A big brick of headsorting, cut short by life stepping in to do some of it for me. Benefits of blogging from a coffee shop, etc.

So, I have a week (well, nine days as of this writing) to find a roommate willing to sign a lease and move in in September. Failing that I have until the end of August to find another place and relocate, which involves more than the usual hassle (see below). At present my options are the tenuous probability of moving in with a couple of friends whose lease is also up at the end of August, getting my own place, moving in with someone else, or finding a replacement roommate. That last bit involves some communication with the guys I'd rather be moving in with, but they're at Pennsic and are historically difficult to nail down [fortunately my coffee shop session ended with positive motion on this front. \o/]. There's a really good possibility they'll either say fuck it and renew their lease, or move into their fallback position with family members [Though it turns out their landlord, who is also my landlord, is already showing their house. Hands are forced across the board and things seem to be lining up optimally.].

My fallback is an unused chunk of office space at work coupled to the dim hope that nobody'll notice. So relocating is looking like a pretty likely possibility. And a pretty big pain in the ass - in the process of dedicating myself to getting The Dualist done, and the usual "this is Pittsburgh" attrition, I lack the social infrastructure one needs to leverage ones way through a situation like this with minimal butthurt. The financial end, in particular, is a real disaster - thanks to the "see below" mentioned above (see below some more, this isn't the paragraph), I'm paying all of the rent on my place for August, as opposed to the usual half. And my financial skills are such that I'm still paycheck to paycheck, so invoking the funds for a security deposit and so forth - if required - will be difficult. Especially given that a lot of places and landlords like to run credit checks. And such types don't care if they get their money like clockwork - one sniff of red and they've lost interest. That's an issue.

I've known this was coming for awhile - ever since my sister and then-roommate enlisted, in fact. I've known long enough to build up a massive impenetrable juggernaut of an avoidance mechanism. Point of fact, I've gotten expert at manufacturing and manifesting methods to avoid thinking about this until the very last minute. Some of that's an emotional defense mechanism - Screaming Butthurt gives me massive anxiety the likes of which you wouldn't believe.... and walling that mess off until it's actually time to do something about it is really the only way I can cope. A bunch of last minute hair pulling, gibbering, and panicking beats the hell out of shitting blood for months.*

Here's the "see below" bit.

I've had three and a half roommates in this house. Brooke found it, we moved in, she moved a TON of stuff in, couldn't pay the rent, was asked by the landlord to leave, left, and left a bunch of stuff behind. Ben replaced Brooke. Ben furnished the house with a ton of shelving and whatnot he found on the street during bulk night. When Ben left, he left all of that and a bunch of other stuff he didn't feel like taking with him. Jen replaced Ben, we took Randy on as a guest, Randy promised to sublet and take over the gas. Jen left, and left a bunch of stuff behind (but not as much as Ben, fortunately). Randy stuck around for a few weeks and then disappeared with most but not all of his stuff. Shortly after that it became extremely apparent - in the form of my sister being legally Served after the landlord tried all proper channels and exerted all other imaginable forms of due diligence - that Randy hadn't sublet. Point of fact, he hadn't bothered to pay rent to either Jen or the landlord. He claimed (in a note left at the time of his disappearance) to have paid the gas, but now that he's gone the bills are actually showing up (as opposed to disappearing) and it's clear that never happened either. Cold showers for the past few weeks clear.

So Randy boned Jen pretty hard. He's got an airtight alibi for his monetary actions, but the lack of communication rankles me something fierce.

I ignored all of this drama until Jen was Served for a couple of reasons. The big one is that each tenant of the house is on their own lease and is responsible to the landlord for their half of the rent on their own time and in their own way. Back during the Brooke era, utilities were structured into Them : Gas and Me : Everything Else, which has worked well until now, in that I've been able to Live As I Will, for the most part. The little reason is that I suck at people and figured a solution would eventually avail itself.

It didn't occur to me until recently that it might in fact take some effort to manifest that solution, whatever it may be.

So I'm one guy with a house full of four people's leftovers, plus my own. August will be a big month for bulk night any way you cut it - if I can find a replacement in the time allotted I'll need to clear crap out for them. If I can't find a replacement I'll need to coordinate with the landlord to get everything cleared out. If I move, I'll have to sort some of this stuff for shipment home - I have no problem tossing zip disks, zip drives, SCSI cards, four gig hard drives and ADB keyboards in the trash, but there are some things I'm too attached to to lose and not attached to enough to keep around. My friend Martin has been kind enough to offer to help, and will benefit from my supply of Apple Newtons even if his services aren't required. I'll probably gift out or donate some other stuff as well - better to have it used than tossed.

Any change in the existing situation will be a change for the better. I've recently completed the Earth chapter of Book 3 of ATC (Transitional Voices), and Water is up next. The comic has a nasty habit of mirroring my life, which would be a bit less creepy if it was done on the fly instead of planned out several months (or years) in advance.** If the plotline for TV is anything to go by, then Earth is the struggle of inertia, Water will go down while I'm Bruce Leeing my way into a new life situation thing, Fire will be some kind of serious violence (hopefully life imitates art and it's awesome as opposed to awful), and Air will end with me being exactly where I want to be in life as well as the comic, as the story will have arrived at where I'd wanted to start it back in 2003, before a crazy mountain-dew drenched caffeine hallucination convinced me otherwise.

That or by finally quantifying that observation on (digital) paper, I've screwed the pooch and blown the whole mess off the rails. Which would make less with the creepy, really - and probably make for more coherent and mainstream storytelling.

I've heard some people are into that.

Cut short in good time and for good reason - I've ejected most of what's been bugging me and The Social has caught up to me. With this out of my system all that remains are solutions.

* Family history of IBS and all that. I've had one minor flare-up since artskool, and that was, of course, stress induced.

I'm writing this at the South Side Beehive on rjbs's old laptop. The Beehive is outside of my inertia loop, and as such it's the only place where the only thing to do is hack at Life. Work and home are compromised. The bars are compromised and ATC/DCR insists on priority in those environments. I know from memory that I used to be capable of an extensive Sit And Think anywhere - especially at home - but I've managed to worm my way out of that. Something that needs to change, and will - one of the reasons I'm here doing this is that I'm on the very edge of my current array of distraction. I'm almost caught up on Stargate Atlantis and I'm maybe an hour from beating Final Fantasy IV DS. After that, the only things I have to distract myself from what Needs Doing are other things that Need Doing. So even if I'm awesome at creating Dealing Diversions, my subconscious is smart enough to line the ducks up into a finite lemming-like row that will eventually put me in the proper position. Historically, at the proper time.

** DCR is completely immune to this, at least for the time being, as it's as much about nostalgia and that funky halcyon 20/20 hindsight as it is about cyborg ninjas from outer space. The Dualist, one the other hand, stands as a monolithic example of Invocation By Sequential Art, as the entire story effectively mirrors my frustrations with - and ultimate separation from - a specific aspect of my life that I'll eventually be able to detail without detailing, in the Nietzsche 'the best way to hide oneself is to talk about oneself' sense.