Vocabulary, Schmocabulary

I HAVE not taken the time to count if it is as little as I have to some folk posited, but I imagine that "120" is nevertheless a liberal amount in respect to my wretched roommate's almost total vocabulary. Of course, this does not include her alarmingly loud non-verbal expressions, even if some might argue that they indeed should be counted as such.

She is never at a loss to quickly identify anything as “thingy,” nor will she not hesitate to employ “thingy” as a noun, verb or accident. Even things she sees daily and should not fail to know how to properly identify, are granted her gutteral recourse to “cute”: the teevee, a dropped shoe, a clove of garlic, one of the few forks she has not thrown away during a daily “cleaning attack” (more on THAT social disease in a future post), her remaining Cat. The list of things she calls “thingy” is as long as her memory is short.

Another atrocious aspect – one worse than even the above attempted alliteration – is her odious reflection of any supposed dust-up, as a “hairball.” From the U.S.’ involvement in Iraq, to the slightest allusion of misapprehension between two closely packed straphangers in that infrequent albeit inevitable moment when one or the other jockeys for position just as the train jerks out of the station, it is no less and no more than a “hairball.”

When her butt erupts, so does her ass: “That’s what I think of that!” she cleverly opines. And just in case all two of us fail to appreciate her wit, she performs this clever line several times a day, every day. Such sagacity is often prompted by a remark shouted by one of the screaming heads on the news channels she perpetually patronises (such as Fox or MSNBC). Sometimes she even exhibits her digital dexterity by forming her fingers into a fleshy “gun”! But we are always granted her gleeful explosion of laughter immediately afterward, an expression which is best described by that Cleesian phrase, ”Like a seal being machine-gunned.”

Morning Noise

IT STARTS with a grating rustle of coin-washed linens, but I am sure that were even the finest virgin silk introduced to her insouciant skin it would produce no less an abrasive effect. Said sound abruptly pulls me, each and every morning, from the heaviest of slumber.

She is two rooms away, with the door nearly shut tight and a curtain to further dampen the light and sound from without.

Half a second later the inevitable aural a.m. onslaught commences.

It explodes with a quick tearing sound, as if someone's tongue is being torn out. It is not unlike the kind of heavy, wet and reluctant hand towels that were once advertised as having bred Bolsheviks back in the 1950s, being deliberately ripped in half. A series of phlegm-filled smoker's coughs rend the already ruptured air. And then she is up, hacking her way to the toilet. As if a corbelled arch whose heavy bricks are held in loosely place by a single thick thread of curved re-bar rather than tightly with mortar, her bowed legs do not so much as propel as bounce her into the bathroom. Inebriated elephants with bowling balls for toenails would be more graceful and less loud. By this time, the horrific flatulence has already made its way out of her unimaginably wrecked lower G.I. There are occasional oral flourishes that would put to shame a chorus of drunken sailors at a frat party. I wish I had the mettle to tear off my ears and plug the resultant holes with that which nevertheless remains to funnel in the awful sounds.

Even if she had the single social grace to close the closet door, I would be privy to every tiny tinkle of pee that jets out of her hole. The cacophony of excreta reaches a fever pitch with a diarrhetic release made inevitable by her daily diet of cheap chinese noodles, pot, beer, coffee and asparagus. From every rancid aperture pours forth filth: spit, piss, shit, gas, hack, belch, et al.

This goes on for no less than two hours; longer if she is not needed at work or it is a weekend day. How she manages to ingest the coffee, cigarettes, pot and whatnot would amaze me were I not so disgusted by the debacle. The brutal burps and forced farts, singly, LITERALLY, make the herringbone hardwood floorboards shudder.

I understand from folk where she works that her morning noise is no longer confined in the morning nor at home.

Shock Horror Cat Funeral

Today I and my roomie, along with a mutual friend from UK whos is boarding with us, went down to the railroad tracks to recover the formerly frozen body of a Great Manx that had died exactly two weeks ago, when the first great blizzard of 2005 hit New York City.

She had thrown what I sincerely hope was merely his spent vessel over the fence, into a thick snow drift that covered the steep bank leading down to the freight and passenger rails. I had not been home when he peacefully passed away, and she had seen to disposing of his body before I was able to get home. (She had rung me up with the news, and I had immediately taken my leave to make may home through the horizontal blast of ice and snow.)

As I was the only one with boots as well as the will to retrieve the olde boy's body, I alone ascended the thorn-covered and somewhat muddy hill. Upon reaching the blue bags in which he eternally rested, I was stunned to observe that he was head up, his front claws curled round the small tree that had only barely arrested his (hopefully posthumous) descent. The bag was in such a way that he could not have escaped were he still alive then, as the opening was at his stomach. Had he attempted to exit, he would have had to let go the tiny tree trunk and continued sliding down a snow covered hillside, blindly.

I only hope that it was a bizarre coincidence and had naught to do with the fact that my roomie was not so goddamned drunk and high as to have made a horrible mistake. I wish she would have fucking awaited my arrival.

I can write no more for now. I am breaking my vow to not get drunk, and hope I do not awaken covered in blood after having made my own fatal mistake...

Welcome to my not-so-homicidal release...!

I have lived round the planet.

I have toured extensively.

I spent fifteen years, starting in the 1980s, maintaining a fanzine.

I have been married.

I am an Eagle Scout.

I used to be a crackhead.

I nearly went into the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs, CO.

I love Cats.

I maintain clandestine residences in Los Angeles as well as New York City.

I can sleep through a war when my ageing corpus decides it is time for those few four hours of naptime...

and were it not for this somewhat sterile medium, I would be in prison for murdering a roommate who, despite her sweet demeanour, possesses the most wretched manners I have ever known.

My friends, colleagues and lovers thought I was merely employing hyberpole when I told them about my roommate's rancid outbursts, uncessant flatulence, morning noise and absolute lack of social graces. I even recorded her atrocities in the A.M. for them; I was accused of merely employing my audio engineering abilities to exaggerate what could not be nearly as horrific as I alleged was the daily aural and olfactory assault. (I will eventually upload a session for all to hear, once I figure out to capture it on my laptop.) This blog is my last resort, that I do not keep bottled up what was too close to exploding in a homicidal fashion.

Of course, if my roomie finds out about this blog, I WILL have to kill her so as not to be kicked out.

I plan on posting a couple of times a week, or at least as frequently as my murderous impulses demand.

MetroHopper