Crimewave

My life turned upside down around this time last year.

I ended up in a collage studying things that I wasn't interested in at all. Things I sucked at. My motivation was already low enough, and with my classes being more than hour of a travel away from my house, after a couple of weeks I stopped attending lectures.

Voluntarily dropping out wasn't my dumbest decision though: that would be breaking up with my then girlfriend.

You see, we lived in the different ends of the country, and I travelled three hours every week to stay three and a half days at her place. Once the thought that I'll have to keep up with this for five years or more dawned upon me, I panicked. Instead of seeking a compromise, or being open about it, or trying to find a solution, I chickened out. I dumped her.

As that was happening, I already felt that this is a bad, bad idea. Not going into endless paragraphs trying to grasp the feeling of love, suffice to say that she was the most important person in my life, and my grave mistake was thinking that things like this can get replaced. That the heart works like a machine, and all it needs is oiling and fixing to work.

It doesn't.

By winter, I was miserable to no end. Drinking out of spite and rage, seeking thrills to make me feel alive and to drive away thoughts of suicide, it was a very, very weird time. Sort of like one, overly long dream, where you're never sure in the morning if things did actually happen, or are just fragments of your imagination.

I can still recall the winds, the smells, the temperatures. The girls, the cigarettes, the gestures, the places. Those long days of doing nothing besides crawling around the busy city, trying to make a sense of it all. Trying to forget.

Trying to cope with depression. The nights without sleep, those lonely smokes, talking to yourself, the early morning sun and the wasted walks. The music.

Out of space, out of time. That you can be useless. That you are useless.

And you will be replaceable unless you find a purpose that you can cling onto.

(Crimewave is a song originally by noise-rock band Health, but the Crystal Castles cover is more widely known. They've also been featured on Skins, and for me, their sound is attached to the autumn and winter of '08. Next post will feature less emo-dribble.)

I Live in Hell

The door lock gave a fight before opening, but after a few minutes of struggling, I could finally enter. All the odours and smells inside hit me, but it was relieving: the apartment felt much safer than the street. All the weirdos and rejects were coming back for the fall, the district was full of them. Gangs and pimps with their whores, even if they don't shit in the same place where they live, it's still kind of unnerving. Especially with most of the other neighbours being a freakshow of lives fucked up.

I close the door, thinking of them, cracking a smile: as bad as it may be, the apartment was mine.

Fuck yeah.

I turn on some lights and start unpacking the stuff I brought with me. Bleach and other cleaning products, because the place is a mess. Large chunks are missing from the surface of the walls. Fixing that is out of my price range for now though.

I turn my attention to the refrigerator: when my renters moved out, I literally started jumping around the place in joy. Didn't remember that the renters before them, a Chinese family (who moved back, because it apparently sucks less than living here...) left theirs at my place. Sure, it's old, beaten and worn, but damn, at least we don't have to choke out the price of a new one. That's a major relief.

And then, my smile is banished by disgust as I open the fridge door.

Cockroaches. Why did it have to be cockroaches?

I close it immediately and hurry to the far end of the place to open some windows to vent out the stink. The roach colony, with the size of the red army alters my plans for the evening: I'm not cleaning that until they're exterminated.

Checking out the kitchen, I'm in for a similar freak-out. The motherfuckers are everywhere.

With nothing better to do, I sit in the main room, which is relatively roach safe. I call my friend and my girlfriend, they're going to drop by, but there's still some time until they arrive, so I read a random book. There's a huge bookshelf, mostly filled with crap, after mom died we sold most of the valuable ones, now it's just purple-prose filled romantic shit and pulp self-help books.

My friend arrives, I show him around the house. I advise him not to check out the kitchen or the fridge. He's wise, he trusts me. Meanwhile it turns out that my to-be flatmates found better stuff to do, they're not coming. We get a bottle of wine from a nearby shop, laying low, there's still a bunch of people on the streets who look like 42 years of solitary confinement each. We pick up the 'miss and we head back.

I tell her the same thing as I told my friend, but she's restless. She DEMANDS to look around everywhere. She opens the fridge, the stench steams out, she shuts the door and we're forced to stomp on some roaches that fell out. Fun.

Not learning from that, she goes into the kitchen. We stay back with my friend, I know what's coming next. She opens the cupboard door, her face twitches in disgust, slams it back in immediately, and skittles out of the kitchen fast. We laugh. I told you so!

We start drinking the wine: it's white, dry and cheap, fitting the atmosphere perfectly. We start chatting about random shit, when from the corner of my eye, I spot a black dot.

It's in the other room, crawling up the wall of one of the closets. It's a fucking roach. And it suspects nothing.

I grab a book from the shelf and sneak to the door. Two meters of a distance, I throw the book, flattening the motherfucker right where it stood. SCORE! I yell.

This scenario repeats three or four times before some pages start falling out of the book. We're mostly finished with the wine, one of my roommates arrive, he's stoned out of his mind.

I rip some more pages out of other books and we start reading lines, taking turns. It's a sort of remixing, we've got a whole motherload of crap romantic books with cheap lines and awkward scenes, what's the worst that could happen?

It's ten PM when we decide to call it quits. By then another couple of roaches have been fragged by the Flying Tome of Purple Prose, and we've crafted new stories from the old one. We had implied rape, incest, necrophilia, they involved nurses, a fishing rod and someone with tuberculosis. Other scenarios had policemen and people getting boners by hearing news from the eastern front.

If only we had more wine...

And thus the countdown begins: within a month, I will be living there, in the middle of the ghetto, with an alcoholic punk and a guy that's got issues with weed.

Hopefully without the roach stowaways.

As to why the fuck would we do that? I'll tell you tomorrow.

('I Live in Hell' is a song by the band Dear Landlord. Their debut is easily the best punk album this year, go check them out!)