I sat in college, satisfied. My medical execution had been removed, but there was still the financial one. Who cared after the horrors of a research hospital coupled with experimentation and the general flagrant idiocy of people who couldn't handle their nursing jobs with anti anxiety drugs.
I lived with a lot of writers, and not necessarily as a mark of pride. There was Chas, some rotund devil who was already always taking photographs of myself and for some odd reason, writing poems about me for poetry class. I gathered that the rich white artists hadn't been exposed to punk rock, so I was either a novelty or a terror to them, but I certainly was not writing poems about their personal relationships for class. This happened more than once. Another guy's name was Jacob, who wrote a short story about killing me for doing the dishes. I don't know what went wrong, but really in retrospect it was probably all "Nights of Secretly Using Drugs." I did my schoolwork and drank. When I got rowdy, I would throw bacon grease on the kitchen floor and kick over Christmas trees that didn't belong in the hallways of that horrible old three story, five bedroom ramshackle house that had bursting rusted plumbing and only one bathroom.
Lacer was a different story, but the same. Spun out on speed, she would spin out volumes that just sounded like Kurt Vonnegut, but in an affectionate way.
Really, Bren was the worst. She hired a meth head to cut the lawn once, let him stay in the shed, and we had to pay ninety dollars for him to cut our lawn with our own lawn mower? There was also the day I got out of the hospital where she expected me to do all my backlogged housework. After a hospital stay? Damn. Her art was childish and mostly about manatees, which seems dangerous in the offhand realization that you realize she didn't really give a fuck about anything but art and roommates. It is arguably a dangerous system of chores that would force a person with neck surgery to mop the floors and do two weeks worth of dishes that were not theres that piled up when his neck was being sliced into to remove his jugular vein. She dated Chaz, wouldn't pay the rent, and they are still together up there in the Northwest, taking pictures of coal and filth now instead of people.
Like he was on assignment, Chaz took naked pictures of Bren for an art exhibit. All it did was estrange people.
Lacer dated Matt, some con artist with a rich family that couldn't stay in the same school or smoke cigarettes without breaking them in half. For one exhibition, he just bought a bunch of hamburgers from Wendy's and threw them on the gallery floor, charging a grand per mess. What a real bloke.
Robbie was ok. He contracted leukemia later, so I felt some inherent sympathy for him. All he seemed to do was drink, which seemed fine by me. He wrote a sad story once about being gay and drunk and having to hitch a ride to the funeral of an old lover, called "The Patron Saint of Merlot." He was funny in a way. Turned out he knew some of my Portland friends, so I voted on him moving in when Lacer ran away to the east mountains in a breaking van. There was that whole mess. I'm being funny. The whole thing was really an entire and complete mess on top of being a waste of time.
Nobody seemed remotely interested in artistic theory, but they were into literary criticism. It was like their theories were autistic, just pulled from the campus textbooks. I've heard idiocy in my life, but I've never had to sit on a porch, bathed in cigarette smoke before with the feeling that I was wasting my time.
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