Confessions of a Fart-Eater

31 Dec-3 Jan:
Carl brews ayahuasca for 12 straight hours, enough to fill 40 mason jars with brown goop. It is conjectured the fumes from this activity, coupled with months of intense DMT abuse, are what set him off. He is partying New Years Eve with Matt and the neighbors. Then he is sitting, pensive. They ask him to go get cigarettes for them. Minutes later, they hear roaring outside. When they go down to investigate, he is harassing passers-by. They coax him inside, and he is manic. Everyone says he is acting crazy, and are instantly labeled "intolerants" and "close-mindeds" who are against him. Carl is awake the next 4 days without food, becoming increasingly manic.

4 Jan:
I return home. There is barf in my sink, barf in my toilet, barf all over my trash can, my liquor and soda is all drank, my food is gone; all owing to Matt the leech. My furniture is upset, my laundry detergent has been poured on walls and random scattered clothing, my printer has been used to make color copies of craziness; all owing to Carl. I assume nobody is home, and I go to my room. Minutes later, I hear somebody creeping about, and it turns out to be Carl sneaking around like a ninja. I quickly realize he's crazy and use manipulation to earn his trust and friendship. I retire to my room to try to get away from his incessant blather. SWAT team comes. We are both released. Carl insists he wants to get away from the hostile neighbors, who he is sure called this in, as soon as possible. The police tell him he can't move out until he's slept the night. I go to bed and sleep, despite being able to hear Carl outside shouting at strangers and wrangling them into philosophical debates.

5 Jan:
Carl's door is closed and his "important stuff" is gone. His car is gone. I assume he moved out in the night. I get a call at work from Alex, the apartment manager. I tell him everything I know (nothing new), which he later relates to the police. I come home, and things are as they were, except: a closet door is opened, the one that holds Carl's hunting rifle. The rifle is still inside. Also, Matt's XBox 360 is missing now. Matt is still missing, and at the time I think it's because he knows I'm pissed that he trashed the place. It later turns out that he's hiding out at his mother's because he's afraid Carl will come back with the assault rifle he took.

That night, I wake up in the middle of the night and I can hear a door repeatedly slamming inside the apartment. I hear a second door being rattled in its hinges. The apartment is ice cold for no apparent reason. I reach for my pistol and leave to investigate. The balcony door has been sucked open by the wind and is slamming against the railing, so I close it and lock it. Carl's door is still rattling. I creep up to it; there is freezing-cold air pouring under the door, and I realize his window is open and the wind is shaking his door. It's locked, and I can do nothing about this.

6 Jan:
A leasing agent from the apartment office confides in me that the police have told them Carl is in the hospital. He tells me the apartment manager let a detective in (without a search warrant or my permission) and he established that Carl was "making drugs".

Shortly after coming home from work, there is a loud banging at the door, and my heart stops. I mentally flash back to the SWAT team. It's the apartment manager (Alex), and I let him into Carl's room because I need him to close the window and turn off the fan. He asks me if I know where Carl is, even though he already knows (I say No). He asks me if I knew he was making drugs (I say No). He tells me to let him know if Carl comes back, and I emptily promise to.

10 Jan:
Carl comes back with his M4 carbine and his psycho ex-Marine buddy to get some stuff he needs, including his hunting rifle and shotgun. He asks me to help him bring stuff out to the car, and I tell him it's not a good idea to be seen with him. He asks why, and I tell him the police know he was making DMT and they suspect me as an accomplice. He tells me to watch the door while he destroys evidence. For two hours. His room door locks have been changed, so he fireman kicks the door open and grabs some jars. He and his friend dump out the 40 jars in the toilet and kitchen sink, then pour vinegar and salt and hydrogen peroxide in them, then run several loads of them in the dishwasher, then stomp them on a blanket out on the balcony. I think stomping 40 glass jars will make somebody to call the cops, but it doesn't.

While this is going on, he relates to me what happened after he disappeared. There was a patrol car surveilling the place to make sure Carl didn't escape, but he snuck out without being detected. Then he was driving away, and someone was tailgating, so he slammed on his brakes and caused the guy to rear-end him. He got out, roared like a lion, and punched out the guy's window. He didn't hurt the guy, but stomped around roaring until the police came. The police tazed him and commited him to the psych ward of a VA hospital. He was released after 5 days, because they couldn't (or were too lazy to) hold him longer. He has been unable to locate his car.

Carl rants about how the neighbors called the cops, which has been privately admitted to me to be true. I plant the idea in his head that it was Matt, because I hate Matt, and he runs with it. He tears down Matt's poster and throws it out.

Then he grabs my book on ninjas and leaves with all the broken glass in a bindle, which he dumps in one of the dumpsters on the premises.

11 Jan:
Carl's father comes to the apartment office to do damage control. He has flown here from upstate NY to help him out. He moves out all Carl's stuff, cleans up the place, and pays for the damage. Carl arrives escorted to look for stuff he's missing, sees Matt, and says "I better go." Matt sees this behavior, and having already seen the torn-up poster, realizes he's on Carl's bad side.

Alex calls me up to tell me all this, and to assure me that Carl has never been here unescorted. He tells Matt that Carl kicking down the door is a vicious rumor he doesn't appreciate. More outright lies. He says Carl will never come back. Right...

Carl's father apologizes to the neighbor, who is understandably concerned about Carl being back, saying "Sorry, he gets like this sometimes." Which opens up the possibility that this is some schizophrenic relapse. Later, one of the neighbors will tell me that he admitted to having been a pathological liar before he entered the military. I can tell it's coming back, because he told me his father was a lawyer (really a community college teacher) and some other tall tales, and his friends are all coming out of the woodwork to trade stories and realizing he's woven a fairly intricate web of deception. He asks for money, claiming he's got all these sources of income and pension money, but he's got a mountain of unpaid medical bills and speeding tickets and owes $10,000 for the crew that salvaged his ship wreck.

He had told me the boat burned down accidentally (here's the newspaper article). Later, drunk, he confessed that he burned it down for the insurance money (unsuccessfully).

13 Jan:
The apartment manager tells Matt to move to Building 9, but he refuses. It's not clear whether he wants Matt to move in with other "problem tenants" or he doesn't want to be liable when Carl goes ballistic on him. The neighbors and I conspire to get Matt out, because he leeches off us and trashes our shit and brings bad people here and never shuts up.

I stage a schizophrenic breakdown. I make a sacrificial altar using Matt's XBox 360, throw apples everywhere, balance strange things on other strange things, leave Carl's insane scribblings everywhere, and dump baking soda everywhere and wet it. Matt bangs on my door and demands to know what happened. I use a "screaming chicken" dog toy inventively to imitate the sound of a baby being tortured. He screams "Why do I hear a fucking baby in there?" I turn my Greek Rempetiko music up deafeningly loud, and I can hear him out there cursing and pacing. Later I come out dressed to go the gym, but with a trenchcoat over it and my hair messed up. He starts up with me and I shout him down, repeating some of the same things that Carl said. "YOU GAVE ME MY VOICE! YOU TAUGHT ME HOW TO SPEAK!" I leave, and Matt is stricken with terror.

He thinks I may just be addicted to crack, so I continue the act when I get back, reaching ever more manic heights.

16 Jan:
Perfect timing. At 2:43 a.m., Carl comes back, again with his baby nestled under his trenchcoat: a gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed, selective fire, shoulder-fired weapon with a telescoping stock. He knocks on the neighbor's door, but puzzingly not on ours. He is probably looking for things in their apartment he couldn't find in ours. They refuse to let him in, and call Matt frantically to warn him to get out. Matt is sleeping and ignores their calls.

The next day I proudly break the news to him. He doesn't see its immediate relevance, being that Carl knocked on the neighbors' door, so I drop an unsubtle hint that the move to Building 9 was suggested for his own safety, and that Carl told me he wasn't done "taking out the trash". His eyes bulge wide, and 5 minutes later I hear him leaving. I assume he is hiding out somewhere, waiting to leech a car ride off someone so he can get his stuff relocated.

The police raided our house yesterday. See, Carl has been doing sleep deprivation the past 4 days and he's gone beserk, thinks he's a superhero. The neighbors called the cops and said he's got a gun and is going crazy, which is true in word but not in spirit. He does have an assault rifle in the closet and is wearing a black robe and yelling at all strangers that walk by about how he's part of a cosmic chess game. But he is not threatening anyone. And he's not naked under the robe; underneath he's got a Thundercats shirt and boxer shorts. He believes Thundercats has mystical significance because it came out a week before he was born; he never watched it until recently, and now realizes it's a divine message addressed to him personally. Consequently, he bought 15 of the same Thundercats shirt from Walmart. It's his new uniform because he is a lion like Jesus Christ was, a warrior for God.

I didn't think much of any of this until I heard banging on the door and then, "Austin Police everyone out NOW!" First Carl was yanked out, then I was pulled outside, directed onto the ground and questioned. I watched two teams, coming up one from each stairwell, with riot shields and riot gear.

"Do you want to hurt anybody?"
"Because you haven't come to me with physical aggression, I don't feel the need to return physical aggression. You're all coming at me with mental aggression, which is why I am mentally aggressive. You see how I fight every question, every lie, with pure truth. I am invincible because I battle you with the Word, a perfect weapon. You see I have in my robe a sword and a Bible. Which do you think is more powerful? Everyone seems to think it's the sword. You probably feel more threatened by the sword, but--"
"Do you have any urge to harm yourself?"
"No, I'm a warrior. I'm on fire for God right now. What you don't get is that every--"
"Are you on any drugs or medication?"
"No! I am high on life right now. I understand you understanding me understanding you."
"Do you see anything I can't see right now?"
"Oh my God yes! I see life at a higher level than you're seeing it right now. Like I see everything. How it all fits together. Like Buddha, he says we all have the capacity--"
"Okay, I'm not asking about insight, I mean are there any weird creatures or voices that you can see or hear."
"Oh, no, no. It's not like creatures."

The officer keeping a watch on me, who had been rolling his eyes the entire conversation, motions for me to get on my feet and go back inside. While Carl was blathering on, they were searching the place for unregistered weapons. One can safely assume they saw the bong and quarter pound of marijuana but didn't care. Too much paperwork. They didn't even arrest him; he was so annoying that they just wanted to leave ASAP. (I today found out that he has an arrest warrant out--even then, none of the 10 officers elected to bring him in for it). Afterward he would claim that he remained perfectly calm because he had given himself up to God's will, and obviously God was protecting him from injustice. Because he's a Thundercat. I mean, a lion. Which is why his meditation consists of roaring at himself in the mirror for hours. Well, more like a servant lion. Because his name means "dog" in Mandarin, so he's God's faithful dog. Except he's also Batman. Batman mixed with Two Face, because his duality is ejaculate winding its way down to his core being.

A dog lion thundercat batman two-face. In a robe. With a sword and a Bible. Claiming to be fasting through a mouth full of my cheese and crackers.



It's okay though, because I'm a character in his book. Which is going to be a movie, too. Hello, Hollywood!

Valerie: there are prositutes a few blocks away but everyone pretty much minds their business
Vargtimmen: ha, canadian prostitutes?
Vargtimmen: lookin fer a nice time, eh?
Vargtimmen: yer not beaver patrol, are ya?
Vargtimmen: cuz u have to tell me aboot that

Vargtimmen: when did you lose your edge
Valerie: I HAVE EDGE
Vargtimmen: really did you buy some from Etsy

[NAME REDACTED]: My dad just found out i've been kissed.
Vargtimmen: hahahah he knows you've been raped

"Every time we're shattered, we get to piece ourselves together however we want." My systems are 58% back online. I like how I'm coming out so far, this time.

If I couldn't sleep through anything, I'd have awoken to the sound of a TV crashing to the ground from the third floor balcony, with my two roommates peering down and grinning like jackasses. Or to Matt shouting rap lyrics loudly over his already-loud rap music. But I can; I can sleep through anything. And I can leap to attention if my name is called; I can be dressed and armed in seconds if the proper sequence of words is uttered: "[My name], help!"

What wakes me up is usually not from without but within. I never don't have nightmares. They are almost all variations on the same few themes: running from the police or security guards; being pursued perilously high into the roof of a tower which is poorly constructed like a retarded treehouse whose slanted wooden floor sways in the breezes up high; pursued (sometimes naked) through the sewers, abandoned mental hospitals, boiler rooms, oil-caked factory floors. Maybe this is why the climax scene of The Third Man holds so much power for me: the psychopath (me?) in the sewers with fingers reaching impotently up through the drainage grate, final heavy breaths tangible as wisps of vapor.

A marquee advertises "Mutant ass-monsters." The tiles are all smashed and smeared with caked orangey-brown grime. There are old tubs cracked and filled with leaves and dirt. The walls are lined with green chipped paint lockers, many of which are kicked in, hanging off, or left ajar. I find a full-length mirror, probably made for inspecting ones own muscles. I lean closer and stare deeply into my own jaundiced-looking eyes in said mirror. It is disturbing to see the windows to your soul covered in birdshit--in this case, dead leukocytes, felled in battle by an insidious threat to the integrity of my organism.

My todo list sits in my Dropbox, each save version-controlled, my life progress now plottable as changesets. A resume once proudly proclaiming my 10-key speed; then, typing speed; now, learning speed. Soon: mutation speed? operations per second? What will be chic during the coming war against the machines?

The hit song when I was born was by "Ready for the World". I feel like this and the existence of Beartato are secret winks from God reassuring me that He, an uncaring Lovecraftian meta-God in charge of running this simulation, does in fact exist. He can be represented, unlike your Christian God: He is just the eye on top of the dollar-bill pyramid. The Eye blazes and looks angry and looks pleased all using just the eye area to express these emotions. At the black center of The Eye is ℵ₀, the originator god who created the god that created the god ... that created the necessary physical constants for the mixed-valance tensors applied to Riemannian Geometry used to create the simulation we exist within. The Eye could dispose neatly of us, rip us apart in neutrino annihilation, or inflict infinite consciousness on us, our mindhole violated repeatedly for all eternity by shadow tormentors who identify themselves only as "Three interested Cenobites, as if it's any of your business."

Which begs to weigh itself to bear upon a question... when you're not inside your crackden, author, where prithee art thou? The answer, of course...

Austin: There are iridescent black birds (grackles) in numbers approaching 1000, in places all over the city (especially grocery stores); the sounds they make are hilarious whoopings. There's a strip club flashing "XXX"; next door, a pet store with a neon purple sign that says "LIVE NUDE FISH". I was tricked into going to Chili's, and I told the waiter "I'm sorry, I think this might be Diet Coke instead of Coke Zero." He picked up the plastic beer stein and chugged the entire thing, then slammed it gently on the table. "Well that's our Coke Zero, at least. Could I get you something else?" No, no you couldn't. You're beautiful just the way you are.

People come up to me and say "You seem like the picture of mental health, maybe you could give me some pointers on mental health." You know who you are (there are three of you). Well let me tell you about the key to happiness. It's called buying strawberry syrup and stirring it into a can of Barq's. This is the only beverage that meta-God drinks. It goes down harsh but pulls back nice. I plan to drink it right into my tomb, and leave my stack of soda cans as grave goods. Aluminum depleted in 2570 AD, my tomb will make some robber very wealthy.

We got a new roommate from Portland who moved in and moved right back out. I was excited because he was a cleanly person like me. Matt hated him because the pretentious West Coast elitist faggot clearly looked down on him and his hood lifestyle. A week later, I noticed all his stuff was missing from the cabinets. Nobody knew anything about it. It was a total mystery, he had just vanished without a word. Then Matt, when high, admitted to things which clearly indicated he had caused this to happen, but which he insisted could not have been the reason. Apparently Matt had been leaving his music loud, got yelled at it to turn it down, turned it down only a little, got yelled at again, ad infinitum. For several nights. And by the end, Portland was just coming out and stopping to stare him down. But Matt locked eyes with him, staring more intensely, eyes glinting like a homicidal maniac.

After this admission of Matt's, Carl told us the juicy news: he ran into Portland that very day, and Portland said "Oh, they put me in the wrong unit [bullshit, he paid for a transfer because he didn't like Matt]. My new unit is all gay men, two of which are a couple." So if Portland has sound issues, I wonder how he's going to deal with being kept up all night by raucous homosex.

At least they'll be cleaner than we.

So now I've got two ex-girlfriends obsessed with me stalking my LJ. And an ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend stalking me, and random faggot from Nashville stalking me. I'm going to f-locked after this post, so y'all are going to have to be my friend before you can read what my friends read.



I spent this weekend exactly how I wanted to, and it was awesome. On Saturday I slept all day and then went barhopping before settling on Champions to see the UFC fight. Georges St. Pierre demolished that little bitch Josh Koscheck. I stayed up until 5am playing King's Table and chess, taking every game. Then Sunday I slept late, woke up and made delicious eggs. I carried a three-person couch on my back up to the third floor, from its home by the dumpster, and covered its cracked faux-leather with a huge blanket tucked into the cushion corners. Matt's plan had been to set it on fire if we found bugs in it (he has a near-psychotic phobia of insects), but I couldn't find any nests. Then I put on shorts and sneakers and played soccer for a few hours with strangers in the cold. Then we got back and watched nature documentaries about fluffy downy baby owls learning to fly, while stoned out of our gourds on a super-comfy couch, sipping pumpkin and sugar cookie egg nog mixed together, and Sam Adams Winter Lager.



Fuck y'all haters telling me I need to get out of this situation. Out of being alone, not accountable to anyone, surrounded by loosely-moralled men who look up to me and do shit for me for money. By loosely-moralled women who build eyes at me.

I'm the lucky one.

I didn't see much of Matt at first. It would be clear from later episodes that he wasn't somebody who hung around long; rather, his MO is to blow in like a hurricane, wreck shit, and disappear just as swiftly as he came. He sweats through all his clothes and tosses them all over the house, and asks us if we have any clothes he can change into. He's a parasite, one that comes and consumes all it can get away with before moving onto another host, coming back later once the rotation has finished. Most of the night he spends at his "boy's" but sometimes he'll be just too lazy to go anywhere after work.

One night he came back here after work, he brought over an MS-13 member with him, a Mexican man tatted from head to toe. Who was strung out on planks (Xanax). And who stole Carl's deaf friend's cell phone, which doesn't have even have voice service. After he copped it he said "All right, holla at you later" and slipped out. The deaf friend noticed it was gone and told Matt, who went chasing after the guy. Matt is fat and sweaty and gross and stopped to catch is breath as the Mexican darted behind a building. Just then 4 black men came out of nowhere and jumped him. He returned with two black eyes and the crap just, completely kicked out of him. They stole all his money and drugs. He's said he's been robbed twice before, so he's no stranger to getting his ass kicked. He came back and spit blood in my toilet for a while, then his sweet old mother arrived and tried to coax him back home.

"Please Matthew, come home with me. Please, just come home."
"Fuck you Mom, you're a bitch. No Mom, you're a bitch. I'm not coming home."

He stormed out, and his mother apologized to us on his behalf. I did and didn't feel bad for her.

Another night, a Monday, he decided to remain here for the evening. We all went over to the neighbor, who had offered to "smoke us out". They pass around joints, then roll up blunts and start passing blunts, then doing gasmasks (hands cupped over mouth with 4 blunts held between fingers). Then they request a bong and start passing that. They erased a gallon-sized bag of hydroponically-grown marijuana in an hour or two. I only took a hit from a joint, and nothing beyond that; there was no need; the entire room had been fishbowled, and the contact high enough to make me feel like The Scarecrow had just sprayed his aersolized neurotoxin in my face. Matt, being the leech he is, was taking every hit every single time something was passed. Not even being in good with these (to him) strangers.

And the entire time, Matt pestered for connections/free samples for harder drugs. Daveed, the drug-dealer next door, has made it clear time and time again that he does nothing but weed because other stuff "ruins lives". He doesn't want to be in the loop with any of that. Matt presses on, asking about sherm, oxycontin, blotter acid, crack, & al., Daveed's answer not clear enough to him. Daveed gets weepy-eyed and launches into story about how he escaped gang life in Houston by coming to Austin, living as a drag rat (homeless teenage bohemian party-kid living near UT campus), bouncing back from a downward spiral of hard drugs, and reducing his addictions to just weed to the exclusion of other chemicals.

"I can't let that come near my life. I just remember not being able to walk down the street as a child. I remember being shot at as a 7 year old, just because of who my father was. You know how people rap about guns like they got guns? My whole family had just, chest and chests of guns, submachine guns, heavy weapons. I'm an outcast from my family now, for turning my back on gang life. I came here after my father's murder, I was shattered and just had to put my foot down. After I cleaned myself up from the hard stuff, I decided to smoke weed 24/7, so I can't remember the things I've been through. I only sell enough to keep myself high 24/7. I don't want anything for myself, I don't believe in the value of possessions. I have friends. I don't have a car, you can see my bedroom has nothing but a bed. I'm just here keeping to myself. I don't want any attention drawn to me. I don't sell directly, I only sell to my friends who flip it to people who flip it. I don't keep cash or good on hand, the cash gets banked and the good gets flipped. If you're interested in flipping, I can sell you a QP (quarter-pound) at very least to start off. Just so you can buy a car--although when I was a footsoldier I went by foot and bus and totally pulled it off. After that you need to buy larger quantities. And don't let anyone know I'm here; I know you know people. I keep people around me, you can see that for yourself. And I stay strapped, though I don't like violence. I mean I didn't even hurt that crackhead, I just subdued him."

Here, referencing a story told previously, about "why he doesn't mess with crack". Just last week, in typical bohemian fashion, they carelessly left the front door unlocked. At 3am a crackhead walked in and started banging on bedroom doors looking for product. Together they managed to restrain him and shove him out.

Daveed pauses to think for a bit, reconsidering the beauty of having protection instead of idly boasting about having imaginary protection (2 stoner chicks and 2 stoner dudes who play Fat Princess all day).

"I'm kind of a free agent now... I guess I would be looking for a gang just to have my back in case people start shit. I'm not interested in rivalries, I'm a real live-and-let-live kind of guy. Do you know anyone?..."

Matt, never missing an opportunity for idle boast: "Son, all but two of my friends are gang members. I know 3 bloods, 1 crip--"

"Oh I wouldn't fuck with either of those... Listen, actually, let's discuss this at another time." Minding Carl's and my presence. Softening towards Matt only slightly, he agrees to text a connect for ecstasy with Matt's number and a voucher for him.

The rap now is chopped and screwed. It feels like time has slowed down to nothing. The ceiling fan oscillations are like discrete states, like my brain is a strobe light. My concept of self is a single femtosecond slice of existence I inherited from my past self and am willing to my future self; I am playing telephone with the other notions of self that make up this timeline. I tell my past self he's an asshole for being such a poor caretaker of his femtosecond slice and shrug my shoulders to my future self, as if to say "I did the best I could during my brief tenure." Eventually experiential frequency slows back to to 60 Hz, and the illusion of continuity of existence is restored.

"Why doesn't the smoke detector go off?"
"Oh, we took the battery out."

As we're ushered out, it being determined that we'd leeched enough for one night, I spot what is clearly dried spackle over an enormous hole in the wall.

"Were you here when this hole got knocked through the wall?"

"Nah, but when I moved in there was blood all over the ceiling. Like, more than could be lost and still live..."

"Why don't you put the pull-up bar in the empty room's doorway, that way you can keep your room locked? How did you even have that room open, anyway?"

Carl (as it turns out my roommate is named) hesitates. Then: "Are you a cop?"
I look over at my bong and then back at him. "Yes."

He sighs. "I learned lockpicking when I was in the Navy."

"Teach me?"

With a torsion wrench and a rake pick, I managed to break a padlock, then the bedroom lock. I hope to progress to a half-diamond pick soon, as raking pins doesn't require much finesse.

After I was satisfied that I had made enough progress, I asked him to show me how to make DMT. Like a druggie Martha Stewart, he had a batch of the crystals at every stage of their synthesis to show me. Here's the powder. Here's the goop jar. Here's the goop jar with acid. Here's the goop jar with flammable liquid added. Here's a tray of the final product. This tiny flake is all it takes to "rip my soul of my body and shoot it beyond the stars."

I thought we'd be able to enjoy it being just us, at least the first month, but my hopes were dashed a couple weeks into the lease. I was showering and someone started banging on the bathroom door, shouting "Yo! Yo!"

"Give me a second, I'm in the shower."

He continues hollering inaudibly. I yell that I can't hear him with the water running and to just wait. He persists.

I mutter a curse under my breath and shut off the water. I step towards the door and ask what he wants.

"I gotta go to work and they want me to fill out this move-in report and I don't know what to--"

"Give me one second, I'll be right out." He continues talking and pacing outside instead of waiting patiently.

I step out in a towel and ask him what's the emergency. He looks strikingly like a dirtier and less-charming version of Turtle from Entourage. Caucasian, with a ghetto swagger and constipated-looking face. "Yo nigga, name's Matt and I'mma live in this room next to ya, 'cept I gotta go to work and they want me to fill out this shit I don't even know what to put what the fuck is a lavatory this shit is gay what the fuck is you spose'ta--"

"You're supposed to put the condition next to each item."

He looks around. "Nawww, this place is tight. Everything look nice."

I point to a spot on the sink where the metal has been stabbed through. "If you don't write that down, the pricks are going to blame you and charge you for a new sink."

"Sheeet, for serious? That's gay as hell, dawg. I don't got no time for this, like I said I gotta be at work and I don't got time to write a fucking book about this place, they said I gotta do it in 48 hours and after work I'm running with my homeboys and I'm not going to have time to--"

"All right, all right, I've already filled mine out, I'll just fill yours out with the same information. Sound good?"

"Aww yeeeeh that'd be tight. Say you gotta car? Cuz I need a ride to work. No? What about this guy, this guy have a car? Awww, I don't want to be late." He continues this way, talking unceasingly while complaining that he's going to be late. He says if he could afford a car then he'd be a bigshot delivery guy for Domino's instead of just a cashier. He is clearly way too old to not be able to afford a beater.

Somehow "ground rules" come up. I tell him that Carl and I have agreed to turn a blind eye to anything but murder.

"What about rapin'?" Matt asks.

"Uhhh, I genuinely had not given it that much consideration. I guess don't do murders or rapes."

"You do rapes?"

"No, I hadn't planned to do any raping. I usually don't have difficulty finding women willing to sleep with me."

"What about Carl? He do rapes?"

"He seems like a pretty nice guy, so I'm guessing no. He was in the Navy and never even slept with a prostitute. His friends actually set him up with a threesome--two Thai girls willing to do anything he wanted--and he was too much of a gentleman to even be able to perform."

"Word? I'da been like WHAM WHAM WHAM and WHACK WHACK WHACK..." he went on, pantomiming without leaving much to the imagination. I got the impression subtlety wasn't his strong suit.

Finally moving on, he asked about drugs. "Nobody's going to care. The guy across the hall is a drug dealer."

"I don't know what he's selling but fuck, I gotta homeboy with the hookup, ya heard? You want me to call him?"

"Carl's got a picture on his phone he took there of a pretzel jar full of good, so... it's kind of convenient for me to just go next door."

"Well what the fuck are we doing here? We should be over there robbin' them niggas."
"The dude lets you sit on his couch and smoke hydro with him and never charges, why would I fuck him like that."

"Shit, that's cool. Still though, if I catch him slipping... I'm not saying, I'm just saying."

"I really think you should just let him slip. Really. It's okay, there's nothing wrong with slipping."

"Well, okay."

An awkward silence ensues, after which it finally seems to sink in that I'm standing there in a towel and can't get dressed until he gets the fuck out of my room. He leaves, trailing off: "Well, all right, later. I'll hit you up this weekend, maybe you can buy some product from my boy..."

He's only come back once since then. It was quarter past midnight, my room light was off, and I was (what I thought was) quite obviously having rough sex. (Even if I weren't, what's important enough to wake up someone in the middle of the night for?) He rapped loudly and shouted something muffled by the door. I yelled "Go away!" and kept on frigging. I figured he'd catch on, what with the loud moaning and the female head slamming against the headboard, but I could hear his pacing and talking for a couple minutes before he finally gave up.

By the time I finished up my business he'd already disappeared. I secretly pray he can never bum a car ride back.

When I say that I died, I can understand your disbelief, but know that I (past/alternate tense) did die. (Interestingly, in Japanese, adjectives can take the past tense, though not pronouns.) I say die to mean being ripped from one's current frame, which feels every bit as real as The End. Even though I knew I done did the drugs, I was sure it was like in The Matrix when Neo takes the pill and then he wakes up outside reality, shuddering in cold goop, ripping the nutriment tube out of his esophagus. I woke up from my current reality which had popped off the stack, and the stack pointer returned to its previous position. And then I woke up again. And again, and again, at the rate of maybe twice a second, each time gagging on the proverbial nutriment tube, each reality a universe with entirely different physical constants and sensory processing systems. I was being yanked back out of every layer of reality, every insignificant detail of my meaningless life obliterated, a mere frame in an infinite stack. I remember thinking "I guess I don't have to go to work tomorrow since reality has been vaporized." I was 100% sure that I was being yanked out. It was terrifying, to not be able to stop waking up.

If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you.

And now I am an orb, floating in the vast emptiness of space. I move around, but I never get any closer to any distant stars. I cannot see myself, I can only move purposelessly. I am an observer in infinite time and space, a voiceless curvature singularity. I can never die because death has no meaning here.

My roommate: "I have a friend who I gave some, and in only a few minutes his face was completely sunken. He looked like a Holocaust survivor. I don't know where he went. It isn't for everybody, that's for sure. You've gotta be in a good place upstairs."

This is only the frame I came to a stop at. This life is not mine. And now I'm not afraid to die because of the same "vital drive" all creatures share. I am dumbstruck with an existential horror that there is no afterlife; instead, a metalife. It's being yanked out. It's returning to the outermost frame: the floating orb.

We opened doors by thinking
We went to sleep by dialing "0"
We drove to work by proxy
I plugged my wife in, just for show

"Thank you, but I have no desire to try that. Ever. Again. I never thought I'd appreciate how nice it is here in the regular quantity of dimensions."

I moved into this place at the start of a work week, had an onslaught of life matters to attend to that week, come home every day by bus, and consequently: I spent the first week in a tiny clearing on the floor, hemmed in by my stuff piled from floor to ceiling. I had so much stuff crammed in that I couldn't move enough stuff to make room to move stuff so I could have room to set up a bed. I began to suffer an awful claustrophobia, which hasn't subsided much even as my room has become organized.

Because it wasn't just having to sleep on the floor and maneuver through jagged-edged junk that brought me to space madness. I have this tiny room separated from what is, as far as I'm concerned, the outside world, by paper-thin walls. My entire personal space extends only a few feet in every direction. I am surrounded by strangers in 5 of the 6 directions. I have to put on clothes to use the bathroom. Once I went to use the bathroom, and someone I didn't know was walking out of it... I said "Hey..." and he nodded "Hey" and walked out of the apartment. I have flashbacks of needing to go backwards in the pipe.

The pipes aren't nightmares, they were part of my childhood (as a rat, one would assume). My father would take me down into the sewer/drainage system on several occasions, but this was when I was 6. This is only one of many pipe episodes that make people accuse my father of being a terrible parent, though when I try to think of his good qualities I immediately recall these adventures. It was 1991, SE Massachusetts, and we were in a drainage pipe. It was pitch black. There is 100% humidity down there; nothing evaporates, and it's suffocating. He had a flashlight but I was in front, blocking the light in front of me. He was herding me forward, and we climbed deeper and deeper into the pipe, which got more and more cramped. Everything in front of me is dark. It's getting tighter and tighter, and I go from crawling on all fours to crawling on my belly. None of the sweat is able to leave my skin. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get to the end. I feel more and more trapped. There is not enough room to turn around, so if I have to get out then I have to push myself backwards the whole half-mile or so. The horror... too cramped to even be able to turn around. I'm going to die in this pipe. There is no way out, I can't just say "I'm done with this" and get out, I am trapped and it is so hot, I am going to bake to death stuck in this steamy pipe.

Finally, it opens. Contents of pipe evacuated like an aborted fetus. Now we are underground.

But what opening is there for me? I realize now that my room is too small to actually fit the amount of stuff I have, that my bed takes up over half of my space. That I have signed a lease, been given a prison sentence, confined for the lease term to this prison cell. Everyone can hear everything that goes on in my cell, and I am a stranger in my own kitchen and living room.

I was 7. We broke into a coastal lookout tower from WWII. The stairs were rusted out and the bottom flight was missing, so he hoisted me up to the second flight, which was loosely hanging off of the third. Then he jumped from a piece of rubble and hoisted himself up after me, causing the entire staircase to shake. My mouth gaped in silent horror. Then we climbed to the top floor, the observation deck. There was one narrow window, overlooking the ocean, and outside the window was a 6-inch ledge. He made up his mind that he would to walk all the way around it. He went out the window, out onto the ledge, and shimmied around the corner. I stayed inside, sobbing, sure he would perish and wondering what I would do when I was sure he was never coming back through the window.

When I lie in bed and close my eyes, I can see the outline of the walls of my gerbil cage. I lie awake listening to the sound of nazi zombies biting the dust, or absent that the skidding of sneakers on clay as night hoops continues into the early morning hours.

Another bunker... had an area between the inner and outer wall that was maybe a couple feet wide. Dark, and filled with stagnant water. I'm not sure what the purpose of it was. But we found a way to get into it, and went all the way around the half-mile perimeter, clinging to the inside the walls of the bunker. Crawling inside the wall like rats. Creatures.

I've become disgusted with excess, with fiscal irresponsibility. I want to keep every cent that I earn. I've bought the cheapest phone possible, and set up an SMS gateway on my home computer that allows me to do all the things a smartphone can via a SMS menu system. I ride the bus everywhere. I've sold all but the essentials, and my remaining possessions have been stripped of their assigned functions--the same object is both an iron and a hotplate, the same hoodie is a dish towel and rope and electronics cover. My photographs, music, movies, manuals and documents have all been digitized and originals destroyed or sold to Half Price Books. My money is in an internet bank with no branches. My life exists on the cloud. And now, possessionless, I've moved into a room in a communal apartment for $300/month.

On Nov. 1st, I went to my new apartment to move in. They made me pay with a money order for my first month's rent, so I had to go stand in the customer service line at the grocery store like all the other poor people who don't have bank accounts. Then I got back and received a room key from the office, and took it to my apartment number. I knocked, entered, then yelled "Is anybody here?", but there was no reply. Then I heard faint snoring, and noticed somebody was sleeping with their door open. I tried my key in the two rooms opposite his, but it didn't work; they put me in the room right next to him. I opened my room door quietly, and inside there's someone's stuff all over the floor. I have no idea how, maybe they left it behind? It couldn't be the sleeping guy's, because he only has the key for his own room. But I had nobody to ask and didn't want to wake up the guy if he's working night shift. So I brought my stuff back down and just left.

The next night I returned. I thought that the door being open would have tipped off the occupant that I was moving in and needed his shit cleared out, but it was still all over the place. The sleeper was gone, probably at work. On closer inspection, I realized my room was storing a sniper rifle, a pup tent, and a bunch of other weird John Rambo shit. On the floor in the bare living room: a copy of Fear 2, a gun cleaning kit, and some book that indicates he's an ex-Navy Seal. This is probably the sleeping guy's stuff. I peek in his room, which he leaves open because there's nobody else living there, and inside his room are funnels and jugs full of a brown murky substance, sitting next to naptha and muriatic acid bottles. On the kitchen counter is a glass pipe. Internet research determined this to be the synthesis and consumption of DMT crystals.

It's strange, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. Everyone in Texas has a gun, and even I have tried to make drugs before. It's not like it's crank; it's a psychedelic, so he's what? Into mind expansion? Plus he had a copy of the Sh*t My Dad Says book. I felt safe enough to drop off my first load of stuff in the living room and leave a note saying "Hey man, they put me in room C, and I see you got your stuff in there, so I'm not gonna mess with it. Didn't rat you out to management!" (If management catches you storing stuff in an empty room, they charge you rent for that room over the lease term). Plus the other thing I figured is, if he ever gives me shit I have photographs of his glass pipe and his chem lab, and I can get him thrown out. I got leverage. And if I narc on him, I'd possibly have an angry gun nut who is stuck paying for an apartment he's been evicted from.

The next night I came back to move in permanently. His room was locked for the first time (now that he knows he's not alone). The living room was bare. I went to open my room door and the lock wouldn't open. I tried it again, and again. I knocked on his door, but there was no answer. Was the living room bare because he had cleaned it for me, or because he had taken all my stuff and skipped town? I ran to the office, which says it's open until 8 but was already closed at 6. Lazy fucks. I ran back. Should I drop off more stuff if he ran off with the first batch? My computer was in there, and my computer is my life. I tried to pick the lock but couldn't, then started trying the other doors. I was slightly relieved when another one of the doors opened, but the room was empty. Had this been my room all along? Had the office swapped the locks and trapped my stuff inside? I looked inside the fridge, and the sleeping guy's jars of goop were in it. His name's on file, would he really leave illegal drugs behind? My panic subsides, and decide to leave my stuff in the new room and lock it up. It's obvious I can't move in today, with everything I need to survive locked in the first room.

The next day I want to the office and got a leasing agent to open my room up for me. My roommate was home, and awake. All his jars of goop were out on display on the kitchen counter, but the agent completely ignored them as he opened my door. He asked if everything was okay with the apartment otherwise, and my roommate said "the fridge and freezer don't get cold." The agent nodded and left, clearly not interested. I asked if my roommate worked the night shift, that he sleeps in the daytime, and he said that he takes naps in between community college in the morning and cookin' fuckin' chicken at Pluckers in the evenings, that way he can party into the late hour. He said that he'd lived in the complex a long time but that they had just transferred him to this unit because his last roommate was schizophrenic and belligerent and set up surveillance systems to watch his every move. We both agreed we didn't care what illegal things each other did, "just don't do murders."

My move-in checklist is from a template, so it contains items that don't make sense. Next to "Panic button panel" I wrote "Hidden". It must also be British, because it calls sinks "lavatories".

For the first time since I was rotting alone in a flophouse in Massachusetts, am I free enough to put a bowl of cereal in the freezer, or listen to music while falling asleep. I'm noticing a lot of odd parallels to life in the flophouse and it's actually starting to give me horrible flashbacks. It's weird but I think Always Sunny in Philadelphia romanticizes Charlie's animal lifestyle... eating cat food, living in squalor, huffing glue. I see myself wanting these things, to live like a feral animal. I've got a dress shirt and an expensive leather belt, but I just put a hoodie over it all and I look like all the other poor people on the bus. You know how in zombie movies they sometimes act like zombies to sneak past them? I do the same thing with hobos: I hunch my back and start limping and they don't ask me for money or harass me. I cover my French-made road bicycle in duct tape to make it look not worth stealing. I pack into the bus like a sardine and become another dead-eyed empty vessel.

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.