a number of indelicate conjectures

ok. so this is a real thing and i promise that it happened. yesterday i had decided to go to sleep (it was eleven o'clock and i had gotten up early so i felt pretty actualized about the thing) and i was making progress. there i was on the bed with the lights off and the door closed with visions of i don't know maybe gainful employment running through my head when joseph came up to the door and instead of knocking or just leaving because the light was off and it was that time that i already mentioned, just decided to come in. stopping in the doorway, he called my name several times. when this failed to rouse me, he walked in and tapped my shoulder until i asked him why the thing that was happening was happening. turns out it was this:

oh, hi. sorry to wake you, but can you buy these food stamps?

my baleful glare, it seems, needs work, because after five seconds or so of the most withering expression i could muster, he asked me again. in response i made a number of indelicate conjectures about the manner of his upbringing, his personal hygienic practices, and the level of cognitive resources at his disposal.

we are quarreling.

protip

the top of the refrigerator is still not a good place to defrost meat.

hormones

new fellow moved in the other day. he has opinions:

if ladies allow fellas to get their hormones in an uproar, they shouldn’t call it rape; it should just be defined as stupid on their part.

kind of a bad day all around

today began poorly. i was awakened this morning by the sound of shrieking. gosling was engaged in an emotionally charged phone conversation with his mother. his speech had reached a frequency high enough to achieve vowel formant compression, so exact words were hard to make out, but as far as i could tell the cause of his distress was this: his mother had at one point promised to give him an amount, but now, due to an unexplained occurrence, she planned to give him a smaller amount. while i appreciate that gosling was upset about his reduced handout, i felt that some of the phrasing he chose failed to advance the discourse in any sort of meaningful way (goddamned witch cunt seemed particularly unproductive). anyway, gosling had decided that six was an appropriate time to have this conversation, so instead of reflecting on his appalling sense of entitlement, i went back to sleep.

today began poorly for a second time. i was awakened this morning by the sound of shouting. joseph, it seemed, had let the cat out; but rather than going out and just sort of retrieving her for a bit, he stuck his head up the staircase and yelled, "hey! hey! your cat is outside!" for nearly a minute while i plugged my ears and thought about the time i watched my grandmother blast a small, perpetually yipping dog off its feet with a water cannon.

today ended poorly. i came home after a sedate evening of industrializing western germany to find that someone had filled the house with smoke again. if i had any sort of graphic design ability, i would make up a pamphlet with the heading "have you considered outside?", and fill it with useful statistics about monoxide inhalation and a punchy graphic showing all of us burning to death because someone forgot to reactivate the smoke detector.

a new and exciting venture

joseph too has trouble budgeting the money he receives each month, so at least once each week he climbs the stairs (laboriously) and after a short rest, asks me for 35 dollars. he seems to have a preoccupation with this sum, because this is always the quantity he asks for. i assume he wants the money for drugs, but what costs 35 dollars per hit?

anyway, i am leery of lending money to people without an actual source of income, so i always refuse him. but he is a wily fellow. recently, rather than asking to borrow money, he has been trying to sell me shares in the company he is starting. reportedly, a 35 dollar investment could net me one million dollars! his explanations of the economics of this transformation are a bit nebulous, but he assures me that the business plan is airtight. when i inquire further about this business plan, i am told that it is "complicated."

i am convinced that he is planning a train robbery.

tact

i came downstairs a short time ago to remove and imbibe a crispy 1554 from the refrigerator, but having opened the door, i was confronted with an empty cardboard sleeve rather than the expected six pack. i had purchased the beer less than three hours previously, and so detecting no signs of a break-in, i sought the aid of gosling - him being the only person at home during this three hour period - in determining its fate. i knocked on his door. immediately, the overhead light flicked off and the sound of snoring began to emanate from his room. i knocked again. presently the door cracked and he, yawning in an exaggerated manner, extruded portions of his face and neck.

gosling: (slurring) it wasn't me
i: ah... um well...
gosling: listen, while you're here... can i borrow ten dollars?

i told him i'd think about it.

a fine man

when gosling entered my life, he brought along a friend. they met about eighteen months ago at the halfway house where they both resided before moving here. gosling's friend, whom we will call joseph, is in his early forties, unemployed, and possesses nearly two thirds of his teeth. i attribute this to his diet, which consists almost entirely of tubes of prefabricated biscuits and powdered sweet tea.

a devout mormon, he frequently invites me to bus over to the lds church on country club road with him and gosling on sunday mornings. the first time he extended the offer i demurred, telling him that i preferred the proximity of the timber hollow church. stooping beneath my repartee, he complimented my choice, informing me that the pastor at timber hollow is "a fine man," and asking me to witness with him on campus. this has left me in a bit of a position as i now have to either maintain the increasingly complex illusion of faith or confess that i've been jerking him around for the past couple weeks. maybe i'll just start hiding from him.

oh. here is a picture of his sweet tea jug, simply labeled "joe tea."

audacity

in addition to an aptitude for sitting and coughing, i quickly learned that gosling possesses a certain flair for theft. one evening after mixing a usually delicious dark and stormy, i discovered that rather than containing rum, my bottle of goslings was actually full of water tinted with food coloring. when i confronted him about this, he professed innocence and suggested that I complain to the manufacturer via sharply worded letter. i stood transfixed, marveling at the audacity of his suggestion. but, being a practical man, i recognize when i have been outmaneuvered.

i retreated.

the next day, seemingly abashed, he admitted that he had consumed the rum (apparently all at once and despite his liver disorder), and promised that nothing else would go missing. but soon, as with sandra's son, large quantities of food began to disappear. this round of disappearances, however, was marked by the apparent randomness of gosling's selections. one day, i came home to find all of my cinnamon missing. the next day i was down a pound of swiss cheese and a jar of pickles. each time i confronted him and each time he apologized with a great deal of sincerity, promising to restore my items and to refrain from absconding with them in the future. unfortunately, goslings' resolve is more akin to balsa than steel, so inevitably another thing goes missing shortly after each assurance.

I am thinking about dissolving ipecac into my next handle.

smokers are jokers

shortly after our first exchange i discovered that gosling does indeed vacate the couch occasionally. when this happens he stands up, walks the five feet to the front stoop, then sits down again in the green plastic deckchair that materialized there one evening. upon arrival, he proceeds to smoke a truly impressive amount of cigarettes, usually consuming a full pack per excursion. this would be fine, i suppose, were it not for two things. the first is a practical concern. the stoop is situated directly beneath my window, and due to sandra's policy of hiring only non-accredited builders, the insulation surrounding that window possesses a more permeable nature than most. the second thing is a practical concern. due to his enthusiasm for inhaling ash, goslings has developed the sort of wet, wracking cough generally associated with tuberculosis patients. most nights, he wakes up several times in a storm of coughing.

typically after the fit subsides, he goes out for a smoke break.

sympathy

about three weeks after the health freak abruptly left us with an empty room and an unpaid $130 gas bill, a new guy moved in. our initial interactions were as interesting as they were varied. i'd walk past him toward the refrigerator while he sat on the couch blasting slayer on his cd player, or i'd walk past him toward the refrigerator while he sat on the couch blasting megadeth on his cd player. i admit to a certain curiosity regarding his ability to reconcile the reality of rent and expenses with his seemingly total inertia, but this curiosity was short-lived.

one day as i walked past him toward the kitchen, i was surprised to find him sitting on the couch, cd player silent in his lap. in what i later recognized as a significant judgmental lapse, i initiated conversation by asking him if his batteries had run out. he scrutinized me for about ten seconds and after arriving at a seemingly momentous decision, said, "hi. i'm gosling." in the period that followed, he related to me his life story. you will be spared the details, but the relevant bits are these: at the age of 34, ours is his first apartment, and due to various medical problems he receives government assistance. he was telling me all this because he wanted me to write a letter of support to his welfare agents.

i felt genuinely bad for gosling, so i agreed to write the letter and spent the next twenty minutes looking up first aid procedures for tonic-clonic seizures. in the coming days and weeks i was to realize that my sympathy was misplaced.