Typed ‘1993’ there for a second. How nice that would be. I’d still be in Syracuse and (I think) would have a gorgeous girlfriend… around 93’ I think I was still living with Kristy. We’d have somebody in the White House who could be trusted not to destroy my civil rights and gangbang the economy in the process. I’d be ten years younger. Life would just be better.

But nooooo… 2003. Here we are.

I’m moved in at Paul’s. And this weblog is for venting, and nobody’s using the goddam comment threads anyway, so I’ll say what I want.

First, my brother Paul has been great. He pretty much organized his buddies into a posse to come help me move… Monday night with a couple of pick up trucks, Tuesday (still feels like today to me, but actually yesterday) with a U-haul and a pick up truck. And here I am, settled mostly into his former bedroom in his very small apartment in Zephyrhills. (He got one of my old couches and the futon and is making his living room his personal space for the duration.)

So Paul’s been great. And I’m here because I didn’t want to spend $580 on rent this month in an apartment I was being evicted from at the end of the month anyway. And I have to keep reminding myself of that… I could still be sleeping in my apartment tonight. I shook the tree. I agitated my brother and sent out emergency email notices on Friday night and BAM!, he came through. Here I am.

So Paul’s been great. But. Jesus fucking Christ.

Okay. First, there’s no room here, and no storage space at all. All of my books and all of my comic books and quite a lot of other stuff are going to have to go into storage. I spent most of today putting garbage bags around most of that stuff so it can temporarily be stored on the back porch, up on cinderblocks. I’m hoping to get someone (one of Paul’s buddies; neither he nor I drive) to take me to a storage facility with all this shit, like, SOON. Within a couple of days. There’s just no room for it here.

That’s a pretty annoying thing, but it’s the most minor of annoyances. But wait. First let me say that one good thing did happen, or rather, I avoided one bad thing: I expected, since the Monday evening evacuation got screwed up (the guys driving in in both trucks got lost, my normally amazing mother having made one of her rare mistakes and told them ‘Bayshore’ when she meant ‘Westshore’, resulting in them going over to St. Pete when they missed the Westshore exit from 275). They took a couple of truck loads back with them, but had to come back the next day with a U-Haul for the rest of it, and I just knew Sondra would hear about it instantly if I moved out in the daytime and come screaming out to demand the June rent.

Well, that didn’t happen. We got away unscathed. That was a good thing.

But Oh My God do I miss my apartment.

Let’s work up to the big thing.

First, Paul smokes, heavily. And second, he owns a fairly large, overly friendly, very pretty dog named Chewie (Paul is a sort of geek; he thinks of himself as a geek, even though he doesn’t read much and doesn’t own a computer, and while I think he’s about half a geek and doesn’t have to be because he’s pretty good looking, he thinks he’s the whole thing) and I’m a cat person, if I have to have a goddam animal around at all. Third, Paul isn’t working right now and most of his friends work weird hours or not at all, and apparently, every night is Noisy Game Night at Casa Paul… from around 10 until 2 a.m.

Now, I’m not working either and I often stay up that late lately. But these guys are noisy, and honestly, it’s annoying. I’m going to have to play music in here every night until about 2 a.m. just so I don’t have to hear them.

This isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is still coming.

This apartment is a pit. I mean, the way it’s set up, I don’t mind. It’s small for two people, but when I saw it the first time last year, I thought ‘you know, this is a nice little apartment, I could be real happy here if it was just me living here’. However, taking a closer look at it now, I realize it’s in a shoddy building that has been poorly maintained for a long time and, well, it’s filthy.

And now we’re getting there.

My brother Paul is a genuinely great guy. But he is one of these people… unfortunately, they are not as rare as you’d think or any of the rest of us would wish… who has no natural slovenliness threshold. He will live in absolute filthy squalor, and he simply does not understand it when people ask him ‘holy mother of God how can you live in shit like that’?

Recently, when my cuz in law gave me a really graphic description of the filth Paul was living in, I kind of long distance instigated an intervention, and he’s cleaned up his act quite a bit. And thank God, the last time I was here the bathroom was a hellish lightless festering chamber of rot and crud you would not let a toddler into. It’s actually more or less clean right now.

But, well, this place is a pit. It’s the kind of place that is old and crumbling and the walls just accumulate grit and dust and the linoleum, I swear, is a hundred years old and visibly powders into crud when you walk on it. I swept this floor… I mean, I flailed this floor with a broom… when I got here (and Paul cleaned out the room for me before I got here) and I just had to sweep it again because I noticed some visible crud on it when I sat down to do my email tonight. This place is literally one of those places you don’t want to reall let anything of yours touch the floor, ever.

Look, I’m no Felix Unger. In fact, according to many of my former housemates, I’m quite a slob. But I have never in my life let any place I lived get this bad. I thought my apartment was pretty messy but holy shit. I swear if I could jump back in time 48 hours I would seriously think about writing a rent check for the rest of June and then going in and begging Sondra to renew my lease. (She might have. They might just have terminated me as a ploy to raise my rent more than they are legally allowed to, which is what they may have done to me two years ago.) And if she wouldn’t give me another lease, then I might have called my brother Pat and begged him to let me stay in his spare room while I put together some options. This place is a hole.

Oh, and I just had a discussion with Paul… got up to get a glass of milk and he was still awake. (His friends did leave promptly at 2, apparentlly.) Yes, every night is Noisy Game Night here, apparently. His friends all have families and he doesn’t drive, so they’re used to gathering here every night until one of his friends, Pat, goes to work at 2 a.m. I told Paul in no uncertain terms that while I was here and helping him with the rent (Paul recently got laid off his seasonal job, so having me move in was a big help to him as well as me) that was going to have to change. He’s not happy but wants to talk about it tomorrow. I imagine he doesn’t want to talk about it at all, but we are going to talk about it tomorrow. I realize there’s going to have to be a compromise… I don’t live alone any more. But a compromise is not Every Night’s A Party In The Next Goddam Room. These people need to go somewhere else once in a while.

The crud isn’t the worst of it, though, and neither is the fact that Paul is still, basically, one of these people who does not understand that when the trash can is full, you have to take the trash out to the curb, you can’t just find some way to precariously stack one more empty frozen pizza box on the top. He also simply does not understand that ashtrays should be emptied a few times a day. And his idea of cleaning a room is cleaning everything you can see. Since he was getting the futon and leaving his bed for me, he didn’t move the bed or clean under it. I moved the bed (as much as I could in this small space, unfortunately, I didn’t do it before I started setting up my electronics and space got very limited very quickly so I could really only get around the edges, I’m sure there’s a two foot strip in the center of the floor under the bed that I don’t even want to think about) and just around the edges I pulled out absolutely filthy accumulations of ancient papers, porn, and clothes you wouldn’t even want to try to salvage. I didn’t stir up any roaches, for which I’m thankful, but Jesus, it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta under there, and I didn’t get anything like all of it.

Ah, did I mention the roaches?

This place is crawling with nasty little German cockroaches.

Paul says that recently he’s been trying to fight them with pesticides and not having much luck. I had the U-haul stop off at Wal-mart on the way here and we went in and got a lot of roach motels and some pesticide paste and I have practically papered this room with the stuff. And I haven’t seen much in the way of roaches in here but they are just all over the kitchen… in the cabinets, on the walls… I did not simply spend today garbage bagging my boxes of books simply because of the wet and damp, I did it in the hopes of keeping them from being infested with bugs during their hopefully brief stay here.

Right now I’m half regretting getting my computer out and set up…

Just saw a roach and sprayed it dead. It was right on the wall near me. Christ. That means they’re going to be moving into my computer’s CPU. Aaarggghhh.

Maybe in a few days this stuff will have had an effect and the roaches will have backed off. And I know… millions of people in the world would consider this hovel a paradise. But Jesus.

As I was saying… right now I’m half regretting getting my electronics out. I thought I’d need to be able to watch movies and especially use the computer to stay sane, but my God. If my stuff gets infested with these little bastards, you can’t get them out again. I don’t know. Would putting the things in a walk in freezer for a couple of days kill the fuckers?

I have to get a job. I have to get my own place. I can’t live here for very long.

I'm sleeping with the light on tonight.