No Weirdo Zone

At this time of year it's apparently fashionable to reflect on those things for which one is grateful. I could definitely list a few things: health (always a good one, that), a good job, family and pretty girls at the gym (without which it would be a dismal sausage-fest). This year, however, it occurred to me how wonderful it is to live in a house without roommates, and how grateful I am to wake up to people that I actually chose to live with.

Many people's experience of living with weird bastards starts at college (although for some I recognize that it begins at birth). We had one Ugandan bloke who vomited repeatedly in his wastepaper bin as a result of some affliction brought on by a diet that consisted mainly of cheap beer and no food. He then left the bin, half-full of puke and water, in the sink in our shared kitchen over the weekend. His mission in life seemed to be to earn a degree without ever leaving his room; he changed his course of study from Chemistry to some bullshit literature degree which made the feat eminently likely. In my second year I shared a flat above a hardware store with four blokes. One of them pulled a similar stunt, spraying the entire (and only) bathroom with dessicated vomit and then retiring to bed, leaving me to recoil in horror when wandering in for a relaxing morning shit. Retribution was swift, however. He went out of town for a long weekend and we planted cress seed on his carpet in the shape of the word "CUNT", machine-sewed his clothes up and hid rotting giblets around his room. It's amazing how fast cress grows, and how effective the message you can send with it.

On leaving college you might share a house with other supposedly grown-up people while you start working. Strangely, my first group of housemates were pretty normal, but the psychotic old spinster landlord who lived next-door with her deranged and freaky mother more than made up for it. Suffice it to say that on my next visit to that town (should I ever have the misfortune to return) I might consider a recreational detour to urinate on her grave, always assuming she didn't make a pact with satan to live for ever. Next stop was a house I shared with Chicken Man. He worked at a chicken processing plant (where they turned thousands of battery-raised fowl into supermarket chicken delights such as chicken kiev, chicken cordon bleu and the delightfully disgusting pizza-topped chicken (imagine a pizza but with chicken as the base instead of dough). He had rampant psoriasis, which I couldn't quite get out of my head while eating the flaky topping on certain products, and a girlfriend with the IQ of phlegm.

He was a nice enough bloke though. Meanwhile the future Mrs.Bison was renting a room from June, a woman with a voracious sexual appetite who would borrow her clothes without asking, wear them to smoky bars and return with a parade of strange men to fuck. If we'd owned a blacklight it might have been instructive to run it over the clothes she borrowed. On the other hand she did have a nice collection of pornographic videos, and held underwear-and-sex-toy parties for her female friends.

Eventually we managed to move to the same town and rented another room, this time in a maisonette that we shared with The Weasel. He was another harmless bloke, although he looked like one of those quiet serial killers that no-one suspects for years. We did look into his room one day when he left the door open, and the "white" sheet on his bed was literally blackish in the center; I don't believe it had ever been off the bed. When you sat in the living room with him it was clear to all of us that we had nothing to say to each other, quite apparent to him that if he disappeared from the face of the earth we wouldn't notice, or indeed bring ourselves to care, and obvious to us that he knew this, having come to expect a similar reaction from the whole of society.

Even when you do get a place of your own you still have arsehole neighbors to deal with. I used to have to bang on the floor to shut up the low-life in the place below who came home late, and drunk, on weekends and banged around with his TV on loud. After one shouting match through the floor he came round. He said it was to apologise but I have a feeling that the idea of apology hadn't occurred to him until he actually met me. In our first real house we christened the neighbors The Leatherjackets because of their matching his'n'hers black jackets, and the complete absence of any personality or other notable features. Their kid, "Damien" (after The Omen) was destined to be (and by now probably is) a sociopathic dimwit criminal drain on society.

So yes, I'm thankful that I live in my own place, even if does have cedar siding, rendering it a giant fucking woodpecker buffet. But I'm also glad I had the chance to live in the "real" world with all the weirdos and nutjobs. If you've never come back to your shared accommodation to find rugby players with their cocks hanging out singing "Father Anal Sex" with a pint of bitter in one hand you really never learned to appreciate your own house. Plus you'll never come home to find a gift of two-inch tall green cress growing in your carpet. Unless you put it there, of course...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison