Sublet under RANT thread. lol
An excellent place for me to vent my particular spleen.
I live in a house with two other people. Men, to be specific. Which in itself suggests domestic mayhem and gross mismanagement... One of these so-called "men" is my junior by about 3 years which puts him at about 54 years old. Emotionally he's about 19 (which makes him my senior in that regard). He looks very much like a gaunt version of Philip K. D-ick without the smarts. The other guy's a college student. Perhaps you'll hear more about him at some future date. Maybe not; he tires me.
The PKD lookalike tends to be forgetful and may be suffering from incipient Alzheimer's. Who knows? He certainly doesn't. One of his peccadilloes is to put something on the stove like water or SpaghettiO's and retreat to his room where he promptly forgets about the kitchen foray until it either boils away entirely or becomes a caramelized mash. Abstractly speaking, this mash looks like it could be somewhat appealing for those with a sweet-tooth and a penchant for carbon but it's always on the liminal edge of being a fire hazard. Not a few times have I walked in the door and seen smoke issuing from the kitchen; once there was even a respectable little fire going. Now, I live in a room filled with books and my manuscript novel-- which I've been plugging away at for the better part of the last ten years--and the prospect of coming home from a day in the trees* and seeing my passions going up in a blaze of glory scares the bejesus outta me. I've cajoled, threatened, and wept before this PKD lookalike to try to remember the deadly combination of gas stove, rampant steam and/or flames, and isolation in one's bed chamber when he engages in culinary activities to no avail. I suggested Postit Notes on his goddamned computer to help his failing memory. So. The other day I come home and see this massive pot on the stove. It's still going through the last moments of a phase transition between extreme heat and room temperature. And what may this be?, I think to myself. I take a peek. It's a pot full of boiled eggs... blackened, cracked, carbonized eggs nestled in a begrimed pot. The inner edge of the pot looks like a post-attack trench on the Maginot Line. Some of the eggs seem to be hissing at me, like Dragon's eggs, and the others are all moribund and glazed like Easter eggs from Hell. I trot down the hall and say (through the door), [Insert PKD's real name here], have you been "cooking" again? Silence. I pause, draw breath and ask what the Dalai Lama would do in this situation. I opt to forgo the Enlightened Path and say in a quiet tone: One of these days you're going to put us on the street, you know, and I swear I'll crack your pate like one of those goddamned boiled eggs. He chuckles... Then I chuckle. We chuckle. I shake my head--shamed at the violence of my imagery--go to my room and log on my Burglar hobbit and kick the crap out of some orcs until I feel better.
Bully, let's move in together somewhere. I'll stay in my room, you'll stay in your room and we can live happily ever after.
* Despite my being a lowly Australopithecus, I don't dwell in trees because of some archaic evolutionary proclivity--I inhabit trees simply due to the fact that I trim trees to pay my rent for the dump I actually dwell in.