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oday I focused less on the
house as a whole and attacked the clutter within my room. I went
methodically through my drawers (which all contain different flavours of
the same basic kind of chaos, though some were more rich in paperwork and
others were more rich in electronic stuff), sorting things into the
following basic categories:
- electronic junk (small stuff)
- pennies (red money: a large vitamin bottle full)
- quarters, nickels, dimes and Susan B. Anthony Dollars (white money: a
half a paper coffee cup full)
- small tools
- large tools (I had amazingly little difficulty figuring out what was a
large tool and what was a small tool)
- art supplies
- writing equipment
- personal items (razors, deodourant, mouthwash) - a very small box
indeed
- large personal paperwork and a few remaining books (a milk crate)
- a few remaining large electronic devices
- small personal and official paperwork, photographs and cassettes
- large official paperwork
- removable digital media
- clothes (two 30 gallon trash bags full)
When I wasn't upstairs in my room, I could be found downstairs poking
through the mostly packed-up kitchen for things to eat. The kitchen and
the bathroom are busy places these days. The enormous population of the
Kappa Mutha Fucka end times translates into the not-especially happy fact
that at any one time someone is taking a shit or a shower while someone
else is cooking up a bowl of ramen or boiling a hotdog.
The large number of people simply hanging out in my household makes it
psychologically difficult for me to clean. I have this anxious feeling as
people sit around drinking downstairs (or even just smoking on the porch),
that they might be undoing my hard-won gains against the force of entropy.
I feel like I need to babysit them. They're always drunk, bored, or all
of the above. The Boy Jesse,
especially, gets fidgety and starts inflicting damage on inanimate objects
in such situations. I get to feeling so stressed out that I need to
escape. You see, I can hang out with them for a time, but when I'm bored
with socializing, or when I can take the stress no more, I have a whole
world of virtual pursuits available to me, gratifying to several degrees
of immediacy. There has been no age like this one, when I can throw
together a few paragraphs, upload it onto the Internet and know a dozen
people will have seen it before I've even left the computer lab. There's
inevitably a kind of arrogance that accompanies such power, but it's
tempered by the reality that I'm not a real celebrity, that I still depend
on my unemployment checks (however fraudulently won) for my life force,
for my ability to get what I need to keep me going. The Internet is
young, and I'm still just a nobody. I have to admit that I enjoy
attention from even the most random of strangers. I don't always respond
to my email, but it still provides something my inner-rejected-adolescent
desperately needs. I'm loath to admit this, especially since it's not the
usual experience of an online journal-keeper, but, there it is. I haven't
been self-referential in a while, so this is appropriate. And
I'm wishing I was in love too, but that issue is too complicated to
address in this shoddy imperfect forum.
n the evening, people came
in waves. In the first wave I was entirely sober, and I was irritated
that so many people of various stages of drunkenness were mingling in my
house. Populations of the kind I was seeing are the kind that can't help
but inflict damage upon a carefully tidied house. Across the room I told
Jessika, "It would be great to
hear that 'the party' was happening elsewhere." Heading out the door, he
responded that it was up to me to kick out the merry celebrants,
leaving me with Peggy & Baboose, Joanna Road
Rage, Jatasya, Cecelia the Brazilian Girl (no doubt strung out
on Ray Robot's mother's pills) and, finally, Ray Robot, infamous for
destroying things just for the attention it wins him - negative though it
be - thinking he's acting like a cryogenically cool party animal. The
others: Morgan Anarchy, the Boy
Jesse and Johnny Boom Boom, all
swish-swashed back and for between home and the JPA Fastmart as their
alcohol came, was drunk, and needed to be purchased yet again.
was in my increasingly
Zen room, watching a show on The Learning Channel about circus freaks,
when Wacky Jen and Kirstin the Ecoradical
showed up. They were on a beer run, one they soon canceled after the
disappearance of Ray Robot and his entourage. There ended up being a big
congestion of us in the front yard, partaking of meaningless socializing
as usual, much like last night, though without a barbecue. Matthew, one
of Deya's former co-workers from Rebecca's Natural Foods (where Deya no
longer works) was there as well. He asked us if our house was always this
crazy, and we thought about it for a moment and decided that it was.
fter disappearing into my
room again for a protracted period, I resurfaced and found the house empty
with the exception of Deya and Jessika, just then going to bed. But
Jessika came into my room instead and we sat around talking about stuff.
I told her that I've been trying to keep my life very simple, avoiding
every possible annoying pitfall, but that it's reduced me to a nothing
person, a stick figure.
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