Thursday, July 26, 2007

July 20 - 26, 2007

This blog has become my neglected child – locked in the closet and fed once a week. It’s not that I don’t love him. I do. Just not enough to take him out and beat him every day.

But I will continue to keep him alive. Past July. And on.

Close your eyes and imagine a drumroll…

I’ve found a place to live. Assuming I can pass a credit check.

$442 to share a room in a white-carpeted college-ish apartment in the heart of Hollywood. Only a block from Sunset and Vine. I know what you’re thinking: “Ooh, Hollywood! Glamorous!” But you’re fucking wrong because Hollywood is dirtier than a day-worker’s dick.

This is a bittersweet victory for me. On one hand I’m happy that I’ve found a cheap place in a good location with sane people. On the other hand, if I pretended I was gay, I could’ve had my own room in a large house in the hills. For free.

To make things worse, this girl I know who’s a friend of a girl I once wanted to fuck very badly during my fifth-year of college is renting a spacious townhouse in Kentucky for less than $300.

On the bus there’s a large, light-skinned black woman wearing short overalls. Her legs are hairy. She has more rolls than ghetto dice. Pretty standard for the northbound 210.

Except for a tattoo on her neck. In small, cursive lettering:

Sexy Mama.

In what bus shelter? I can’t even see the shopping cart gang worshipping at the throne of this woman. Wait… yes I can.

If a woman needs to tattoo “Sexy Mama” on her neck, or anywhere, then she is probably not a sexy mama. She may have ass for hours, days, weeks, months, years, or epochs, but that’s not good ass. It’s the ass you imagine having shat before you whenever you need to defecate in a public restroom. Big, hairy, pockmarked ass.

An ass with a crack dark enough to be outerspace on a movie poster.

At the grocery store, chunk light tuna is end-capped. There’s a big cheerful sign that says “Only $10 for 10!”

A dollar a can. Only.

Would this have worked in Hitler’s favor? “It was only six million!”

For some cruel reason, Ralph’s has discontinued their generic chunk light tuna. 62 cents a can and it’s all gone. What’s an insecure male supposed to do for cheap protein these days? There are a number of stray cats in this city…

Alex and I have an argument over the fan and everything else we’ve come to hate about each other after two months of living together in a small, hot room. He accuses me of eating the rest of his lo-mein, to which I reply:

“No I fucking didn’t!”
“Whatever.”
“I did not eat your fucking lo-mein!”
“Okay, I believe you.”

But he doesn’t, and I know this. He asks me how it feels to intimidate someone 60 lbs lighter than me, and I do some quick math in my head and realize it’s more like 70 or 75. And it feels pretty good. But not because he’s smaller. Just because he’s so condescending. Yes, I may be an overly-critical asshole, but I am not smug. Ask ten white people and more than half will tell you smugness is worse than AIDS.

I yell at him for being a rich kid, hogging the fan, and having a smelly ass. He says the fan is his, and it is. He bought it. Wouldn’t even let me go in half on it, which I wrongly assumed meant it would be shared. Still, regardless of fan-ownership, you do not enter a room and just turn a fan away from somebody. People are executed for fan-turning in lesser countries. There are fan rules, fan guidelines. I liked it better when he was sneaky about turning the fan away from me, “accidentally” knocking it down and then repositioning it towards himself.

Cunning. Deliberate.

Alex tells me he’s kept his mouth shut about me for the past two weeks.

“Kept your mouth shut about what?”
“Nothing.”
“Fucking tell me.”

And then he mentions the lo-mein. Nothing else though, although I’m sure he has a whole list of things, as do I.

Our music wars for one.

For the first couple weeks he was all headphones. However, in recent weeks, he’s staged a coup, blasting Death Cab and other emo, Hot Topic t-shirt bands in defiance. Please imagine Djimon Hounsou, Hollywood’s go-to noble negro (Blood Diamond, Amistad), shouting this dialogue to a group of African warriors, his neck bulging, abs rippled:

“Why must we wear headphones? Why! Are we not people? Do our lungs not breathe? Do our hearts not bleed? From this day forward, we will wear headphones no more!”

Loud cheers. And then the third act begins.

Our music wars have been like air-headed conversations with chatterboxes. You wait and wait and wait for that break, that hesitation, so you can finally say something. So while I’ve been monopolizing the conversation with Big L and Citizen Cope and Amy Winehouse and Weezer and Ray Lamontagne, he’s been waiting for me to breathe so he could respond with Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Eat World and other generic, whiny rock bands that are cool for skinny kids to listen to.

Maurice pops his head in the room a couple hours later:

“I ate the lo-mein.”

(Big shout out to Leah for her birthday!)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

If smugness is worse than AIDS, your blog is full blown

Anonymous said...

sorry about the tuna.

you said you and Alex yelled about stuff you both hate about each other, but it sounds like you did all of that yourself. and you hate him for being rich? im rich. do you hate me? he sounds like a bitch but so do you.

Anonymous said...

you just had to throw a little HT reference in there, didn't you?

Teehee.

Jeff said...

And here I thought my blog had all of its T-cells. I'd say there's a fine-enough line between smugness and just being an asshole in general. Smug people don't think they're assholes. I know I'm an asshole. I'm also a really nice guy. Who helped a post-stroke blind man cross the street a couple weeks ago? Me. No lie.

Yes, I'm also a bitch. That was probably established from the get-go. But we all have our bitchy qualities, tendencies, whatever. Me even moreso since I like to overanalyze, etc. I don't hate anybody, and certainly for not being rich. It just gets to be annoying when you're still picking up pennies off the street and somebody's dropping $200 on a pair of shoes they're never going to wear. It's their money or their parents' money, I know, but I can't deny the frustration I feel. Sue me.

Also, please remember we've been sharing an 11x12 for about two months, so all of the small, innocuous things that you can usually ignore about people have become this inescapable madness, a telltale heart of sorts. Don't know how many of you have lived in a dorm with a roommate you didn't get along with or pretended to get along with, but this is closer quarters. There is no quad, no lobby, no friend's room to go to.

No, Alex didn't verbalize his frustration, but I think that has more to do with fear than being the better man. Not that I would ever attack him, or anybody for that matter, it's just when I get mad I get mad and it looks like a possible and/or likely scenario.

Ugh, having to defend myself sucks. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut.

Seriously though, thanks for reading and voicing your opinions.

Jeff

Anonymous said...

I wanna hear about LA, not about u and ur roomates relationship assface

Jeff said...

There hasn't been much on LA because I've been working every day. About 14 days in a row coming up this Saturday.

Anonymous said...

listen up ass monkey, ur hear to entertain me, more LA, less girls, less arguments, more toilet humor, more ghetto spots, once again ass monkey, im a dedicated viewer, ur blog is one of the sites i frequent the most, gimme the goods, and dont make me wait so long u assface, ur getting worse and worse, it was a few days here and their, then it turned into 3 or 4 days, now its almost a week, get with it assface, and tell ur roomate he can suck my sweaty central valley balls :)

Anonymous said...

wait, you said, "not that i would ever attack him," jeff? but... it sounds like you DID attack him. i dont know why im defending this guy. attack away, if you feel its the only way! is it?

Jeff said...

Physically attack. When I'm angry I'm more verbal than a Maury Povich guest before the "You are NOT the father!" announcement.

Jeff said...

Female MP guest. Should've specified.

Domineditrix118 said...

Oh, my son. You make a mother proud. Your dayworker and ghetto dice analogies are on target. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

REPENT IN YOUR WICKED WAYS! FEAR GOD: ACCEPT JESUS AND KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE WAY