The Wednesday chronicle, part duex
In the last chapter I laid out the historic groundwork of how my downstairs roommates are methheads, which is relevant background. The key thing here is that meth-heads have some surprisingly sketchy friends. This wasn't totally news to me either but its interesting to see how people who have slightly unraveled are magnetically drawn to people who are unraveling even faster. Anyway, the methheads had turned the garage into a little voodoo lounge hang out for them and their friends. They set it up and made it cozy using my lawn chairs, some xmas lights, old tables and an old ghetto blaster I had left in there(which they stole). So now the methhead's sketchy fuckin friends were all hanging out in my garage pretty much around the clock. Loser-gravity had formed a bubble around my house.
Here's something I learned about meth that is pretty incredible. When the dude in my basement showed me his tattoos(without me asking) he had taken off his shirt(I didn't ask for that either), I noticed something kind of strange. On his shoulders and back were these bumpy scar tissue looking things that looked kind of like big weird pimples. If I had to guess my hunch would have been that he might have not been getting enough of all his vitamins. But it turns out that when you use a lot of crystal meth your body actually crystallizes it and pushes it back out through your skin. Apparently meth crystals will actually push themselves out of the skin through the sores. And here's the best part, YOU CAN SMOKE IT!
Finally a drug that makes crack look glamorous! I have heard grosser things, there are things methadone addicts do that are just nut very good. But how about turning your body into a factory popping out tiny little speed eggs, like some super drug egg chicken. Awesome!
So Sunday morning I am walking to my car when my neighbor informs me that there were 3 police cars in my yard the night before. They were arresting some members of the mega-results weight loss club that had been holding meetings in my garage. When my landlord was informed of the police presence the methheads got an eviction notice.
So they got 2 weeks to vacate and I had 2 weeks to collect their share of the power bill, which, by the way, was impossible even before they got evicted.
Tuesday night was a night like many others, I ate a burrito, drank some diet pepsi, except also I read 100 pages on pre confederation Canadian history. That might seem odd, but you see at this time I was taking 2 summer courses at the local university at night to improve my chances of getting into law school which is a whole big other thing that isn't all that important. Anyway I have a final exam in each class, one on Thursday and one on Friday. Each night when I get home from work I read until I am tired and the words start floating around on the page and I can no longer tell what I'm reading. That usually happens about 20 minutes after I open the book.
I see that the super couple are out in the garage so I head out there to take the opportunity to try and straighten out the whole power bill situation. I walk into the garage and they are both startled to see me. These are my exact words.
"Hey we need to talk about the power bill, ... is that a mirror?" which I say as I happen to notice that sitting on the table in front of them is a hand held mirror with little powdery white smudges on it. They suddenly become very busy moving around and explaining how they have to meet someone right away. No kidding, really? Well I want to settle the power bill. Fine, we can talk about it later.
I go back to my studying, do not make enough progress and then have a shallow sleep.
So now it's Wednesday morning, I'm at work and its my second last day at my job. I had handed in my resignation when I knew I was going back to college, the further details of that are complicated and even more boring that this story.
I'm sitting at my desk and my stomach is not feeling very good. A solid decade of nights spent smoking dumaurier lights and drinking different Canadian breweries cheapest beers have had some mildly calamitous effects on my constitution. Putting aside the mild diabetes and slightly detectable corrosion of my cerebral cortex, there has been some pretty major rewiring of my parasympathetic nervous system. This has had the result that most of the time I need to eat a lot of fiber to take a shit.
This particular reality was working against me for a few days now, since my diet has been built on twin nutritional foundations of: veggie dogs from the hot dog stand on the street corner under the office building where I work, and, the exact same 2 egg breakfast every morning. I have eaten the exact same 2 egg breakfast at the same office building cafeteria, 98% of the days that I have worked downtown. Although I had recently, and totally unconsciously, also introduced coffee into my diet to keep alert. Taking night classes was wearing me out so I started drinking a lot of coffee so I could turbo supercharge past the extreme. But the coffee was working like a monkeys paw. Your eyelids will remain open until infinity, but you will be cursed by visions of a future you can not change, a future where you are plagued by disorientation, nausea and split ends.
This is my second last day at work and although my body is still sitting in my ergonomic chair I am already gone. I have a final exam in one class the next day, and another final exam the day after. On my breaks, and during breakfast, lunch and dinner I am reading my textbooks. Its actually a lot more like speed-reading, but something more like sitting in a cockpit speed-reading the instructions on how to land an airplane while the runway is whizzing towards you at 400 miles an hour. I have 550 pages to read in 2 days, 550 pages. I have to read 300 pages before tomorrow at 6 pm. That's 60 textbook pages an hour. Jesus Christ is that right? I-am-fucked.
My mind is on the exams, which as soon as they are over will feel something like magically landing that airplane and opening the doors to find myself in Cairo, with nothing in particular to do and no one around who speaks English. I put a textbook beside my monitor and when my boss isn't around I read in 5 or 10 minute stints. The girl who sits next to me shakes her head, not because she doesn't approve, because she is skeptical of the chances of my plan succeeding.
So I came home from work and there was a pair of boots in the dryer. What the fuck does that mean? I don't care, but it is annoying. The washer and dryer had been running all night for the last 4 days, it started right around the time the cops showed up. The machines are old and loud, and they sit against the wall of the methheads bedroom so I guess that's why they were using them in the evening. Since we had clearly reached the end of the road together I started running the washer and dryer at around 7 am. I would have started it earlier but that's as early as I could wake up.
I knew that the people downstairs now had a bunch of their friends living there too, I guess because they mistakenly believed that they had nothing to lose. I started to hear arguing and fighting now and then, I hoped someone would beat the shit out of someone just so that one of them took a punch. I actually thought about cracking one of them in the face with my squash racket, but I didn't have the balls, or any justification other than my skyrocketing contempt for all of them.
I recalculated how much reading I had left and how much time every couple of hours that night. I start making decisions about what parts I'm going to have to skip. D-Day, better read that, Operation Cartwheel, skip. Siege of Berlin, better read that, liberation of Rome, tough call ... skip.
Around 11:30 I hear someone walking up and down my front stoop. I get up, and walking to the door I hear girls voices. I open the door to see 2 skinny girls who are maybe 16 and look kind of like spooked baby deers, if baby deers got meth habits. It is around this time that I assume that one of the new downstairs guests is selling, which would explain the sudden rise in traffic in my backyard. One of the two girls speaks.
"Is Polo here?"
"Who?"
"Polo?"
"You want to go around to the back door, he's probably there." I could have lied, I could have told them to go away but I didn't. It wouldn't matter, eventually they would find Polo. They would find Polo if he lived in a tree, or a phone booth, or under a circus elephant.
Back to the books. How much time left? I hope they don't break into my place and steal all my shit while I'm at work. Somehow I only have 75 pages left to read tomorrow. Then another 250 for Friday, but overall, holy shit, not bad.
Thursday comes, and then Friday, and lots other things happen to me, and everyone else, and Polo. Chances are prison features into the last one of those three. When we remember things we see them as episodes with beginnings and endings, but I suppose it doesn't really work that way. Its just stuff that happens. Now I will confess that I kind of misrepresented this as a story, and I definitely misrepresented it as interesting, but its my website so I can lie and write whatever I like. Anyway, don't do drugs.