November 3, 2008

Luck with others

So the fundie cleared out of here on Saturday with virtually all her stuff, and later today we'll have the first candidates over to see the place. None of them sound very promising so far but we'll see. The remaining roommate and I are aware that we will probably not get somebody before the end of the month so we'll be sucking up the cost of the empty room, but it gives us time to find somebody good, hopefully. I want to change the lock on the door soonest -- not that I really think she'll be back, but might as well; I think our concierge still has our last deadbolt in the junk room, so just swapping it back will do. And I should tell him, if he's around, to make sure and cash her October cheque pronto; she could still put a stop payment on it. She and Lindsay attend the same evangelical church, by the way.

I want to have better luck with others. People in general, girls I like, friends. I'm getting better at being hardnosed and that's got to improve my chances but it's work and it's not the kind of work I like.

Posted by Jack Spratt at 04:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2008

The fun in fundamentalist

Well our fundamentalist Christian-pop-singer roommate is moving out with five days' notice and an outright refusal to pay for November (she had earlier said she would). When she laid it down with no room for discussion, I informed her that she was full of shit and not the good person she liked to think she was. Now she's dead to me and had best clear out in a timely fashion this weekend lest I start bodily relocating her things into the hallway outside our apartment door. If nothing else, the situation's bringing myself and my remaining roommate closer together; I think he still doesn't know quite what to think, but he went with me tonight for half an hour so we could put up flyers in the neighbourhood advertising the room. We also have ads on craigslist and kijiji, bilingual this time, which is a first for us. As I told him, she'll be gone real soon and next we'll get somebody who's sure to be better than she was. We hope to get somebody soon, naturally, but we won't move so quickly that we compromise our screening process. Of course, the outgoing seemed good when we picked her up a year ago too, but you just try to minimize the risks and then in the end you roll the dice at least a little. Shit that it's happening at the end of the semester when there's term papers and finals to deal with, but this chapter will all be over soon and a new one will begin in just a couple of days now.

Posted by Jack Spratt at 04:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2008

Put out or get out

Yesterday I was downstairs at the boys' place - Tallboy et al - and the phone rang; I was nearest to it so I answered it, and for no real reason I changed up my voice to impersonate D-Mo. It was Lindsay, looking for Tallboy; I handed it off to him and he went off to take it in the living room. He'd mentioned a few days ago that she's still here - surprising - that's how many weeks' visit now: two, three, more yet?

There are times when a thought latches on to me and I can't shake it for a day or two. Right now it's, I don't get what I want.

He's one of my favourite people, she told me smilingly.

Yes, and one day I'll forgive myself about how long I kept treating him like the friend he'd ceased to be.

Things should have worked between us - she should have worked. Neither my heart nor my dick did move the other day when I saw her, like I said - I didn't want her to stop and I wasn't drawn to touch her or talk to her. It's not there anymore. There's a chance yet that she'll wind up at my door, it seems to me, wanting to make cordial too-smiling small talk about absolutely nothing to reassure herself that we're cool, but we aren't that cool and the only visit I'd stand for would involve a grudge fuck. Enough words; there was so much bullshit couched in so many of hers.

Posted by Jack Spratt at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)

Ice Hotel

The building is cold these days. The temps dip down below freezing at night now, and the landlord has long given standing orders to our kindly concierge not to warm up the radiators before a certain point in order to save on heating (whether it's a specific date or a specific temperature, we're not sure, although they seem to be shut off on April 1st every year when things are still pretty damn cold). Some wag put up a crude sign inside the front door which says "Welcome to the Ice Hotel" (in both official languages), and when I went downstairs for a jog tonight I saw two tenants complaining at the concierge's apartment about the cold. I have a dandy space heater in my room which makes a big difference (and glad I am for it), and tonight I baked a storebought lasagna, mainly so that the oven could help heat the place up at the same time. I imagine the rads will be cooking by the end of the month, though, and what warmth we have in the building will seem pretty fine this weekend, when we're going to be on exercise at Valcartier, three hours north and always noticeably colder than Montreal.

Posted by Jack Spratt at 02:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2008

Burlington

I had a good daytrip to Burlington, Vermont, with Goodbar last weekend, me on the Ninja (serviceable again), he on his temperamental 1983 Honda Nighthawk 550. The US border guards were weird, friendly in tone but asking oddly searching questions ("why did you set out so late in the day? How do you know that other guy?"). We rode through Lake Champlain country on the way down which made the trip a lot longer but let us see a lot more gorgeous scenery. The leaves were off the trees in most cases but there were still plenty of autumn colours to be seen.

Burlington is really cool too, a college town with lots of life. So many Obama bumper stickers, so many people jogging - more than I've seen anywhere other than Ottawa. Mind you, after a tremendous supper at Scuffer's steak and ale house on the pedestrian mall (Church Street) across from City Hall, Goodbar's bike kept crapping out and then wouldn't start at all; I got it going with a downhill bumpstart in a small Shell-station parking lot, but then he let it die when he turned the choke off prematurely and it refused to start again even after we got booster cables and tried starting it that way. So in the end I rode home alone that night and he slept at some hotel outside Burlington that he had to walk almost two hours to get to; then with the help of a local garage he managed to get his bike running and ride home the next evening. We are both going to have to picket our motorcycles for the winter in less than a month when the temperature starts dipping below freezing.

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I was convinced that I spotted Lindsay biking around the 'hood a few weeks ago; then two weeks ago I ran into her face-to-face here at the building when she was coming down from her old apartment with one of her old fanboys and one of her weird chick friends in tow. I was coming in; they were coming out. The security door was still closed between us when we first saw each other and she made a smiling face that was meant to convey something like "oh, hey!" So I opened the door and held it while they got their bicycles from inside the lobby and wheeled them outside. That was it.

I told a friend about it, one of the few who's in the know about our history, and he asked, "so when you saw her, did your dick move?" I said no. "Did your heart move?" I said no. "That's good," he said, and I agreed.

Tallboy tonight mentioned that she is still in town for another few days at least. As former roommate Halo (and friend-in-law of Lindsay's) put it: "I don't know where she gets her money".

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I am at midterms for what is presumably the last semester of university that I'll ever take. One of my profs wants to give me an F for a takehome that I handed in half a day late, having misapprehended the due date (the fact that I never go to his class, which would mean getting up at 0700, probably didn't help). I've argued eloquently against it and so far he hasn't written back - or he might have, but I didn't check my university email today. If he gives me a D, I suppose I'll take it; if he pushes for an F, I'll bring it to the associate dean, who's ruled in my favour before on bigger things than this, and drop a train on him. But it's true that this is only school and I foresee nothing that'll stop me from graduating on time.

Posted by Jack Spratt at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)

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