The Package, book one John Shepard (radiographite@gmail.com) - Tue Sep 1, 2009 04:04:39 GMT - 1096 This is it: the greatest and grandest Rastport of all time. I am writing this in the past, a chronicle of events you don't get to see until it's all over. Am I being cryptic? Well, why spoil the movie too early? Book One: The Package Prologue: Hell Week 2007 You remember the tale: we began a week in August 2007 by, we thought, simply trying to get our cable Internet switched over from Shithead's name to my name, in preparation for him moving out by the end of the year. The end of 2007, mind you. We'd already given him the ultimatum, which he was well into blowing off. Why we chose right then to switch it over: we thought we could get a better deal by cancelling it and resubscribing. This failed spectacularly: you get these special three-months-cheap rates not through Comcast but through a reseller, and the reseller offering this particular deal were idiots and we spent three whole days trying to get things going, by which time the deal expired. Something about, their computer kept showing our location as unavailable for cable (on account of there already being cable there!) and while it may have been as simple as a "reload" button at their end, no one was smart enough to push it. Eventually we gave up and got the old account reactivated in my name - by which time Douchenozzle was already making death threats. Then the company that owns the apartment complex stuck a note to our door demanding that Douchespigot's antenna complex be removed from the outside of the building within a day Or Else. Now the part of the story you didn't already know. We contacted our landlady about the death threats (recall that she's not the one who wants the antennas down, the property company is). She said, call the cops and file a report just so it's there. We asked about evicting him and she said, the way the property company works, they cannot evict one person from a unit, they'd have to evict us all. Nor will they allow us to remove one person from the unit, even if it's two against one. Which means we had no weight to our ultimatum. He had called our bluff and he was right. We couldn't throw him out. Landlady's advice was, if he won't leave, we should leave. Take our two names off the lease. And by doing so, everything - rent, utilities, damage he's done to the apartment - would be his alone. He would be proper fucked, and we could have a new life. That's not a bad idea, come to think of it. But imagine what he'd do if he found out. This is why I jumped on the delete button if anyone suggested it on Rastport: "pull up stakes" etc. Yes, it's an obvious option, but he doesn't do "obvious" unless someone prompts him. So if nobody says "hey, you guys should move out and leave him holding the bag" then he won't consider it as a possibility. Or at least, if he never sees us talking about it, he'll assume we're too dumb to have thought of it, and either way, he's safe. See, there's going to come a time in such a process where it will begin to look like that's what we're doing, and if he thinks we might do it, and sees us doing things that look like it, then he might connect it. And what does he do in such a scenario? At best, he'd sabotage the shit out of it, and there are a lot of ways he could make it impossible for us to succeed at this, quite within his reach, if he knows what's coming. At worst, well, you know how fond he is of violence. That's why this Rastport is being written offline to be posted only once the full story can be told - only once an end is reached. So that's what we've decided to do. No longer to try to get him to move out, but to move out ourselves and leave him holding the bag - and more importantly, leave him holding the unfiltered consequences of his actions. And if you're reading this, an ending must have been reached. I: The Grand Plan I write this in May 2009. He was told to move out by the end of 2007. He did not do it. We didn't force the issue because we wanted to avoid drama. We thought we'd move in 2008. We thought I would make enough money at the market. And maybe we were right. The problem was we also racked up some vet bills, following which we said "ok, not this year. Next year." Meanwhile he is probably saying to himself, "well, I haven't tried to kill them in months, so maybe they'll start being nice to me now." If a dog craps on your desk, and you wait too long to rub its nose in it, it doesn't really connect the two events and understand what it did wrong. What I wish is that we could have moved on January 1, 2008, exactly one day after his deadline. Or the day after the towel episode. But we didn't. A great opportunity for teaching was missed. We just lack control over our lives to the extent of being able to just do what needs done, when it needs done. But it also occurred to us that his presence is a lot of that. Nearing the end of 2008, we started to get serious about it. There was a Grand Plan. And it went something like this: I would file for a sabbatical from Saturday Market, and thereby take 2009 off. Without the market to take my time, I could look for a job. Without the market to provide enough money to live but not enough money to move, I would be motivated to look for a job. The timeline of this was, I needed to submit the sabbatical paperwork by the end of October 2008. And two things happened about the same time, right after I submitted the paperwork and considered it too late to back out: one, Zowie Bunny rang up a $1200 vet bill and died, and two, the economy crashed and Portland's unemployment went double-digit. Still, we stuck with the Grand Plan as long as we could. I kept looking for a job in earnest. Got yelled at a few times for not being sufficiently earnest - there were those who felt my job search must include shit jobs, gas stations, grocery stores, Jack in the Box. I could debate the merits, I suppose - but if my having a job that doesn't pay more than Saturday Market is the difference between us getting an apartment and not, then we've probably got other problems. I write this chapter in June 2009 and am convinced we do have other problems. But I'll get to that. Impediments to what we called the Grand Plan kept mounting. Some are me alone. My resume is a disaster. Has been for years. You can't just trowel over a hole that big. I last worked in the technology field in 2001. And that was doing Perl, a language that seems to have dried up. Or at least locally it has. Here's the problem. Portland doesn't have a tech industry. I don't think it really ever did. I think the "Silicon Forest" of the early 90s was a lie. I think companies like Epson and Fujitsu brought factories here to take advantage of some kind of tax deal - they brought their talented people with them - and they stayed as long as the tax breaks were active. Then they pulled up stakes, closed their factories, and left the people here. Now Portland is full of unemployed geniuses with degrees, many of whom hit bottom so hard that they can't afford to get out of the city. I now believe Portland is being used by several out-of-state real estate firms as part of some kind of fraud pipeline. I haven't entirely figured out the mechanism, but it is clear that someone is artificially messing with property values, and that there is much more construction going on here than is normal for a city this size. Condos are sitting empty all over town, more are still being built. I think the basic idea is to get the locals to pay for massive redevelopment projects, the money for which goes to California and stays there. Now Portland is on the receding edge of a trade imbalance, there's no money coming into the area, just local businesses sending their money out and it vanishes into some nebula of realty and bulldozers. Portland never sprouted its own tech industry. Even mighty Intel (in Hillsboro, not Portland proper) is a transplant - and it is mere inertia that keeps them here, despite the media sucking their dick. No homebrew industry of Web developers, no impressive programming houses, no world-recognized community of problem-solvers ever really grew here. So aside from Intel, there doesn't appear to have ever been a reason for anyone outside the tri-county area to write a check to anyone inside the tri-county area for anything involving a computer. This is an oversimplification but I think you get the basics. (Linus Torvalds lives here now. He works at OSDN, one of the few truly local tech outfits. I still don't see what his purpose is there. I never got what he was supposed to be doing for Transmeta either.) In this analysis, it's not that Portland's tech industry crashed before I got here, it's that it never had one and I came here on lies. In Indiana, at least, companies used computers to do stuff and sometimes hired me to come look at them. Out here there are fewer companies. Period. And I don't just mean because it's a smaller city. There are disproportionately fewer reasons to start companies here. There are fewer reasons to keep a company here. There are fewer reasons for a company to have offices here. So figure, fewer companies, a lower percentage of which work like Indiana companies with some homebrew Perl monstrosity the original developer no longer refuses to fix, and more local geniuses with more impressive pedigrees than mine... I was doomed before I got here. It wasn't that my resume has a hole, or that I wasn't looking hard enough - I was looking for something that didn't exist. I couldn't find these jobs eight years ago when I didn't yet have a hole in my resume. And being driven to it by a pair of douchebags. I really think the worst thing to ever happen to Douchenozzle is that he hooked up with Matt Sealey, and Matt sold him an illusion of the world. Part of that illusion was their Grand Plan for us all - that Doucheweasel would move to Portland with my girlfriend and I, then I would walk in the front door of Intel and get a fifty dollar an hour job, then Matt would fly here, marry Douchepriest and become a US citizen, and the two of them would live here in this apartment on my dime while they took turns on my girlfriend and I would not mind. This of course requires too many steps to be any delusion Doucheblat could possibly develop on his own, suggesting it's Matt's idea. And where do I get the idea this was their plan? They told me. Over the years both of them have, in heated moments, yelled at me for not making parts of this plan possible, as if neither of them understood why I didn't. The reason I didn't go apply for a job at Intel is that Intel has been laying off constantly since before we arrived. Matt thinks "laying off" means they're hiring. Douchecranium lacked the neurons to disagree with him. But so low-level was this assumption that neither of them realized it was an assumption - which is why nobody told me their Grand Plan at the time. I was just expected to do this thing. It never occurred to either of them that I wouldn't. That I got here and couldn't is proof that I am worthless, lazy, and deserve to be murdered. Proof by their standards anyway. Not proof by mine. You note the obvious flaws in the rest of their plan too: this was 2001 and gay marriage wasn't legal here, and even for the brief period when it was legal, it probably couldn't have gotten someone citizenship. I was supposed to not mind that all this was supposed to be happening at my expense. I was to be mined for resources and dumped like a spent booster as soon as I failed to provide: money, food, three-ways or more-ways. Nobody ever asked. They just assumed these things would happen, on such a level that the fact that they did not is actually confusing to those two. There's a saying I wish I could find attribution for. "There's a word for people who assume the world will always work out in their favor, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. We call them morons." I'm not saying It's All Matt's Fault. I'm saying Douchemotor has a notorious habit of, if he's trying to get in someone's pants, he will believe any goddamn thing they say and it took Matt about two-thirds of a second to discover this fact. Right when Douchespray was supposed to be learning how to live as an adult, not in his mommy and daddy's house, right when he was supposed to be realizing we weren't full of shit when we explained such outrageous things as rent has to be paid before guitars and drugs can be bought, right then Matt intercepted the process and told him we were full of shit and rent doesn't need to be paid because I'm going to pay it, and so on. Matt gave him a framework within which to be a douchebag and he refuses to unlearn it. I grew tired of trying to buck the trend pretty early but Girlfriend kept feeding Douchetwist's delusions for awhile after the move. She pitied him, she believed he needed our help, maybe she saw someone else in him - the ghost of the friend we knew, maybe, or even an echo of her own dark past - and mostly she thought the worst of his behavior was my fault, probably because he told her it was. It's just that even when he thinks he's got an ally, he still can't help twisting the dagger, doing and saying totally uncalled for abusive things because that's who he wants to be. Then he burns up his entire supply of friends and thinks it proves that they are all stupid. Eventually he pissed her off too. That was a mistake. It's not any one decision he made at some point that he shouldn't have made, it's not any one boyfriend he shouldn't have picked up, it's not any one thing he said that he shouldn't have, it's not one left turn instead of a right turn - it's him. It's the totality of him, starting about six months before we moved. He destroys everything he can't control. And what he can control he fucks up. He is deliberately incompetent. He has all the hallmarks of a substance abuse problem when he's sober and gets worse when he's drunk. (And he doesn't have to drink to get drunk. All he needs to do is eat cookies. Or skip meals.) He is incapable of believing in any part of reality that doesn't reinforce his awesomeness - the awesomeness that no one else sees because we're all too busy cleaning up what he has destroyed. Things stop being possible around him. Maybe what Matt did was chip away all the parts that didn't look like a douchebag - but looking back, by the time Matt got involved, there wasn't much left to chip away. It isn't any one thing he's done, it's thousands of things he's done, any five of which we might have thrown him out for, had we the presence of mind or the finances at the time. It's a maze of mistakes and lies. We believed him. We trusted him. We helped him. We are through paying the price. II: Dining on ashes We held on to the Grand Plan as long as I guess we could be expected to. Like I said, there were complaints from some corners that it was my fault - that I was searching for a job wrong. But I do have some numbers to back it up. I wrote a Perl script that screen-scrapes Dice.com looking for technology jobs in the area. It counts them and presents a summary, as well as actually listing them all in a more succinct format than Dice itself does. In December there were about 580 jobs in the area, three of which were Perl. I applied for all three and heard nothing back. Nothing. Today there are 380 jobs in the area, many the same job through several headhunters, none Perl. Most are C# or J2EE, technologies I don't know and am not going to be able to put on a resume anytime soon. The Dice Score keeps creeping down. I don't look only on Dice, and I don't think the Dice Score is a precise figure, but the downward trend means something. These days they say the only way out is to hire yourself, start a business. I had one. I walked away from it. It was called Saturday Market and it was somewhat profitable. And I quit it for 2009. Filed the paperwork, paid the fee, brought some of my hardware home at the end of 2008, shut the machinery down and basically got used to its absence. By the end of March we really noticed its absence again. We were flat broke. Twelve dollars for food for two weeks. That kind of thing. Money problems we hadn't seen since 2006. Not because of Zowie. Well, somewhat because of Zowie, cutting into our reserves. No, the bigger problem was December ending on a bum note because of the storm, then Douchemustelid losing his job and starting to drain away at us in January and February, then me having no income in March thus extending the off season longer than usual. It kind of brought it all to a head by the end of March and I had to go cancel my sabbatical and start doing it again - on short notice, with half my equipment used for other things, and with no product since December. There was another aspect of the Grand Plan which was to use the downtime to learn Python and possibly one other technology, to have something to show for it, some kind of tech showcase that might get me a Python job. You saw some parts of this. It sorta buckled. I haven't written a line of it since the market restarted. Not because of time constraints, but because the program I was writing finally grew more complex than I am smart enough to work with. I'm scared of it. It might be my confidence again, or the focus problems of which I often speak. Whatever. Point is I failed at the Grand Plan, at all aspects of it, and went back to Saturday Market with nothing to show for my downtime, except possibly a better-formatted resume and a job site screen scraper which I continue to check, just to torture myself. Thus collapsed the Grand Plan. In hopes that we might resurrect it, my arrangement with the market was that I would, somewhere during 2009, go back on sabbatical. Idea being, I get a job that pays more than the market, and it needs more of my time, I need to be able to cut it loose for awhile. But I do have my doubts that a job that meets my needs - a job for which I am not ridiculously over or underqualified - might materialize out of nowhere. I really believe we moved away from those jobs - that I was rushed into moving away from them before I might have a chance to realize what was going on. I write this in June 2009 and our solution to the problem is this: we go ahead and start applying for apartments anyway. III: The gathering storm So here it is, mid-June 2009, and it is again dark days. Saturday Market is adrift in a sea of despair: the new site did not destroy us but it certainly hasn't made us ten times richer like promised, my sales in particular are about half what they were this time last year. For this to work I need high averages, not fair-to-middling good days dotted by occasional forty dollar Sundays. Meanwhile the Earl of Douchebagge is pushing his luck. Our food supplies vanish. He plays music ridiculously loud at midnight. He shorts us on rent. He is pretty obviously not looking for a job - I say this because last time, we could tell he was looking for a job because he annoyed us with it, demanding to see the mail every day, phone ringing constantly, him leaving and returning several times a day doing job interviews. This time nothing. Unlike my industry, his is fairly stable - metalworking shops around here aren't vanishing. They may get less work, they may not be able to keep a night shift, but they aren't closing. His is an industry where your physical toolbox matters more than your resume and his toolbox is decent. He isn't out of work because there's no work, he's out of work because he's a douchebag - he got fired from one job for bringing a case of beer to work, and got laid off from another because he refused to work days, and appears to not have looked for another job since. I don't think I have the luxury of wondering what it will be like for him when we finally drop the hammer on this. The problem right now is that we don't have a hammer to drop. So. The search begins. Further evidence that there's something wrong with the job market here is that the apartment market is actually functioning. I mean, within the confines of a diseased system. Rent is way too high until you get outside the metro area - and we can't do that. (Maybe if we had a car. In a couple years.) But you can look and find apartments. You can be as picky as you like, the combination of location and features you want probably exists, if you multiply your rent by two. Two things trip us up. High application fees, and minimum income requirements. We had to deal with neither when we applied for this place in 2001; in fact two of the three of us were unemployed. This very apartment has since instituted a minimum income for applicants; we would probably not qualify if we re-applied for this same apartment. Which fortunately they're not asking us to do. That said, the landlady did offer us another unit in this complex, which we turned down because a) we wouldn't meet these new requirements, and b) I'm not sure how we'd keep him from discovering where we went. I think eventually he'd notice us coming and going, since he'd be able to see our front door from his front door. Besides, since this property company is the reason we can't get rid of him now, and their weird changing rules are one reason we have so much trouble dealing with him now, I'd just as soon not stay with them. Anyway. I mean, a $30 application fee isn't much, but there are two of us, and if we're applying for a lot of places, that can add up. Especially if we get turned down a lot. So our search begins with places with no application fee. We're OK getting a smaller place, because this place, being 900 square feet, doesn't feel like 900 square feet. It's a horrible layout, the living room is a huge space but you can't use it for anything, it's shaped like a losing Tetris game and has no useful corners or walls. I figure a 500 or 600 square foot apartment, with a living room and bedroom shaped like rectangles, would be bigger to us. We'd get different furniture, we could find a better place to put a television, we can tolerate nonlinear walking paths or a living room divided into two smaller rooms, and of course it would help considerably if the living room isn't a hallway. I wouldn't need three desks. IV: The hunt The first place we looked at was damn near perfect, at least to me. The thing that really struck me was that the floor plan was almost exactly like our old apartment in Indiana - so much that I was even thinking of bringing some of our older furniture out of storage for it. The price was right, the location was excellent and right in the middle of all the shopping and food we could want. It even had onsite security, to whom I could conceivably hand a photo of Douchediaper and say "do not suffer this man to pass." And it was downstairs which has useful implications both for my 200-pound Saturday Market cart and for a Girlfriend with a weird knee. Just one problem: we were declined. It took them two weeks to decline us, which has me really wondering if they actually looked at it or just sat on it and finally rejected it only because I kept calling and asking. I wonder about the math of it. I gather it costs money to screen an applicant. OK. So if you are a landlord or property manager and you charge no application fee, that means you are paying out of pocket for this to happen - and that means if you fail someone, you paid the $20 or $40 to fail them, versus if you accept them, they soon begin paying you. Whereas if you charge a ridiculously high application fee like $40, it's not a big deal to fail someone because you don't lose money on the deal. In the extreme, I can see it being a particularly juicy scam - collect a $40 fee and never actually process the application, just decline it and keep the $40. Why then did a place charge us nothing and decline us? I have to make some phone calls tomorrow and find out. I'm sad to lose that place. But then. You recall when I first applied to be at Saturday Market, how I had a heck of a time getting approved because of communication problems within their office? I get the impression that's how that apartment worked too. You got a manager onsite that takes phone calls, shows applicants around, and faxes in applications. You got the owners in some other town that receive those faxes and screen people. And there is only the most tenuous of connection between these two - such that the manager seems to know absolutely nothing. The clusterfuck that was the application process, of crossed wires and subtle expectations, probably spreads throughout. Had we gotten the place, we might have have had problems down the line, much like what we have now, of getting caught breaking nonexistent rules, onsite landlord being the last to know anything, etc. 'Course it's also possible they found something in our histories that we don't know about. Maybe my expunged juvie record isn't as expunged as I thought. Maybe they found my blog. Maybe the current property co put in a bad word for us. Maybe there's a miscommunication and each applicant has to make N times rent. I guess I'll find out. We looked at another place today and found it the opposite of that one. It's almost amusing. We approached and just kept seeing signs of badness, getting worse the closer we got. It was across the street from a hideous little sports bar with a sleazy disintegrating sign. Around the complex we could see gang graffiti. A guy with no shirt walks out to get his mail. In the parking lot is an older Jaguar with no license plates next to a Cadillac Fleetwood Executive with no license plates and a couple of vans with no license plates. We get up to the complex and we see that the door frames seem to be retrofitted - as if either the doors have been knocked down in the past and the frames hastily rebuilt, or as if they expect the doors to be knocked down and want them easily replaceable. An empty unit stands open and we peer inside, because we can: there is a weird smell, the walls are chipped, there are no baseboards, and there's a creepy unfinished laundry/utility room in front. The living room has huge sliding patio-style doors that lead out to nothing. The kitchen appliances are from another time and place. Perhaps most tellingly, the complexes on either side of this place were much nicer and probably twice the rent, suggesting that even if we did get the place, we'd be able to live there a year, maybe two tops before they demolished it and put something more expensive in its place. That place was made of sleaze as a building material. I'm hoping third try's the charm. The significance of the vehicles with no plates? Probably gang rides. V: Soliloquy There's a magic to looking for apartments. Each is a "what if", a world that could be yours. They have the color of sunset, the taste of 1994, and the freshness of a world of possibilities. "Your new life begins here," they say. Not all of them, of course. We find little tricks to looking for apartments online: always enter a minimum as well as a maximum rent, which seems to kill about 90% of the garbage. Anyplace that lists a suspiciously low rent and doesn't actually tell you where it is, probably don't want. Anyplace not competent enough to enter the rent number into the proper field, you probably don't want. We make a point of checking everything with Google Street View, which has flushed out a few amusing losers: one place you could actually see garbage along the street and gang signs on the crumbling walls. We haven't yet run across any addresses that don't exist or are in the middle of parking lots. There is of course no guarantee that an ad you see on a something's-list is actually legit - I could see someone pull a scam by which you pay them application fees to apply to an apartment they do not actually own. Easy enough, we just don't apply to anyplace where the manager can't meet us onsite and unlock an empty unit to show us around. (The really sleazy place, we were able to simply walk into an unlocked empty unit and have a look around with no manager in sight. Three or four strikes against it right there.) Apartment listings are a shared fiction. There is always a camera angle that can make a dorm room look like a concert hall, a lighting condition that makes it look like your view out the window is of brilliant skies that go on forever, tricks of cropping that make the weird room geometry look tolerable, and of course, you can't smell it through the Apartment Guide. I think they deliberately photograph units on the west-facing side of the complexes so they get sunset colors. I know I would. I've also found out that in most complexes, if the manager lives onsite, their unit is specially tricked out and the photos are of that unit. Look closely and you can sometimes see the rent drop slot. We live by dishwasher, and are probably unable to go back to living without one. A very good reason for having one is that a dishwasher can get water hotter than the faucet, so at least in theory it can do a better job disinfecting a rabbit's water bowl. We've seen some places that don't have dishwashers. If we get a unit without, we'll need to get a portable dishwasher. The full-sized ones are expensive, about $600 and rarely found used. There exist (and I didn't know this, or I'd have had one in Indiana) countertop units, about the size of a microwave oven, and they're about $250. That might actually be practical. In some cases what we'll be doing is not so much moving stuff, as abandoning and getting new. The couch where I used to sleep is not going with us. Neither is the futon. Neither is my desk in the bedroom. We'll be getting a real bed, the first I've had in eight years, so I can sleep - I have my suspicions that at least some Meteorites have been due to pinched nerves due to bizarre sleep posture. We'll get a smaller couch, better desks. And my plan - and this is a plan based largely around the apartment we just got declined for - is that I will have a new Cube. Sounds redundant but I find the ability to cut out light is very handy. What I figure is, assuming the living room has a "far end", I'll occupy that end, put up a sliding curtain, and have a computer desk on one side and an art desk on the other so I can swivel a chair around and reach either. The art desk would double as the Saturday Market production desk and probably have printers on shelves above it. And while this sounds big and outrageous, the general idea is that this would be my office and I won't need another computer desk in the bedroom, nor an art table somewhere, nor would a dining table need to double as a production table, and so on. Girlfriend will get a computer setup of similar size and complexity if she wishes. Figure some aspects of this plan may change if the place we finally get has no suitable geometry for it. But then, I also have my hopes that we would know to walk away from a place whose floor plan is so bizarre that there's noplace to put this. That is to say, we learned our lesson and choose not to get another place that looks like this one. VI: It is a dark place I walk I am under no delusions about this little project of ours. I don't expect it to solve all my problems. Not everything is Douchesplatter's fault and some of the damage he has done won't be fixed by simply removing him from our presence. I expect I will still have problems with depression even after the move, I expect a teething period of about a month where I have worse infrastructure problems than I do now because I won't have any established patterns or useful habits yet. (That's kinda what went wrong here in the first place. Right after we moved in, when I had no resources and no systems in my life, and needed a little time to rebuild them as I think is probably normal for people who've just moved, right then the Douchebag Twins started trying to reshape the world. I was vulnerable and they razed me to the ground, disrupted any systems I tried to build, and made it their rules. Which no mortal can possibly follow to their satisfaction. Then when I was most thoroughly destroyed, they said "see? he's useless." Well, we won't have those two in the mix this time, so hopefully the teething period goes a little better.) I know this creates one problem we don't really have now. Right now, when we bump into Shitdouche in public somewhere, it's merely annoying and awkward. But consider what we're about to do to him. The goal isn't actually to hurt him, it's just that he's left us no other option but to pack up and leave - the aftermath of which will be that he is utterly unable to function without us, which he will interpret as us somehow attacking him - and I think you can guess what color that puts on the occasional chance meeting downtown. Security is a concern. We have to think about things like how to secure our air conditioners so he can't simply push them out of the window and crawl inside. We have to think about how to not be followed home, especially since we don't know what his friends look like (if he has any); we may have to get in the habit of taking roundabout ways home. We may have to start carrying pepper spray. And what of Saturday Market? The goal with Saturday Market is to have as many people as possible know where to find me each week - while simultaneously hoping one guy doesn't ever show up? Am I going to have to pick booths based on whether a sniper can get a clear shot? I mean, if he decides to "go postal" and try to kill me, it is only proof that I was right - that he is a cancerous mass, so utterly dependent on me that my leaving merits murderous revenge - but he isn't about proof, except the kind on liquor bottles. I can be right and still end up shot or stabbed. The point here isn't to be able to say "I told you so" with my dying breath - the point here is to be able to live. We hope we will, by doing this, force in him a choice: he can refocus all his efforts on meeting his responsibilities, you know, pay utilities and save the expensive cameras for later, or he can go on some brain-dead revenge quest which will most likely ruin his life. There too, he's not about choice - he'll try to do some weird hybrid of the two, and fail while causing us maximum annoyance. We have to be prepared for that. He won't simply cut back his spending, take a job on day shift, call in some favors, take on a Furry roommate or ten, or whatever he needs to do - he will keep right on being a douchebag, get himself evicted and get shit stains on his rental history (he probably thinks rental histories are like one's "permanent record" in school, that there is no such thing) and blame me for everything that happened after we left, then come seeking revenge which will probably land him in prison. Just as likely he'll end up homeless and living under the Burnside Bridge so I get to see him every weekend. But. The point of all this is not to fear him at home. I just want him out of my life. He's too stupid to leave. So we have to leave. It's the thing I hate most about him: he corners people until they have only one option, and then he bitches when they take that option. He has no concept of consequences. He doesn't think about how something he's trying to do is going to turn out - rather he fantasizes about some ridiculous outcome and is flabbergasted when that does not occur. He abuses people, they do not like it, they then do not do what he wants. This pisses him off. So he abuses them more. And as often as he spirals down this wormhole, he never fucking figures it out. He's threatened to move out for years. We call his bluff and he doesn't do it. It's just drama to him. He thinks we can't function without him, and "I'll move out" is supposed to be a threat. One hears in such a threat an echo of, say, a high school principal threatening to suspend an unruly student - such as him - to which the student might say "no, whatever you do please don't kick me out of a school I don't want to be in" in a sarcastic tone. From him it is an empty threat, one of a million douchebag drama chips he thinks are worth something. Of course, once we told him to move out, his tune changed - for awhile he said he had a place and was just waiting for something, until he realized we could tell he was lying. Really, the only reason we take his murder threats seriously is that we've seen him try to make good on them. Threats of violence are the only threats he ever tries to make good on. I cannot otherwise think of a promise he has ever kept since we've been here. He promises to fix something, he forgets and throws away the pieces. He promises to pay us on time, he doesn't. He once told us once we moved here that we'd rarely see him, he'd be doing those day-labor places to save up money so we could all buy a house within a year. He promised he would get a loan to contribute towards the "move to Portland fund" which he then did not get - and told us a week before the move (and too late for us to back out or find other options) that he had not even bothered to go ask. But if he says he's going to beat the fuck out of you, or break things, if he doesn't immediately get his way, he beats the fuck out of you or breaks things. He is so proactive about it that he sometimes beats the fuck out of you or breaks things before promising to do so if demands are not met. Then he thinks we're out of line for wanting him out of our lives. This whole operation is to remove one specific problem from our lives. A problem that has made itself clear that it does not intend to go away on its own. A problem that has removed all other possible solutions from the board. A problem that is getting worse. That's how douchebags operate, you know. Think in terms of a negative feedback loop: they are able to consume your resources, in such a way that it costs you resources you no longer have to try to prevent them from consuming additional resources. Think of a situation where an employee is an alcoholic, and calls out sick a lot - but by doing so, they force their supervisor to work their shift for them, leaving the supervisor no time during the workday to actually write them up. In this hypothetical situation, the only solution is for the supervisor to stay off the clock and do the write-up; the alcoholic can exist as long as they can keep the supervisor from taking the extra effort to do this. If the supervisor has somewhere they need to be after work each day, this can go on for years. The situation here is much more complex than this example, but the principle is the same: a douchebag thrives by absorbing the resources by which others may get rid of them. A douchebag who can't do this can't remain a douchebag for long - at some point they would have to adapt, and learn to stop consuming people. But a real douchebag is going to keep finding situations in which this works. We think the Earl of Douchestick is about at the breaking point. We believe we are the only people left that he can raid for resources - once we're out, he has no one else willing to let him absorb their life to the degree he absorbs ours. I doubt this fact has occurred to him. Otherwise the things he said to make all his other ex-friends stop wanting to be around him, he might wish he hadn't said. We just happen to be the only ones he was able to rope into a situation from which we now find it physically difficult to escape. It took a long string of lies, manipulation, lucky breaks and windows of opportunity to create this situation - where he calls the shots and we can do nothing - and it is taking extraordinary effort, and creating extraordinary inconvenience, for us to undo it. Because whatever comes of this, wherever we end up living, we had a place and had to pack up and leave it and change how we live. Not because we wanted to, but because he's a douchebag and left us no way to tolerate his presence and no other way to be without him. Yes, we're trying to get a place that's cheaper and has a better floor plan but this would be fine if he just weren't in it. Yes, the property company here are douchebags themselves but we could deal with them if we didn't also have to deal with him - they have conflicting needs and I am tired of being caught in the middle. This is a huge apartment in a great location in a nice neighborhood and we are giving that up to be rid of him. He pushed us that far. This isn't about solving all my problems. It's about solving one big problem. Once that's done, once I have a home again and am not treated like a homeless stranger under my own roof, I can rebuild my life and start fixing the other problems once I can actually reach them again. It won't be instant. I won't immediately start producing epic drawings again, first I have to relearn how. I have to unlearn the bad patterns created by his presence. I even expect a period of depression as a sort of "comedown" after we're in and settled. We'll be broke for awhile too, after paying deposits and fees and buying furniture. But part of the point is, we get a place that's $200 cheaper than this, and then save $150-$200 a month on top of that by not having him around (electric bill, dishwasher detergent, food mysteriously disappearing, rabbits getting sick eating food he's dropped, and "oh my god his room smells like dead tapeworms, let's go downtown while it fumigates" trips) then we won't need his $300 a month. The finances will stabilize. Until they do, we're going to be on a forced diet. It'll be like January-February, except in August. But that is what we are going to have to do. VII: A twisty maze of passages Two major technical problems now confront us. One is the actual getting of an apartment. Like I said earlier and promised to explain, I think we have a problem. Specifically our credit sucks. Or rather my credit sucks. Girlfriend's credit doesn't suck, because her credit for some strange reason does not exist - credit checks on her come up "not found". We've been sharing a bank account in my name for eight years, and credit checks only go for seven years, so that basically she has had no credit activity for that time. Most of these places we're checking consider "no credit" much worse than "bad credit". We have someone willing to co-sign, the weird thing is most of these places don't ask for a co-signer. A few can sorta be prompted into it. But anyway. We are now in "hurry up and wait" mode. We might get that one with the floor plan just like my old apartment after all. It'll be a couple weeks before we know. And probably a month after that before a unit becomes available. The other major problem - the one we can't begin to solve until the first problem is solved - is how do you move out without your roommate noticing? Once we get the phone call, and once we do the paperwork, my life becomes a puzzle game. This was going to be easier back when Douchefrog had a job, you know, the noisy stuff can be done while he's away. Now he doesn't have a job and by the time we're doing all this, he probably still won't. So we'll have to be a bit more creative. (What was I saying about the skill douchebags have in taking away the resources you'll need to get rid of them?) Ideas occur. One idea: I'll reestablish the Cube of Denial. That way, first, I can move out everything in that space - computer, printers, desk. And second, it can be a staging area, boxes come out of closets or bedroom and go in the Cube, to be moved out at leisure. Another thought: well, we do still live out of boxes after eight years here, I'm thinking each visible box we move, we should replace with an empty one so he never sees the amount of stuff we own changing. Another thought: some furniture, such as the futon, we simply leave here. The biggest thing I'm looking forward to after the move, aside from obviously not having a giant homicidal infant in my kitchen eating my food is that we'll be able to have a real bed. We're leaving the couch I used to sleep on, as it's just too damn big to be practical. We're leaving some of the less useful computer desks. So that means the really heavy stuff that'll be hard to move without him noticing, we just won't move. I'm here all the time anyway, so I have no problem actually loading up a hand truck with four or five boxes and carting it to the new place myself, maybe two trips a day. Each load of dishes I wash, one thing will vanish and be placed in a box. We unload the bedroom and closets first, saving the more visible stuff for last. But we still have to figure out how to do the final stuff. The dining table is going with us, as is the microwave, most of the dishes, our DVDs and videotapes and books, blenders, toaster, most of the contents of the bathroom, the stand the TV in the living room sits on (not the TV, that's his), a huge bakers rack, etc - stuff that is in the living room or kitchen whose absence he would notice. And I mean, if we save all that for the last day, it limits the trouble he can cause - but I'd as soon avoid him altogether. We figure by the time we reach that stage we can either have someone out front in a U-Haul, or use a "PODS" module (sorta like a U-Haul without wheels, you rent it, it is placed where you want, you fill it, they move it where you want). But if he is aware there's a U-Haul out front for us, you think he wouldn't take a fireaxe to it? Or be down there to "meet" us on the next load of boxes? In this are the seeds of some nasty Final Confrontation and I don't yet see a way to avoid it - the thing we're doing this to avoid. We can't predict when he's home or away, so we can't schedule the last day of move-out to coincide with him being gone all day. What we believe will happen is, once we get approved for an apartment, and we can get a firm date on when we can move in, then we sign the papers, pay the deposits, and tender "to whom it may concern, we hereby give 30 days notice of the end of our residency" letters to our current property company. Then during that 30 days, we move stuff out a little at a time, from the back of the bedroom forward, so that he never actually sees anything change until the very end. Then I pull some kind of magic trick the last day. Idea being, once the 30 days are up, we are off the lease and nothing he can do will affect us thereafter. He can kick the walls down, he can shit on the carpet, he can forget to pay the rent - not our problem. We will not physically be here so he can't take it out on us. Now here's the part that will make us look like douchebags: the utilities. They're in our name, not his. So to keep him from getting us in trouble, we have to shut off the utilities when we leave. But to keep him from killing us in our sleep, we can't let him know ahead of time that we're turning off the utilities, so he won't have an opportunity to get utilities in his name before the current ones go dark. This means once we drop the hammer, not only is he sitting in the dark, he also has no phone or Internet, so he can't contact anyone and say "hey I'm sitting in the dark". He can do it the way I did it when we first moved in - from a payphone. But he will blame us for the results. Well, a confrontation is probably inevitable, my hope is just to have it occur late enough in the game that the damage he can do is minimized. For that reason, one of the first things I intend to do is move a cartload of Valuable And Irreplaceable Things - my drawings, a hard disk backup of critical things, important documents, bunny urns, and my autographed Sarah McLachlan postcards. Might get a fireproof safe for the documents and hard drive. The goal following that is to get to a point where Francesca Bunny can move - probably about halfway through the process, once there's enough infrastructure at the new site that we could spend 24 hours round-the-clock with her if another dehydration episode were to occur. And generally have impenetrable cover stories if asked - for example, even though we don't really intend to leave the place clean, we will vacuum a lot, to make it look like we're doing some kind of spring cleaning for an apartment inspection. I mean, our oven did just fail, so we can pretend it's for that. But yeah. The endgame is a mystery. By the end, we'll have the bedroom and the closets empty, but once we start doing the living room and kitchen, it'll be hard for him not to notice. Hey. This is as good a cliffhanger as any. To be continued...