So it's been an interesting few days.

Spent the latter half of last week franticly cleaning the house for a date on Monday. I'm not prepared to say a whole lot about that just yet only that I had a great time and thank whatever benevolent spirits are looking over me that she didn't see either the kitchen or my now legendarily disgusting bathroom, neither of which I had the time to clean.

Though I don't know what I'm worried about. I mean, she's read my work and now met me in person so she obviously doesn't frighten easily.

So I was in a particularly good mood the following evening when an occasional neighborhood acquaintance of mine stopped me in the alley on the way to the corner bodega.

For those of you not up on the parlance (or haven't seen Half Baked),

Bodega
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Spanish term meaning a warehouse; especially for the storing of wine usually located on the premises of a winery. Bodegas can also store other alcoholic beverages and spirits. Bodega also means (at least loosely) wine bar or winery.

A bodeguita, a general store in Latin America

A term used in the United States, especially in the New York dialect, to refer to a convenience store.

A term used in Poland to refer to a brothel.

A shoe store in Boston

A term used to refer to the clip on the top of a pen cap to attach to your pocket.

A town in California near Bodega Bay

Bodegas are also often fronts that make most of their money selling drugs. We commonly refer to the 13th street corner store as 'The Bodega' because it's a convenience store and it has cheap beer, not for any drug peddling that we have any knowledge of.

It would explain how they stay in business though...

I'm fairly certain they're not running a brothel and given the neighborhood they're located in the very prospect is truly terrifying.

Anyways, this guy that I'd met a few days prior talking to my asshole neighbor, was just standing in the dark alley, almost as though he'd been waiting for me.

Paranoia, right?

We chatted politely for a few minutes. Not out of any particular fondness for the guy, but one thing my Dad taught me is that it only takes a second to be polite and cordial to possibly keep your shit from getting vandalized or stolen in the night by shitheads that won't show their true colors while you're looking.

Smart guy, my Dad. On the 8th it'll be ten years he's been gone.

On the 31st it'll be six years since I almost joined him.

Time flies.

So I talked politely to this guy, we'll call him Mr. S, when I definitely wanted to be anywhere else but there. I wasn't too worried, as I certainly had every advantage over the guy and he wasn't displaying any kind of threat behavior, but it was cold and dark and I just wanted to buy some Diet Pepsi and go back the fuck home.

We talked mostly about my car, which he's taken a particular shine to and which I'm glad is now locked in my steel box of a garage.

Well Mr. S wants to be pals. He talked about how interesting and polite and nice to talk to I was (and I really am). So just as I'm expecting him to hit me with whatever favor he was so blatantly buttering me up for he bade me goodnight (explaining that he heard police sirens), finished off his tallboy and pedaled his bike down the alley.

“Huh.” I thought. Just an interesting little bit of neighborhood theater witnessed in person rather than from the windows as I usually prefer. I try to avoid the interactive neighborhood experience as much as I possibly can.

Anyways, I buy my soda and go home.

Now, a week ago Brian's Dad Chuck came by to check out my outdoor fuse box which also happens to be my ONLY fusebox as the electricity was put in this house back when electricity was still something of a novelty.

The house was originally built as a general store in about 1918, wherein a man was allegedly shot to death in an argument over the proper way to shoe a horse. Right in my living room.

Colorful, ain't it?

Well Chuck discovered that rain has been freely flowing through the back of my fusebox for about the last 30 years or so. The back is completely rusted out and the wire connections are buried in rust flakes which Chuck was afraid to blow away for fear that they were the only thing conducting power to the one remaining circuit we have functioning.

The time Mr. S first saw me he was talking to my neighbor (the one that bitches about me not mowing my lawn enough) as I was heading out the door to pick up the permits to rewire the house.

That brings us to this morning.

I'm upstairs, lying in bed. It's about 2 in the afternoon and I've been awake for a bit, but it's fucking cold and I have no reason to go leaping out of bed any sooner than I fucking have to.

I hear knocking at the back door. People that know the house and my habits know that I'm usually in bed at that hour and I can't hear a knock at the front door so rather than call me on their cell phone, which would definitely wake me up, they'll usually just knock on the back door which works, just not as well.

Well I put pants on and head down the stairs figuring it's Chuck about working on the house. Through the blind I see a Carhart hunting jacket, beard and ball cap leading me to believe that it was Brian's uncle Virgil who works with Chuck.

I open the door.

It's not Virgil.

It's Mr. S.

Fuck.

See, even though I'm polite to my neighbors I really don't like most of them and I make an effort to keep them out of my house. I've often said my best security system is that the people on the outside of the house don't know what's on the INSIDE of the house.

Well Mr. S wants to talk and asks if he can step inside as in-between my bouts of consciousness we'd gotten four inches of snow and the teperature had dropped to about 20 degrees.

I let him one step in the back door.

Looking back, that would have been a good time to kill him.

Anyways, he explains that he and his old lady have no place to stay and he asks if they can rent my spare bedroom. And it clicks. That's the favor he was laying the groundwork for, that's what he was talking to my rat-bastard neighbor about, and it was the rat-bastard neighbor that told him that I had an empty fucking room.

He didn't want to deal with him, so he pawned his ass off on me.

There will be repercussions for this.

Stay tuned.

Well I explain that it's not my decision alone to make about taking on more people (which is true), the empty room is crammed full of shit that would take a day to clean out (also true) and the house could burn down at any moment (more true that I'm comfortable with).

Of course he doesn't want to hear 'no' as Jr. (the asshole next door) has probably filled his head full of god knows what regarding my housing situation. It was Socrates that said “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”. It's a philosophy that I'm rather fond of and believe in. Jr. pisses me off, not because he's an idiot, I can suffer idiots to a degree, but because he's an idiot that thinks he fucking knows everything. And now, apparently, he's reporting on my household activities and encouraging people that I don't want to fucking talk to to come fucking talk to me.

It's rather telling that he knew to go to the back door. I hardly use the front door. My car and the Bodega are out the back.

Again, there will be repercussions.

Well Mr. S gets all the way up to offering $300 cash up front to move in immediately, which I turn down and he eventually leaves.

That cuts to this evening.

I'm not losing you guys am I?

Good.

I get a knock at the door at 9PM. This is not unusual. The knock is “Shave and a Haircut” which I take note of because the last person to knock that way tried to sell Ryan a TV at 2 AM. I didn't see that guy's face. Peeking through the window in the door I see the face of Mr. S, who, in turn, catches me looking.

FUCK.

Most of you are asking me at this point why I was stupid enough to open the door. It's something I've asked myself. I can only chalk it up to my postmortem philosophy making me too nice for my own fucking good.

That and it'd probably make for an interesting story to tell you fuckers.

Because I do think about that when all this weird shit is going on, just so you all know.

I hope you appreciate it.

Well I figure he just wants to try to talk me into letting him stay here again, to which I was just going to refuse and threaten to call the cops if necessary, but no, they'd found a place. He just wanted to use the phone to order a pizza as they didn't have one at their new place having just moved in.

I made the call. I ordered the pizzas. I had them sent to HIS new address because I knew it would mean he'd be leaving shortly thereafter, which he did. Not before offering me prescription painkillers and pot (half a joint of which he smoked on my porch) to return the favor. He insists that he's coming back today to give me $5 to return the favor, even though I assured him it was unnecessary.

Consequently (getting to the point FINALLY) is why I won't be answering the door today, or for the foreseeable future. If you're coming over, call first and be aware that the “Shave and a Haircut” knock may be met with gunfire.



And on a side note, for everyone that liked that fake Mario Trailer on my last post, here's the trailer for the actual movie they put out several years ago. I had the misfortune of actually seeing this cinematic turd box in the fucking theater. Looking back, it's probably got a lot to do with why my intestines eventually exploded.

Enjoy! I've gotta go restring my crossbow...



And this to cleanse the palete,