Lifestyle to Which I Have Grown Accustomed

1/24/06

Author’s Note: This particular article is for Allison, who has recently informed me that reading my blog is the literary equivalent of the Iditarod dogsled race, (i.e. exhausting.) In the future, I shall make a supreme effort toward brevity as I do tend to be overly loquacious.


Editor’s Note: If he really meant it, he would’a just said: “These’ll be shorter from now on.” What an asshole.

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Am I too pampered? Naturally, living in the US as I do, my life is already way ahead of the curve. I pity those people in far-off lands without ready access to disgusting internet pornography or industrial-sized tubs of pickles from Sam’s Club, but then I remember most of them are too busy mostly trying not to freeze to death or wondering where their next drink of non-leprosy-infested water is coming from to need On Demand movies. The trouble is it seems I do need them.

My roommate is getting married soon, (selfish bastard,) and I assume he’ll be moving in with his significant other at some point, as she is somewhat more pleasant to be around than another guy who routinely leaves socks with questionable things soaked into them on the living room floor. Also, I suspect she puts out more.

But my problem is this; I too, will have to find another place to live, and most likely it will be sans another person with which to cushion the blow of those little, polite envelopes that come from someplace called “The Bills.” After some calculations I have come to the staggering conclusion that were I to stay in our current apartment I would have a paltry $70 or so in disposable income after paying for the necessities of life, and that’s not even including my weekly whiskey bill, which sometimes has to be figured using a scientific calculator.

Most shocking is that I make around double the amount for a single person to qualify as living at the poverty line; the current figure being around $9,000. And this is where I’m beginning to realize how spoiled I am. Right now I’m comfortable; I can always pay the bills on time, (notice I said can,) save a little money occasionally, (when I don’t need to score some heroin,) and enjoy more than a few amenities people of even fifty years ago would consider elaborate; namely my cable internet and television. I can honestly not imagine living without these things, especially the lightning-fast internet. Good gods, I’m not about to go downloading porn at 56 kilobytes a second, what is this, the time before Christ?

The solution, it would seem, is to move into a cheaper apartment. Right now I only live about a mile from work and I drive a car which is held together with duct tape and a dream, and living in an apartment within my price range would necessitate moving across town, a mind-numbing ten or so miles away. My sweet little curse of a vehicle probably wouldn’t last very long at those Mohave-esque distances.

I have lived in some rather shoddy housing—shitholes, let’s call them what they were—and am in no hurry to get back to the type of lifestyle where I find it acceptable to eat some green bologna I found in the bottom of the crisper because all I’ve eaten for the past seven meals is varying recipes of rice with increasingly odder ingredients. I don’t recommend the “Dirty Rice with M&Ms.”

The real trouble is that the past four years of my life have represented an uncharacteristic “up” point in my tenure on this planet, where I haven’t contemplated suicide everyday and I never have to worry about whether the heat will be shut off this month. I’ve become too accustomed to this comfortable existence and assumed it would continue to get better, thus feeling “entitled” to the comforts I already have. And now I’m faced with the demonic chance of moving backward in time to a point where I live alone—which is bad in and of itself, whenever I’m left to my own devices for too long I start to get strange ideas and can no longer tell if I’m thinking or actually talking out loud—and slowly denigrate to a point where I no longer care that I’ve had a dingy couch propped on its side in the kitchen for three months. (This actually happened.) Aside from enjoying their company, (most of the ones I’ve had, anyway,) and the financial windfall of living with a roommate, they also keep me in check by their mere presence. Why the hell should I clean the place up if it’s just me living here? It’s not as if your friends are going to stop by, I think. This leads down a slippery slope where I quit my job, stop paying bills and wait for either the icy hand of death or the landlord to show up and bodily evict me.

You might say I should find another roommate, but none of the people I’m friends with needs one and the scenario of living with someone strange to me would probably end in homicide, as I severely dislike about 97% of the population.

There’s no punch line or conclusion here, just a sort of horrified author stymied by the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Clearly I just have to convince my roommate’s fiancé to move into the apartment we currently have. Or kill her. I haven’t decided which.