(Phaysis)

My first week in my new apartment; the dust is settling and I’m starting to settle in on a nest of my own. Moving out, so far, is proving to be the best gift I could have given myself to mark my 36th birthday last week. I am now, finally, my own man.

My former roomate and I have practically broken all ties, and good thing, too. Less stress, less drama. He tried to draw me into some drama last weekend; hadn’t even been moved out 18 hours and he was yelling at me about taking the cable modem; a case of I-said-You-said. The jackass stole my cable internet account without my permission, and, if I have learned right, the only way to do so would be to file a bunch of paperwork at the cable office to transfer an account from one name to another…and both parties must file. So, it looks like someone impersonated me. A heady accusation to make, but it would be fitting as a final “fuck you” to someone he no longer cared about.

After being on the phone with Time-Warner sunday, I decided that the best disposition of the modem was to go to my old apartment, open the door, attach a note to the modem that said “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!”, drop it and my old keys on the floor, and lock the door on my way out.

I dusted my hands on the walk back to the car.

It pleases me that we are no longer in each other’s sphere of influence. I can remove the gloves when necessary now instead of biting my bleeding tongue in an insane fit of diplomacy. That I stayed in the same household with him for almost six years speaks volumes of my insanity, laziness, fear, poverty, and an unwillingness to rock the boat. It’s a testament to intersocial constipation. I held back so much shit over the years, it just stopped flowing. The long winter. The dead season. The minutes of decay in the hour of life.

After our friendship went sour, I stopped communicating, he stopped trying. We found comfort in plausible deniability: I was simply closing my door because I didn’t want to bother him with my loud music; he closed his door because he didn’t want to bother me with his smoking. Our avoidance of each other was because we didn’t get along, but acting as such would have been unbearably direct. We had to find nonverbal excuses. Everything was unbearably passive-aggressive. We didn’t talk beyond an infrequent “hey” and a terse discussion of bills. On occasion, it was friendly, but that was just on the face of it. In private, fingers would fly. In public, tongues would wag. Our rare instances of actual contact over important issues met with inflamed egos and enraged anger. Usually, someone left the house shortly afterwards.

But no more of that.

I am in my own place now. I can stretch out. I can change. I can grow, create, do stuff without commentary, remarks, surprise. I can sit in the common area without bother. I can watch a heavy movie without the risk of someone barging in the front door dragging three strange friends and interrupting the moment at a particularly heavy part of the plot. The environment won’t change suddenly without my hand on the handle.

I am in my own place. Now, instead of having to avoid when I go home, I only have to avoid in the rare public place. That’s easy enough; avoiding in your own private sanctuary is much more difficult and taxing.

I am in my own place. It’s over now. I hope he and I can reach some shred of reconciliation, but right now, it’s doubtful and for the short term unwanted. I’m out. It’s over. We’re done.

I am on my own.

Here goes:

I have announced to my roomate that, after 6 years of living with him, I am moving out. Thus ends our long history of cohabitation. It has been a long, cold winter.

Since the announcement, I’ve been looking at apartments; my goal is to find a one-bedroom flat as close to my current neighborhood as possible. It’s proving to be difficult. Feels as if the whole thing is backfiring on me. But, I keep searching.

I’ve found several places that fit the bill just right, but there’s always something that turns me away: high demand, long waiting list, no availability, obscenely high prices, stupid college-level restrictions like assigned parking, or some absurd anti-pet rules — one otherwise awesome place demanded that no dogs are allowed on the premises, period, which encroaches on any visit by my mother who travels with her dog.

I want to stay in this area, I seriously do, but I’m being priced out of my own neighborhood. I’m trying to be my own man and live on my own now that I can sort of afford it (I’m almost 36 and I’ve never had my own place — what the hell is that?). It’s time to try, but it’s an immense weight to do it. Pushing stones uphill.

So, tomorrow is an important day: I’ll have to make a decision on this one apartment I’ve been considering for the past week, pay my deposit and application fee, and await my acceptance. Failing that, my deposit goes back to me and I keep searching. It’s a juggling act with 12 balls in the air. I’m tired. This has drained me, dragged me down. It’s a full-time job, and since most apartment managers don’t work outside of business hours, it’s cutting into my actual full-time job. More stress.

All my previous searches for a place to live have been a cakewalk in comparison; I’ve either moved in with someone else or have found a suitable place within the first week. I’ve been at this since the first of the month and it’s growing long in the tooth. Ulcers from the stress; paralysis from the options; insomnia from the anxiety; cramps from the fear of uncertainty. I’m sick from this nonsense and I want it to end. And this is only half the work of moving.

Out of being worn down I’ll most likely settle on the place tomorrow and keep packing up my shit to move. Hopefully they’ll have the place ready within the week so I can start moving by week’s end. Then and only then can I be locationally and financially detached from my roomate (we’ve been interpersonally detached for years). I want the charade to end. I want the new beginning.

Why do I settle for failure? Why does anybody settle for failure? Putting up with failure for so long. Why do it? Powerlessness? Tolerance for bullshit? Passive aggression? Hoping it’ll get better while investing nothing in it. Things fail, and we just go along with it. No fight left. No strength. It’s not patience, it’s just muffled intolerance.

I just…settle…for less than the best.

Is this a function of turning the corner into middle age? What’s with the fear of rising up to Change Things? Fear of failure is inviting failure. I want to keep going along with the shitty things in my life, and that is most troubling to me. It hurts to make change; it costs a lot of effort. I know the rewards are worth more than the investment. I know all this shit. So why remain? Why persist?

This weekend has been absolutely abysmal. The air conditioner in my apartment died a wimpering death on friday afternoon. I got home from work and walked into the sauna that was my place of residence. Inside thermometer read 92F. I was livid. My roomate and I have been around with our landlord for years about this stupid air conditioner. The amount of money spent on all the service calls could’ve gotten a top-notch compressor, but that’s our landlord. Always out for the bottom line.

I called the landlord on saturday morning to verify that my roomate called the afternoon before. He answered and we had a chat about the situation. Said that the A/C service company doesn’t like to answer the phones after 5pm on Friday. His words reeked of bullshit to me; he didn’t want to pay weekend emergency rates, that’s what the truth really is. Said he would call at 8am monday. He had no interest in taking care of us, his 5-year residents of this complex.

I’m serious when I say we better have somebody out tomorrow to fix this and leave with a fully-functional air conditioning system, because this is shit. Complete shit. For two days my apartment has been in the 90′s…it’s supposed to be 74. No reason for making us live in this hell any further.

But we’re trying to deal with it the best we can. We have two box fans and three portables, but it’s still not enough to move the volume of hot air in our house, not enough to dilute it with tepid outside air. I was able to keep the inside temp in certain areas at parity with the outside temp of 92F yesterday — which is commendable. All those years of living in the damn projects with no A/C taught me good enough, I guess.

I’ve had no good sleep for the past two nights and I’ve got a ragged edge because of that. Doing what I can; I have a box fan in my bedroom window above the head of my bed. There’s a dish towel clothespinned to the bottom half of it to help deflect air down to my bed. It helps, mostly. Wake up in the middle of the night to cover up. But I’m still sticky with the humidity. No A/C to dry the air. Taking two cold showers a day now; afternoon and bedtime. Wearing almost nothing, and it’s still horrible. Can’t lay down, can’t sit, can’t recline…there’s no escape but to not be at home.

I had left work friday fully expecting to have a chilled-out, laid back, casual weekend. Thanks to ancient equipment and an uncaring landlord, that has been destroyed. I am so angry.

Update: The A/C repairman arrived around noon on Monday. He had a replacement fan motor in his van and was done with his work in 20 minutes. TWENTY MINUTES, and my damn landlord made us suffer the whole fucking weekend.

The disturbing, unsettling dreams continue.

About a week ago, I dreamed that I went back to school. Not just any school — I went back to Ouachita Baptist University, the place where I spent/wasted 5 1/2 years of my life. Yeah, Ouachita. All I remember was that I was riding in the back seat of a car, there were something like 5 other people in the car, and we were on our way from Austin to Arkadelphia. Upon arrival, I make my way to my new room on the third floor of Daniel Hall South, where I had a room at one point. The room was on the front side of the dorm. I remember looking around and seeing how everything, though familiar, had thoroughly changed. Even the students had changed into Abercrombie and Fitch models with more clothing and more praise to the Almighty. Feh.

So, I’m there in my room, it’s overstuffed with people, and I’m sitting in the doorway next to the hall talking to who? My Mojo’s friends. Weird. So both male and female friends are there with me, we’re talking and trying to keep our voices down, and one of the girls laughs a little too loudly. This gets the attention of the Resident Assistant (both of them, actually — seems OBU had started putting 2 RA’s per floor instead of 1), and they kick her out of the men’s dorm (OBU is a Baptist university, so of course there’s no in-room visitation with the opposite sex). I walk out after her, make my way to the end of the dorm and the base of the footbridge, where there’s still tons of people, and I take off towards the woods behind the dorm, first at a full run, then after not being able to run (it’s a dream, after all), I settle at a rushed jog. I wake up before I reach the woods.

That dream, scary as it was, really is just my memory kicking in. Earlier that evening, I was talking to friends online and dragging up memories of when I was in school. Later on in the evening, I was at Mojo’s, and the place in the smoking section, where I sat, was packed and crowded. These experiences and memories sat and stewed all night until *pop* they form a dream. And that dream scared the shit out of me. So, not only did I go back to school, I did so at the loss of all that I’ve come to rely on for support. I left my job, I left my car behind, I left pretty-much everything behind to go back. I didn’t even have financial aid. I just went. That disturbs me the most. Freaky, creepy.

Fast forward to this morning. This weekend, since Friday night, I’ve been sick with another case of sinusitis (the second case in three weeks), so I’ve been sleeping a lot. This morning, the final dream that carried me back to the conscious world, was another “Going back to Ouachita” dream. This one was a little different, though.

I dreamed that I went back, and this time I took my roomate Patrick with me. I knew that, like me, he had to finish some schooling and get a degree. So we went, and we were roomates there as well. This time, things were different, though. I drove the both of us there, from Austin to Arkadelphia, in my car. All our stuff was in my car (don’t ask me how). Our room, as you may guess, was also on the third floor of Daniel Hall South, front side. At first I was thinking it was an old friend’s old room, but it was actually two doors down towards the middle of the hall. And instead of getting there at dusk, like my previous dream, we got there mid-morning, so the sun was beaming through the blinds (now that I think of it, that makes no sense at all, because the front side of the dorm faces the west). Whatever.

So, the dorm is different, again. Carpeting in the hallway. Brown carpeting. The room has been renovated: the closets are gone. In their place is a set of wood-framed bunkbeds. There were no closets anymore. The whole room was carpeted as well; when I was at OBU, only a small few of the rooms in Daniel Hall had any shred of built-in carpeting, and those rooms were half-carpeted, at that. I found the new campus ethernet ports in the corner; I remembered looking for them (they didn’t exist until after I had left that school). Everything was spacious, open, and empty; 80% of the rooms were still sitting with doors open, waiting on the students to come back. There were no RA’s. Just me and Pat, and our first load of stuff.

We paid a visit to the student center, I showed him the post office, the bookstore, the grand stairwell, some of the classrooms. I remembered talking to some of the students who had made it back early. We were there, we were older than everyone, we were smokers, and we were there at Ouachita Baptist University. The sun was shining bright and warm, things looked hopeful (kinda), but we were still there, without degree plans, without financial aid, without jobs, with nothing but our stuff.

Ok, interpretation time: the shining sun in the window is from the fact that currently my bed is beneath the window of my bedroom. The window faces south, so the sun comes in every day, almost all day. It was shining bright and warm on me as I slept in today. But why Ouachita again? I don’t quite know yet, but I think it may have been related to finding a text file on my computer outlining my student loan debts and how much I owe to whom. That may have kick-started the neural memory mass again, or something of the sort. I’ve also kinda, and I haven’t thought this through completely yet, I’ve lately been thinking about driving back to Arkadelphia, for real, to go back to the place where I had my first cigarette and ceremoniously undo everything by having my last at that spot. But why was Patrick there with me? Why was I dragging his ass back to OBU? I really don’t know. If anybody would be bad fit for OBU, he would, hands-down. I really don’t know.

So, this thread totally scares me. I don’t want to go back. I can’t go back. I know I won’t go back. The thought of being surrounded by Arkansas’ finest spoiled uberyouth with high-minded religious intentions to bang each other’s brains out in motels creeps me out. The thought of having to sit through another Chapel session frightens me. The thought that I will know absolutely no one there save the few professors who still have tenure makes me freak.

Please, make it stop. Gah.