throwing things into other things

I've been storing up these stories, awaiting the completion of a trilogy. The other day, completion; here they are.

1) It's no secret that I go to Kuma's Corner maybe once a week. Meat, it's good. It's maybe a secret that I used to be vegetarian and, for this reason, have little sympathy for veggies, thinking that that was a phase that I went through and thought better of. Glad I did it though.

Generally what happens is this: I eat something for dinner - neither a mere snack nor a feast - and feel pretty satisfied until one or another of my roommates sends me a text: "House meeting." This, of course, means Kuma's, and it's almost always after 10:30, sometimes 11.

If we happen to be in person, one of us will say: "Yeah, I could wrap my dick around that" which somehow translates to "I'm in." [I'm in = I'm down = I'm up for it... etc.]

So one time a week or two ago, the crazy roommate and the aborted-baby-daddy suddenly said they were going, but I had just opened a beer. Dilemma! I was on the ram's horns, wanting to sit and finish my beer (waste not!) but also wanting to go get some meat.

Solution: bike with beer.

It's not legal per se, but it's not exactly immoral. I draw the line at immoral. Or at least just a little past.

So I'm biking one-handed on the fixie, left hand poised on the brake [safety first!], when, about half-way there [it's a 7-minute ride], I finish my beer and feel an immediate desire to dispose of the empty bottle. I'm feeling fractious and have an urge to just throw it, devil may care. But then, golden opportunity: a dumpster on the other side of the street. Almost like a reflex, I hook-shotted the bottle in an arc over my head.

Draino.

It couldn't have gone any better.

2) My crazy roommate had gone to Florida and come back, was forbidden to come back to the house, and was spending the weekend in a padded room. [At least that's how I picture it.] The day after her institutionalization was C's birthday party. He had a keg of good beer [that still has some left in it] and a barrel for a hobo-fire.

So, now that we all know what a hobo fire is, let's carry on. [We didn't use a blowtorch to make the holes, rather a drill with some hole-cutting attachment.]

Picture this. The fire is burning and people are showing up. I showed up after a concert that was pretty terrible and had drank 2 G&Ts at the post-concert reception. [I ended up way drunker that night and ended up missing my cross race the next day.]

So things are happening, I turn on the music, it's a party.

At some point, we were going to burn this small wicker ottoman that was taking up space in the living room. In honor of clean-space-clean-mind, I'm getting rid of the random junk in our apartment.

Somehow, I decided to try to throw it from the balcony [2nd floor] into the hobo fire 30 feet away. It seemed unlikely to work, but the greatest rewards come from the highest risk. And the best risks are the one you're not attached to (or are ignoring).

First throw! Miss. Just wide. No can, no fire. Close but no cigar.

C throws the ottoman back up to me (wicker is pretty light), I catch (amazing!), and throw again.

No real thought, just a vague amount of preparation.

Draino. Right in. There were only a few orientations that the stool could even fit into the can, and it happened to find it just as it went in.

Someone came up to me afterwards and said: "If that was on Youtube I'd think it a fake."

Not a fake, just being awesome.

3) On Sunday, my chef-friend and I are driving to a bike race (I've learned my lesson about drinking too much the night before and have made it to *all* subsequent races), and we stop at a gas station for some 5-hour energy and coffee.

But I have this cup from last week still in the cup holder and don't have room for my coffee. What to do?! Dilemma!

So I look around for a drive-up trash can. Nothing.

I find one right in front of the cashier but that's 4 feet away from the curb. I drive up and ask him: "think I can make it?" He laughs, I aim and shoot...

Way way too high, like 3 feet. Hit the window right by the cashier and sort of exploded with melted ice from last week's post-race soda. Missed the can.

So I take my foot off the clutch [LURCH, stall...] and go throw it away. Total fail. The lurch even spilled my coffee [a little] in the car.

Then driving away, he's still laughing in fits, I'm trying to drink the coffee. He gets me laughing right as I'm drinking, and I inhale it. Really. Inhale. Not just choking on it, the coffee enters my lungs and I feel this strange sensation like I'm freebasing coffee, the caffeine entering straight into my blood stream.

I managed to cough most of it out before the race and like to think that it was to blame for my 8th place finish in the race. Not too shabby but would have liked to do better.

Trilogy complete.

coincidences

I think I am done talking about the ex-roommate. Then again, that's exactly what I thought about a million times already and, really, after the thousand-and-first time, I started writing about it. So, sometimes excess is for the win.

We had 2 girls over last week to fill the vacancy. One of my roommates had said "No girls." after the last one, but we assured him that not all women are prone to insanity.

Neither of the 2 who came over seemed borderline anything, and we approved of both. The girl interested in a long-term living situation flaked out, and we went with the short-term Scottish girl who's in town for a semester at the SAIC, something about sculptural installation art.

When she was by the house, she told us a sob story about why she had to leave her current place on short notice and under duress. She was subletting from some folks, had given them a security deposit, and they went to Détroit. Then, mid-October, the landlord comes by and says that the folks who skipped town owed a month or two in rent. For some reason, this poor Scottish lass was on the hook for it. So she was being asked to leave. Shitty sitch.

W heard all this and asked for clarification: where exactly was this house she was living in?

Turns out, he knows the people who live on the other half of the house - good friends of his - and he knew more about the sitch.

One of the people who left earned the nickname "The Step-Shitter" due to an unfortunate mess that he left on the steps leading up to the house, probably while on drugs.

That was another thing W heard about the folks who left: junkies. So somehow, through the magic of the internet, this girl ended up at our place.

W thought all this was very funny when he met her, for, he too was on drugs, though nothing so deleterious as heroin. Just hard enough, however, for him to bring up, multiple times, how insanely coincidental it was that she lived with the step-shitter.

So now she lives with us and made dinner last night. Real food! Yum.

In other news, I had a SLEEP burger the other day. Fuck yeah.

finding is the new losing

New day, same topic.

I thought we had moved on. I would have thought the hospital would have figured out her brand of crazy and tweezed it out.

No communication for a while, followed by a rumor that she had stopped by the house. Something about being drunk and talking to C.

Sure enough, it happened. But no one seemed to want to talk about it.

Then I get a text from my friend, the one who set her up with us. (That is, her ex.)

"Did she leave her phone at her house?"

I told him I was sure she didn't come in the house and haven't seen it.

More texts, more insistent, and it comes out that she was, in fact, at our place, inside, and had possibly left her phone.

And by "left", I mean "threw".

No visual proof, but it sounds like, after a heated confrontation with C, she flipped out and, on the way out, threw her phone somewhere in our apartment.

In order to have a reason to come back?

I was set to ignore it, not caring what happens. I have sympathy for everyone - up to a point. Once it's gone, it takes a long time to grow back. Her account is bankrupt.

But today, I was tearing apart the living room in search of her phone.

And then I got into it, moving couches, dusting, wiping the floor in the dark corner where clutter accumulates, and rearranging the furniture situation.

It was, in fact, on my list to do some cleaning/organizing today. I didn't get to my space, but made a good dent in the common space.

And then, after having forgotten the original impetus for cleaning, her phone turned up. The rumors and theories were true: she was over and planted her phone in a fit of drunken rage at random in our house.

She's burned through her allotment of sympathy and now is accruing ire. I'll get her her phone back but she'd better stay away while we forget (and block out) her very existence.