And Now, the Answers

The answers to the three questions posed at the end of my last blog entry, written back in 1979 at the dawn of the internet (I really need to update more often, I know. But, you see, I was trying to build suspense with the three-month absence. Totally):

Evil Ex-Roommate does, in fact, live in a barn surrounded by hay bales. There is no indoor plumbing.

We were able to move my things without incurring significant damage to our persons, even though my friend's meat-free diet lacks sufficient amounts of protein and my mother and I are small women. This was accomplished by the on-the-spot decision to leave my couch on the curb of my old apartment building, because it was way too big and heavy to get into my new building's elevator. That brings us to the last question:

We were not, in fact, able to avoid confrontation with the neighbors. If you guessed that that was the "no" answer, you win! Also, if you know me personally and did not guess the answer that involved me getting into a fight with someone, you should be ashamed because you really don't know me at all. Call me sometime.

The fight was because my apartment building's next-door neighbors (I always called them The Sims because they have at least two room's worth of furniture hanging out on their front yard, not unlike when you first start to play the popular computer game and you don't have enough money to build all the walls or floors of your new house so you and your SimFamily have to live outside until you get a promotion in your SimJob because you SimWorked out on your SimSoloflex for one day), did not appreciate that we left my couch on the curb once we realized that it was not going to fit in the elevator of my new building, which was built in the twenties when people were apparently really small and fond of real wood paneling. I'd like to point out again that these people have two couches, a dining table that would not be out of place in a Medieval Times, and two old-fashioned salon hairdryer chairs in their yard, so you'd think they didn't really have a leg to stand on with the no-furniture-outside argument. Unless, of course, they were standing on the leg of one of the fifteen chairs around their massive table. That's, like, sixty legs. I tried to point out to them that maybe someone with a goddamn FIREPLACE hanging out in his front yard shouldn't have a problem with other people trying to create their own outside living rooms, but the guy insisted that we live in a "nice neighborhood," which apparently means that we are to keep our outside couches behind the high walls of our ugly and cheap-looking stucco fence. Dude, just because you were stupid enough to pay over a million dollars for a house that was condemned just a year ago and then renovated by a team of laborers who I'm pretty sure were taken to the jobsite directly from the Home Depot parking lot they were hanging out in in hopes of getting hired for an odd job, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to conform to your standards of what a million-dollar home neighborhood should be. And by "the rest of us," I mean me, the homeless man who built a two-room tent with adjoining greenhouse on the sidewalk, whoever it was that stole two loads of my laundry out of the goddamn dryer, those kids who kept sneaking into my apartment building to use our pool, the dead pigeon, and, of course, this guy:

I will miss you (the pool, not the guy. My new place doesn't have a pool).