony, decided that even though he had gone two years without ever so much as touching that smaller vacuum for anything other than his own bedroom (and only then when he was bringing a girl over), evidently decided that he was somehow more entitled to it than I was and made off with it. The other items I’ve found him to have taken – a couple of DVDs, my tube of toothpaste and one of my PS2 memory cards – are just small, pathetic acts, but in aggregate still serve to aggravate.
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Vince’s shoes were all gone from the front hall.
My heart leapt in my heart. Dare I hope? Dare I dream? I dashed about the apartment, and my spirit soared: His DVDs were gone (minus those I had set aside the day before so that he wouldn’t “accidentally” pack them when his belongings)! And on his bedroom door, the following note:
Vincent H-a-v-o-k (edited to evade Google), by the way, is his wrestling name. Have I ever mentioned that before? He’s a professional wrestler, and this is his wrestling persona. Yes, he signs stuff like this with his wrestling persona.
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On a separate-but-related note…
It's been a wild ride, folks, and I'm not going to lie: As much as I'm glad he's gone, there remains a small part of me which is almost sad that I won't have him to blog about anymore. The guy was scum, but as you all made abundantly clear in your comments, he was SUCH scum that he at least made an engaging antagonist in this grand drama. But all vile, horrific, unbearably unpleasant things must come to an end.
I just got this letter in the mail earlier today.
It seems that Vince has decided that if he's being forced to go, there's no reason to have any dignity or composure about it, and to take out his frustrations with having received the just rewards of his own past bad behaviour with even worse behaviour. Perhaps he's decided he has nothing to lose, so why not?
Oh, man.
Man, oh, man.
I don't think we benefit from this.
In part, I'm sure it's the way I was raised. I grew up in a small town where I know the people were reasonably friendly with one another, but my mother, who raised me more-or-less on her own, was from the big city of Toronto, and brought that alone-in-a-crowd mentality with her. I never spoke with any of my neighbors after early childhood, and neither did my mom, for the most part. Since moving to Vancouver, I've certainly never been more than a friendly acquaintance with any of my neighbors, at most, and that's not too good.
I keep meaning to go around to the neighbors I have in my building - those people on my floor and the ones above and below, and say hello. But it just seems so wierd, you know? Almost an intrusion. Almost an abuse, even, to impose myself upon the people who just happen to live near me and expect them to be friendly to me.
For the past year, Vince's presence has prevented me from acting on this impulse, anyways: I keep wanting to invite the neighbors over for a cup of tea and a bite to eat, be friendly, be "neighborly" in the classic meaning of the word, but it's tough to do so when you live with someone you refuse even to speak to. But soon enough, he'll be gone. I'm thinking of proposing a sort of pot luck dinner, inviting all of the neighbors over, and seeing who I can get along with.
The other day, I had to field a noise complaint from my landlord due to some noise Vince had been making late at night, and the absurdity of it struck me: someone living right next door to me went to the strata council of the building, who went to the building's owner, who went to my landlord, who then called me. Just think: if that neighbor and I were friendly with one another, they could have just come and spoken to me (or Vince), and dealt with it without involving all of these uninvolved people. But that's the ugly reality; we aren't friendly. We don't feel like we can just talk to each other. It's absurd, and I think I should change it.
Because the idea of living in an actual community of people who know each other and can speak to each other in a friendly, neighborly manner, appeals to me.
So what about you: Anyone out there friendly or even "neighborly" with their neighbors? Anyone have any thoughts on the topic?
It was at around a week or so later that I gave some thought to the considerable amount of money he owed me, and how I was likely never to see a dime of it. A plan occurred to me, though, which it seemed to me might at least allow me to recoup my losses somewhat. I hadn’t seen too much of Vince in the week or so since that last conversation, though, and so it seemed to me that the practical approach was to leave him a note explaining my thoughts on the topic. I therefore drafted, printed, and taped to his bedroom door the following missive:
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This is not meant as a chauvinist remark on the quality of my particular language as opposed to other languages; I’m sure that many, if not most languages can, when made use of by one who cares enough about the subtleties and nuances of expression and vocabulary within that language to learn and familiarize themselves with them, are capable of producing sentences and ideas, songs and stories which are in their own unique and varied ways, beautiful. The English language simply happens to be the language I’m most familiar with and which I happen to have devoted myself to. And for my part, and in my experience, it is beautiful.
When I open my mouth to speak, there’s always just a little bit of excitement which accompanies the act, and no less so when I sit down to type one out. I feel like a painter sitting in front of a blank canvas, with a palette of a thousand different colours of paint at one side, and a million brushes laid out for me on the other. The opportunities for expression are nearly limitless. I can produce something wonderful, exciting, memorable, amusing, disgusting, thought-provoking, bizarre or precise. So many options which are available to me! And I love them all. I always say, if you have the opportunity to say something in a manner which is memorable and awesome, and the opportunity to say that same thing in a manner which is dull and plain, why would you ever choose the latter? Who could possibly benefit from further exposure to the ordinary who would not benefit more from exposure to the extraordinary?
And in this modern world, where we have so many literary and oratorical sources to draw upon, so many thoughts and notions, so many dialects and vernaculars, it’s an incredibly heady experience to really contemplate what kind of range of verbosity is available to a student of modern English.
And yet, for a distressingly large portion of the population, any expression of the English language which extends beyond the mundane and banal, no matter how modern it may be, always just sounds to them “like Shakespeare.”
And they are not shy about sharing this observation with you. Indeed, they seem to view it as a solemn obligation that they be the one to inform you of this notion of theirs.
It’s depressing. Shakespeare, as eloquent and as full of wit as he was, was a product of his time, and that’s a time which is four centuries in the past. Is there not a single common touchstone for excellence in the field of expression in the English language in the four centuries since the death of the Bard which has had any lasting or significant impact on the common man? Is there nothing that suggests to them that a person who speaks well and in a thoroughly modern manner might be more reminiscent in their use of the language of a playwright of the 20th or 21st century than one of the 16th?
It’s all the more perplexing when one of these vulgar brutes then decides to start peppering me with “thee”s and “thou”s, as though in imitation of my own speech, seemingly convinced that they’re “ripping me a new one” with their cutting satire, when I can guarantee that I had never done so in their presence.
What does it say about a culture that any significant portion of its population cannot even imagine anyone in the modern day being well-spoken and eloquent, without it being an imitation of someone nearly half a millennium dead? I would almost be prepared to receive it as a compliment if not for the fact that they are so unrelentingly mocking in their tone. They sound no different to me than the kids in high school who would call me “Mister Dictionary”, and discourage me from eloquence by telling me that “using big words makes you sound dumb.” And yet these are often adults themselves, whose adulthood experience with the English language and the culture which surrounds it is so impoverished and so shallow that to them, the act of making good and thorough use of it is somehow worthy of mockery.
I’m long past the point where their mockery hurts me in any way. What It says, though, about the cultural experience that produces these thoughts? That hurts me. That hurts me deeply. Because I know that they have the same opportunities that I do: They have that same blank canvas. They have that palette of a thousand colours. They have those million brushes. And they choose to take a handful of brown and grey paint and smear it haphazardly upon that canvas without a care in the world for the other linguistic tools they have available to them, and find those who do avail themselves of them to be a bizarre anachronism.
Who “talks like Shakespeare.”
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As long-time readers of my blog will know, I’ve been having some difficulties with my hideous, swine-like monster of a room-mate, Vince, for some time now. For those newer to the readership, I recommend that you check out some of the previous nightmares-rendered-as-text on the topic. I do so not only in order that you might be able to better understand the unfolding drama of the story, nor yet simply because I enjoy having my posts read (although both are valid points), but as a cautionary tale: Vince is in some respects a worst case scenario as room-mates go, and as we draw nearer the end of this saga, a moral begins to emerge.
But before we jump to that, let’s step back a couple of months.
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Today, I have placed a letter to my room-mate Vince on his bedroom door, in the hopes of undoing some of my mistreatment of the poor boy. In the belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant, I share this letter with you, my readers, in the interests of claiming responsibility for my own faults as a room-mate. The full text is posted below.
***
Vince
I have come to realize that I have in some respects been an inconsiderate room-mate of late, and I feel that I ought to ask your forgiveness in this respect. I have placed upon you unreasonable expectations and become angry at you when you have failed to live up to them, and I have treated you poorly as a result of your not having acted in accordance with wishes of mine which I have never plainly articulated. As such, I hope to make myself clear in ways that I feel now I owed it to you to have made clear many months ago.
I have complained many times about your stealing my food. I have told you repeatedly to replace food of mine that you’ve stolen on those rare occasions which you haven’t lied to my face about having done so (and to your credit, some 20% or so of the time that you’ve made this promise, you’ve delivered on it like a champion). I have placed locks on some of my cabinets in order to prevent you from stealing the food and drink contained therein, knowing – as I’ve told my friends since then – that “If you want to keep a dog from ripping open a bag of dogfood and glutting itself, you need to put it somewhere that the dog can’t get at it, and the same principle applies here, since Vince has all the concept of personal ownership that a dog has.” But perhaps in only having done so, I’ve only muddied matters for you, in that I may have seemed to have been giving you tacit permission to steal that food which I placed in the fridge, rather than keeping it under lock and key like I did the rest. For example, when you ate an entire large bottle of my ketchup over the course of a week without ever asking if you could have any of it, never apologized for having done so afterwards, made no offer to replace it, and then put the empty bottle back in the fridge and left it there, can I really, honestly hold you responsible for such actions?
In all that time, I’ve realized something – and herein lies the crux of my apology. I realized that I have never explicitly and specifically told you to never steal my food. I have expected you to be able to function at the same level as any reasonably intelligent adult human being would function. I have expected you to be able to at least act as though you have any sort of functioning ethical core. Both of these are plainly unreasonable standards to hold you to, and I am deeply, profoundly sorry for having done this to you. I want to redress this wrong by being 100% clear and specific on this issue in the hopes that future confusion and the acrimony which arises from this confusion can be avoided.
To be clear: None of the food which I have ever bought has been bought in the hopes that it would be stolen from me. All of it has been bought so that I could eat it, or else people who have the basic and rudimentary grasp of fundamental politeness and morality necessary to ASK if they can have some of my food could eat it. You are a part of neither group, and thus none of my food has ever bought for you, nor is any food which I presently own or which I will ever buy be for you.
I realize that I have never been as clear as this, and yet have somehow, irrationally, expected you to grasp principles such as the notion of “other people’s property” and “stealing is wrong.” I hope that I have now been made sufficiently plain that in the future, these needless and easily-avoided conflicts can be avoided, and peace around the home can reign.
Once again, I’m sorry for having been so vague, and I hope you can forgive me.
-Dave
It seems that my regular gaming group has taken a little bit of a hit, having lost two previously- regular players to various uninteresting fates. This leaves us in a trifle of a lurch, as we find ourselves with but three regular players in total. As anyone with any experience in the fine art of Dungeons & Dragons is concerned, this is an entirely unacceptable number. We’re hunting around for two more players to fill this gap for our every-second-friday gaming sessions at my place.
As anyone who knows me knows, I dress exclusively in black, about 99% of the time. This is not a question of slavery to some external trend or movement; I’ve never considered myself a goth, for instance; I realized in high school that, as much as I liked the way that goths dress, it’s mostly about a music style which doesn’t speak to me in the slightest, and that in any case the idea of suborning my own sense of style to anyone else’s expectations of what I ought to look like or present myself was just sort of fundamentally ridiculous and loathsome to me.
Similarly, anyone who has known me for more than ten years – which is admittedly a vanishingly small list at this point – knows that this has not always been the case; my later days in high school were a process of experimentation for me, as they were for many people. In my case, I worked very aggressively to define myself along very personal lines so as to prevent anyone from being able to sort me into any group or clique at the time. One day I would show up in a suit and tie, wearing leather loafers and a briefcase. The next day, I would be dressed head to toe in bright green, including an elabourate facepaint design (which would come to be the foundation upon which my body painting skills would later be built). The day after that, a blue housecoat, tattered jeans, orange reflective safety vest and floppy brown leather hat. It was only very gradually that I fell into a single style which I felt comfortable with and which I felt represented me well to the world, and this is a style which to one extent or another I’ve stuck with ever since.
I’ve had any number of people attempt to dissuade me from this course, of which the most laughable was a horrendous little cretin named Jason Engel, who worked day and night to conform to every “goth” stereotype he could, and was among the most superficial adults I’ve ever met. He viewed my dressing exclusively in black as a sort of trespass into “his” territory, and one I wasn’t entitled to. He attempted to get me to dress more colourfully in the service of his own vanity. I laughed in his face and remained steadfast.
Today, I’ve had a friend attempt to get me to wear colourful t-shirts and bluejeans so as to make myself more superficially appealing to women. The thought was utterly repulsive to me; being told that in order to find that right woman, the thing to do was to toss aside my own individuality and sense of visual identity in favour of a sort of generic mediocrity; blending in with the anonymous and faceless crowd. I don’t deny that this might be effective if my intent was to find some woman who were attracted to the bland and the generic, and I needed some camouflage or disguise in order to deceive her into believing that I was one such person, but I daresay that this illusion, and the feelings built thereupon would be shattered quite swiftly the moment that I began to discuss virtually any topic with her. Besides which, what use would I have for such a woman? It would be a trying ordeal for me to be involved with such a lady, I fear, and a trying ordeal of a relationship, startling as it may sound, is not actually something I’m actively seeking out.
Besides which, there are practical concerns, ranging from the physiological to the psychological. My legs are twin pillars of rippling muscle, bulging against the world with seething power. There is a terrible cost to this, however; they also bulge against one another in a manner which is fairly destructive; as my thighs press against one another, the friction caused ends up destroying the inner thighs of any pants which I wear. Even this, though, is preferable to the fate which awaits me if I were to wear more durable pants; a pair of blue jeans would rub against my legs no less than my preferred slacks, but whereas slacks would give way, the heavy weave of jeans would cause my flesh to be worn away, leaving a pair of oozing blisters in their wake. Not only is the agony of this sensation – which is all too well-known to me – a significant disincentive to following this advice, there is the question of how attractive oozing and infected sores on my inner thighs would be to that prospective Miss Right.
Then there’s the psychological, and here I cite no less an authority than one Mr. Albert Einstein. Einsten decided early on in his life what fashion was comfortable and serviceable to him, and he stuck by it. So consistent was he, in fact, that he came upon a startlingly utilitarian approach: He simply bought dozens of identical suits, and they formed the entirety of his wardrobe. Every morning, he could simply pick any shirt, any pair of pants, any jacket, and not waste so much as a single moment, a single spare thought on the topic; there was no question of what mood he was in, what went well together or what the occasion was. This was a guy who had bigger fish to fry with his brain than a question of what to wear. “But Dave”, you may ask, “What about the ladies? What about making a good impression with the ladies? Don’t they demand of their suitors a sort of blind adherence to an arbitrary sense of style chosen for them, against their will, by the mindless pressures of the society around them? How could a man of even Einstein’s towering intellect possibly be a role model for you in this regard, given that he must logically have been a romantic failure in light of his decision to be happy with his own appearance, rather than abandoning his own principles in an effort to satisfy the mindless shrieking demands of the collective unconscious?”
Well let me tell you a little about that. Albert Einstein married his cousin Elsa. Most women would be like “Ick, no! I will not grant you access to my vagina! Incest is disgusting and wrong!” But Einstein, being the cockpunchingly pimpin’ guy that he was, was able to brush that shit aside and be all like “Shit, bitch! I’m Albert motherfucking Einstein! You gonna let a little thing like THAT get in the way of you gettin’ with my fuckin’ same-suited, no-haircut-gettin’, not-shavin’-my-moustachin’ self?” And she was all like “Aw, what the fuck.” Cause you know why? Because chicks dig confidence, that’s why. And a guy like that, as confident as he was of the way he looked and dressed and groomed himself had a lot going on in that regard.
I’m not trying to put myself in Einstein’s bitch-gettin’ league or anything here; he plainly had a great deal else going on that I could only ever asprire to. Why, he once had a three word conversation with William Golding!* What have I done that can compare to shit like that, right? But as far as role models go, I figure I could do a lot worse.
* This conversation, retold in Golding’s essay “Thinking as a Hobby”, took place atop a bridge over a small river at a time when Golding knew about one word of German, and Einstein knew about no words of english. As a fish swam under them, Golding remarked “Fisch”, thus expending the bulk of his german vocabulary. “Ja, fisch”, Einstein responded, entirely accurately (one presumes; in fairness I’m actually giving the two of them the benefit of the doubt here; they could have as easily mistaken a bit of garbage for a fish, in that neither of them are known to have been marine biologists of any repute).
A few years ago, I was living with a colossal douchebag named Aaron. He and I eventually grew sick and tired of one another (because this is the function of a room-mate), and he moved away to become a harbour hobo.
A harbour hobo is someone who lives in a boat and floats that boat just far enough off-shore that they're in, shall we say, communal waters, and as such doesn't need to pay rent to anyone. His theory was that he could get a loan, buy a houseboat, pay back the loan instead of paying rent, and then, once he had the boat paid off, he could live rent-free and have some collateral towards buying something which someone might conceivably want to live in. In the mean time, he would live in a little thirty foot box with his thirteen year old yowling, shitting, puking beast of a cat, floating out in the middle of the harbour for several years without electricity or the ability to have people over.
Aaron was kind of an idiot.
Amusingly enough, it seems that, as has so often been the case in his life, he's vastly overestimated his own abilities. In this case, predictably enough, he seems to have realized living in a floating box with no power and nowhere to dock kind of sucks, and has rented out some space at a marina. I know this because I've been getting mail from his marina at my place, some year and a half after his departure. I find this a trifle puzzling in light of the fact that he LIVES at the marina, and one would think that whoever is sending this mail could walk from the office to the boat and hand him the letter, rather than paying to have it sent to another city, and one which - and I feel this is an important element here - he does not in fact live in anymore.
In a fleeting moment of curiosity, I decided to try to figure out where he actually lived so I could have his letters and such sent there, and in the process of this, I checked out the marina in question and discovered, to my combination of amusement and seething contempt, that he's named his boat after his putrid, dying cat, after a fashion, and called it "The Cat's Meow." This, to me, is around as clever as naming his cat "Tigger" in the first place.
It did get me to thinking, though: If I were a boat owner, what would I call my own vessel? The answer came to me in a moment, and was blinding in its obviousness. I would call it "The Drowning Moron". I would then have a wooden masthead carved in the image of a drowning man, flailing about in the water, eyes wild and unfocused, and I would have it affixed to the front of my boat in such a way that the water line would be right around the mouth of the masthead, so that as my boat bobbed gently in the water, he would periodically surface and submerge in the water, his desperate, pleading eyes only occasionally meeting those of passers-by, his hands reaching out for aid he would never receive, because he is made of wood and physically connected to the boat along his hypothetical spinal column.
"Cat's Meow", indeed. Have a little dignity, you jackass. Name your boat something awesome or don't name it at all. If that's not one of the laws of the sea, if fucking well ought to be.
I seem to have reached a small breakthrough today, and one with possibly far-reaching consequences. You may recall a post from a few weeks ago in which I spoke on his ever-accumulating pile of filthy dishes in this sink. The resolution to that one came around a week later, when I confronted him on the topic and he claimed that the reason why he had gone more than a month without doing his dishes was that he simply "hadn't noticed" that they were there. I at the time expressed some skepticism on this count; how could a man who was attentive enough to consistently remember to get dressed before leaving the appartment not notice the pile of disgusting, mouldering dishes in the sink for over a month while continuing to pile new ones on top of them? Nevertheless, I decided today to test the theory here a little bit. We have a recycling bin which we keep on the balcony, and which theoretically we're supposed to take turns taking out whenever it gets full. In reality what takes place is that I take it out one day, and then, two or three weeks later, when it gets full, I point out to him it's his turn to do so, at which point it promptly begins to overflow all over the balcony for a month or two, during which I point out to him four or five times that it remains his turn to take it out. This time, however, proceeding from his premise that he lets these things go for so long because he doesn't notice them, I took the full bin, placed it directly in front of his bedroom door, and then stood back and listened.
A few hours later, he returned home and evidently noticed it almost straight away, and indeed, actually took it out almost immediately. A remarkable accomplishment! I was so proud of him I almost considered breaking my personal "never speak to Vince about matters not pertaining to bills" rule. It did put me in mind of a few additional applications of this tactic which in the coming days I plan on testing; placing the kitchen garbage bag in front of his bedroom door; possibly hanging from his doorknob. Placing his dirty dishes in a bucket outside of his bedroom, perhaps. And yet, there feels to me as though there may be limited applications here. How do I get him to vacuum up the piles of crumbs and leavings he leaves after eating on the couch in the living room? Do I pull up the carpet and place it, along with the vacuum cleaner, in front of his door? There comes a point where the impracticality of it stands in the path of my curiosity.
And how do I apply this to his other foibles? How do I put "Don't bring around your imbicile of a girlfriend" in front of his door? How do I put "It's your turn to buy the toilet paper, you unhygenic pig" outside of his door? How do I put his-not-falling-asleep-watching-DVDs-in-h
Well, alright, I suppose the answer to that last one is fairly obvious, but the notion of my taking it upon myself to carry his slumbering form from the couch and tucking him into bed is as repulsive as any four of his other shortcomings put together.
In the mean time, I do seem to have limited his DVD viewings slightly by keeping any new DVDs I purchase hidden in my living room after a debacle some weeks ago in which I bought a DVD of a comedy I'd wanted to watch and he managed to lose the disc - inside of the DVD player, I might add - before I ever got a chance to watch it, and then lied to me, pretending he had no idea where it went. I realize that to some extent I'm living in a fool's paradise here; I'm never going to keep him from this habit by limiting his available DVDs. If he had a single DVD - even one he dislikes as much as, for example, the Sarah Silverman program (whose depiction of women as being essentially equal to men repulses and enrages him) - he would still watch that one DVD five to ten times a week because he needs that sensory imput to drown out the howling void inside of his skull. All I'm doing here is denying him NEW motives to do so, though the 10-20% decrease in his viewing times is an acceptable pay-off as far as this goes. The fact that this also prevents him from ruining these new things I enjoy the way he's ruined so many others by watching and re-watching them so many times per month that I can no longer stand the sound or sight of them is a significant bonus.
I mentioned the other day that my hideous and repellant room-mate, Vince, has a girlfriend. This, I feel, is worth elabourating upon somewhat.
I call her Retard Girl, though I don't know her real name. I've never asked, and never been introduced. I've never called her this to her face, nor indeed spoken it out loud; it's merely the identifier I use when thinking about her within my own internal monolouge. If it seems peculiar that I've had so minimal a contact with a woman who's lately been in my home four or five days a week for the past couple of months, then perhaps I ought to step back a few paces and tell the tale of my first encounter with Retard Girl for the sake of context.
Vince had been living in my place for some months, and while he had failed to impress me, I was nevertheless not completely disgusted with him just yet. He had made plain that where women were concerned he was entirely amoral and without guiding ethics; he would brag about sleeping with his friends' girlfriends behind their backs, he would praise people for acts of infidelity and dishonesty with their own significant others, he would routinely become involved with women he felt nothing for on the most temporary of basis, and once made reference to a girlfriend of his by saying "I don't have a girlfriend, but I have a girl who would be pretty upset to hear me say that." In short, his attitudes and approach to women was so comprehensively repugnant that I could not imagine any girl who would voulentarily date him being the sort of person I would want to interact with. Besides which, I could tell - without ever having seen him with a woman - that the personal drama involved would be pretty striking in no time at all, and I had no desire whatsoever to be involved in their relationship in even the most peripheral of senses.
It is with this - among other things - in mind that I informed him of one of my personal rules of conduct: "I don't want to meet her, I don't want to speak with her, I don't want anything to do with her. So far as she's concerned, you have no room-mate, and as far as I'm concerned, you're single. I expect you to adhere to the same treatment if and when you should ever see me with a woman." He was a bit confused, and so I clarified somewhat that I just wanted to avoid any potential home-life-destroying drama, and this would be the easiest way to do so in this regard. Privately, of course, this was also a sort of insurance policy I wanted to establish to keep him from deciding he wanted to take a shot at any future girlfriend of mine, which he was even then plainly stupid and selfish enough to do. If he never spoke to them, I reasoned, he couldn't make a pass at them. He agreed at the time, and I was content with this.
Some hours pass, and I'm in the kitchen, cooking at the stove when I hear the front door opening. Out of my peripheral vision, I see it's Vince and he has someone short standing behind him with one of those feminine voices which rises at the end of each sentence as though she were asking a question, regardless of the nature of the sentence in question. One of the most repellently unintelligent-seeming affectations I've ever heard. I immediately realize that this is Vince's lady friend, and, true to my word, I ignore their arrival entirely, keeping my eyes rooted to the dishes in front of me, neither greeting them nor acknowledging their presence in any way. I looked forwards to them returning this absence-of-treatment and pass on to the living room or Vince's bedroom without interacting with me. Sadly, it seems my fool of a room-mate had failed to mention to her the arrangement we had agreed to some hours previously, and before long, she was standing next to me.
Talking to me.
Retard Girl: "Whatcha doooooing?"
Me: "I am cooking."
Retard Girl: "What're you cooooooking?"
Me: "The Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, a dish of my own concoction, and thus named after the Serbian Monarch whose assasination led to what we would come to know as World War 1."
Retard Girl: "Whaaaat's thaaaat?"
Me: "Which? The War or the meal?"
Retard Girl: "Eeeeeiiitheeeer?"
Me: "... World War One was a wide-scale military conflict taking place in Europe in the second decade of the Twentieth Century. Primarily involving the countries of..."
And here Vince stepped in to interrupt me, perhaps not wanting to have to sit through a lesson on the history of WW1 during the first date which had led to his girlfriend being within a few feet of his bedroom. I was content to leave it at that. Sadly, Retard Girl had other ideas (if indeed the products of the peanut rattling around in her otherwise empty skull could indeed be called "ideas" in any meaningful sense).
Retard Girl: "Can I have a huuuuuug?"
Me: "You may not."
Retard Girl: "Why nooooooot?"
Me: "Because I do not wish to give you one", I said, privately disgusted both by her naked attempt at drama whoring and at the thought of the number of guys who must surely exist out there who would fall prey to a ploy like this with all the subtlety of presenting her upraised hindquarters to them.
Retard Girl: "Is it because I'm tooooo uuuuglyyyy?" she asked in a pouty, little-girl 'comfort, console and indulge-me' voice.
Me: "I wouldn't know", I replied entirely honestly, "I haven't looked at you yet."
At this, she flew into a rage, screaming curses and insults at me. I replied mildly "If it pleases you to speak these words, then by all means speak them. It is of no significance to me." before Vince dragged her off to the bedroom.
She made another abortive attempt to speak to me some ten minutes or so later, once again asking me what I was cooking, evidently having forgotten our previous conversation. I was already tired of this situation, and asked Vince if he could explain to her why it was I was not engaging her in conversation. As he did so, I retreated to my bedroom, my thankfully-now-complete meal on a plate in my hands.
In the many months since then, it seems she's gotten the message; she's never again spoken to me, nor I to her, nor indeed have I ever looked directly at her. Every so often, though, I'll have the misfortune of hearing them in the living room as I'm in the kitchen. Perhaps they'll be watching Venture Bros, I cartoon series we have on the DVD shelf, and she'll be asking him to explain the plotline to her every ten seconds or so because it's too complicated for her to follow. Or on another occasion, she'll be watching Wildboyz with Vince as he watches it for the thirtieth or perhaps fortieth time, and he'll need to explain to her that a great white shark is a dangerous animal that has been known to eat people, and that's why the guys on the TV screen are afraid of it. With each passing instance of my having to hear her speak, my heart falls a little bit further, burdened down by the weight of the knowledge that the modern world could give rise to such a woman, and that Vince's personal standards are so low that she's the sort of gal he will voulentarily interact with her month after month. He talks about killing himself a lot while she's around, and I suppose I can't blame him for reacting this way to her, but that doesn't keep him from needing to speak on the phone with her some 80% of the time that she's not directly in his presence, essentially narrating his every thought and action to her over the phone because she requires this sort of constant attention and maintenance, presumably to continuously distract her from the vague but nagging impression that there's something amiss with the howling, empty void in her skull where any normal person houses their brain. It's just a shame that all she has to fill that void of thought is a retarded man-child like Vince.
They really do deserve each other. I just wonder if the world really deserves the horde of mentally retarded children they'll doubtless someday spawn together.
I've spoken a time or three on the topic of my dear room-mate Vince, and since it's a topic people seem fascinated by in a sort of horrified way, I see no reason why I ought to deprive you goodly folks of more tales of my amazing cohabitation with him that you, my gentle readers, can marvel at and in some small way appreciate further your good fortune in living with anybody else, or perhaps more fortunately yet, nobody at all.
This past month, I've been running a series of experiments. It began one month ago today, when I noticed that Vince had - as is his wont - left some dirty dishes in the sink. While as a matter of habit I have habitually cleaned up any such messes in the kitchen as a reaction to what I consider an ordinary adult aversion to seeing post-meal filth cluttering up the home, I decided this time I might like to try something a little bit different. This time I would leave it to Vince to handle on his own and see how long it would take him. He had, after all, demonstrated a truly epic level of sloth, self-indulgence and irresponsibility in so many other fields of late, I felt it was a valid field of inquiry, and one which the scholar in me felt a burning need to learn the answer to.
Days went by, and then weeks. The stench began to grow steadily stronger and stronger in the sink. A few dishes came and went, but there were a few "old regulars" like his blue-lidded Tupperware containers with noodle remnants and his glass full of some increasingly-scummy-milky substance (see picture, below). All the while, I kept on placing my own dishes and such in the dishwasher immediately next to the sink, keeping them carefully separate from those in the sink so as to keep the results of the experiment pure and pristine.
In the mean time, I set up a number of other experiments in series. "If the kitchen garbage bag is full to over-flowing, will Vince eventually take it out on his own, or will he leave it like that forever?", "If we run out of toilet paper, and I refuse to buy the new bag for the eighth time in a row, but rather keep a private horde in my bedroom for my own personal use, will Vince eventually clue in and buy some toilet paper without needing my prompting to do so?", "Will Vince ever take out the recycling when it's his turn, or will it just pile up over and around the recycling box forever?", "Will Vince run the dishwasher if I don't, or will he leave it full of dirty dishes forever", and "Will Vince wipe up that smear of blood on the bathroom counter that he or his girlfriend left, or will I need to do that for him". All were all topics of significant interest on my part.
Each of these, in their turn, ended with predictably disappointing results. He turned to using paper towels from the kitchen rather than purchasing toilet paper (paper towels which I had bought), he let the kitchen garbage bag overflow onto the floor, the blood on the counter ended up getting wiped clean incidentally when I was doing my routine cleaning of the counter in a moment of piquant disgust, the dishwasher went unused except for when I felt the need to run it to satisfy my own sanitary distress, and so on. He DID take out the recycling after just three weeks of it overflowing, and I took that opportunity to praise him for it, hoping that - like a dog - some positive re-enforcement might motivate him to further acts of hygiene. Sadly, this was not to be the case.
Today, one month in, the kitchen sink is largely full of his filth, many of the items having been there since day one and still there to this day, like old veterans still hanging around to tell these johnny-come-latelies that there WAS a day when the sink is clean, and NO our old minds aren't playing tricks on me, I was there damn it!
Vince can see this, day in, day out for a solid month without feeling any urge to clean it. He is more of a man than you'll ever be.
I have no particular desire to be his daddy, holding his hand and walking him through these rudimentary tasks, but I begin to feel that he lacks the necessary brain power to contribute anything but filth in the absence of something closely resembling parental guidance. Somehow, that critical part of the upbringing of a child where they learn that the household tasks that their parents teach them to do as kids are not merely for the parents' benefit but in order to inculcate them in the child just never happens with him, and as a consequence, he's incapable of functioning as an adult in this sense. When I tell him to do his chores, he seldom does them either, which tells me that he's not capable of functioning at the level of a child, either. A dog or a cat would know not to leave their filth in the area where they live and eat, and so he's incapable even of functioning at what I would consider a basic mammalian level. I would characterize his level of hygiene, thus, as somewhat akin to a worm or a maggot, who is content and comfortable living amidst their own filth.
This poses a bit of a conundrum for me: An adult, you can talk to about these things. A child, you can teach. An animal, you can train. A worm will never be anything other than a worm, though, and will never do anything but what a worm will do. Even a maggot will never be anything better than a fly, and I don't care for either, to be quite honest, and I begin to sense than in Vince, this is exactly what I'm forced to live with.
Perhaps in a short while I'll tell you folks about his truly magical girlfriend. The sort of woman who decides she wants Vince as her special guy is someone worthy of a tale or two herself, I can assure you.
Looking at some old photographs of myself, basking in the glory and radiant beauty of my own youthful visage, I came to a startling conclusion: Though the years have been in large part kind and my appearance has changed for the most part as little as you would hope perfection might, there is one trait which has - quite without my intention or notice! - changed appreciably.
My sideburns, it seems, have crept ever downwards and outwards, coming to dominate an ever-greater portion of my face. Now, while I neither begrudge nor bemoan this, as I rather like the look either way, I aknowledge a certain bias in this regard. And so I have decided to consult those people whose intellect and taste I trust the most: The people who like me and my work.
To wit: Sideburns: be they better whilst short or long? The results of this survey may have some small consequence vis a vis my personal grooming practices.
Update: After two days, by my count, the vote stands at five votes for longer, five for shorter, and thus we stand at a stalemate. I find it somewhat vindicating that opinions on this topic are broadly as divided as my own personal ruminations have themselves been. I believe I'm going to let this one stand for a while yet before make any decisions.
I swear I'm going to get back to doing entertainment-oriented posts in the immediate future, but for the moment, I feel that people may be entertained and horrified by the ongoing-and-seemingly-accelerating ridiculousness of my room-mate situation.
When last we checked in with Vince, he was pretending to be asleep while I was steam cleaning the apartment, including, most notably, the sections which he himself had said he considered it fair that he be tasked with cleaning. I say "pretending" because the notion that he could have slept through my working it back and forth immediately outside his bedroom for at least one of the five hours I spent doing his work for him, only to have woken up mere MOMENTS after I put the last of the furniture back in place, affecting surprise at the fact that I got the machine to work in the first place, since - and this was the new explanation, not proffered as of 6:30 AM when he went to bed - he was never able to get it to work, and THAT'S why he hadn't done any cleaning.
The past week, I've tried my best not to speak with him for more than a couple of seconds at a time, so as to avoid a screaming match and thus maintain the fragile, surface-deep illusion of domestic peace which I value so much. This morning, though, it seemed as though doing so was less valuable than asking him the following when I found him passed out on the couch in his underwear with the menu for a DVD of "TNA Wrestling" on the TV:
"What series of events, exactly, led to your hat being on my bed at some point in the night? I would like to know the nature of the interaction between you and my bed which brought about this situation, and why you thought it was a good idea that this interaction should take place."
His reaction was to stare blankly at me for a solid twenty seconds or so, the gears in his head audibly grinding against one another, before mumbling that he had no idea how it had happened, nor indeed how he came to be passed out on the couch watching old wrestling videos, and conceded that the situation was "Pretty fucked-up."
In light of the absence of empty beer bottles strewn about the apartment, I am forced to begin to consider the possibility that he may actually just be losing his mind. I seem to recall a time - and this was a time which was not too long ago - when my disgust with him was occasionally leavened with moments of tolerance and even contentment.
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- Dave Littler's New Deal
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