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This'll be about the eighth time I've tried to post something since the 9th of June. If patterns hold, the computer will freeze up just as I'm getting into a groove.

I just typed "compouter" there.

I am stuck fast inside my apartment now, waiting for a plumber to call. There was a problem at my house, and it's actually caused a few hundred dollars worth of damage. I almost had it fixed - I was one ballcock's thread away from making it work - when the whole pipe came off in my hand. I can't solder worth a shit and I don't have a gun anyways, so I had no choice. Luckily I was able to find a plumber who'll come today.

I truly cannot afford this right now.

It sucks for this blog too, because the only thing I write anymore is a litany of drudgery and depression. Maybe I'll switch to a grey-on-black layout with a picture of a stack of dirty dishes at the top. Truth. Truth and moral queasiness. Is my life this way because I have offended someone?

I try to put myself in the position of the tenants I have, who are forever having problems making rent. Their difficulty doing this ripples into my life, but I mean if at the end of the week I can't put enough scratch together to keep my life rolling I'll be forced to sell the house for tens of thousands of dollars less than it's worth - and I'll still come out ahead, with enough seed money to put a down payment on a condo, or start my own business. Or piss away in a blitz of KORGs and Fenders.

Mmm, that's the ticket. I wanna have a phalanx of chorus pedals under my feet when I take a crap. I want to weld a whammy bar on my fridge door.

If my tenants can't get it together, then I make them homeless. They do not get their security deposit back, they do not get a reference. They just have to go live in some other sucker's mother-in-law suite, someplace you can rent without a credit rating. Stuck in basements and shared living accomodations. That's if they're lucky enough to have a place to crash free long enough to put together first and last month's rent.

Whole cities of people live like this. Grown adults, underfoot. Unwilling parasites.

guhhhh

The fucking cat which will not stop waking me up at ten minutes to four in the morning with his claws ripping at the part of the boxspring closest to my ear until I rise to give chase, shaking with incoherent anger, moistening the air between us with a spray bottle, falling back into my pillow, ruining the chaste magic hour with a pile of fucks and assholes and fuck-you-you-fucking-assholes, the fucking cat I am going to fucking kill.

As it happens, I worked till midnight. This is my week for doing that. I wasn't doing my supposedly usual job, which is operating the loader; I was instead cleaning the trommels, which basically means crawling into a dark, sweaty, stinky, hot 10' cylinder and blasting off all the caked-on (in this case, extremely wet) compost with a high pressure air wand. I can still smell it on my hands and in my hair (and so, on my pillow) even after two showers.

There is no point in going back to sleep until the sun has fully risen and the silly nocturnal cat is fighting back sleep from his dumbass eyes. There is no point. And so,

there is no sleep. there is no sleep. there is no sleep.

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I give up. One of my tenants is going to be late with rent again. I've had a pre-authorized debit come up NSF just yesterday, and I am (for the next three days) living off of my Visa, which has miraculously had another $1400 worth of credit added to it, just in time. Usurers. I worked four hours overtime last night and I am totally fucking knackered. My whole life is a fucking house of matchsticks.

Speaking of which, the E-town fires haven't abated. A downtown rooming house was gutted on Sunday, and yesterday it was the Pyrogy House over on 118th Ave. Some of the people who came over to watch the rooming house burn actually clapped and hooted, which is fairly silly behaviour considering some of the residents had to jump from the second story windows to escape. As it turns out, the rooming house was a - aw, what's the word. Like, a place where addicts come to get clean and sort themselves out. Anyways, one of those places, except that wasn't what was happening. As in there wasn't a lot of sorting out going on.

The Pyrogy House gained fame earlier this year for being the family business of one of the contestants on the last season of The Bachelor. The Bachelor, incidentally, is a show where thirty women compete in various romantically-themed challenges (like mud-wrestling salamanders) to win the hand of a man who prior to the show's pre-production stages was a total stranger to them all. The Edmonton Journal ran about eighteen thousand articles that mentioned the Pyrogy House by name this past spring.

Ever seen that movie Se7en? Sure you have. Kevin Spacey is so creepy in it, right?

It'd be funny (and incredibly tragic and awful and GOD PLEASE LET THESE FIRES STOP HAPPENING) if there were two competing arsonists in Edmonton, and one of them was a religious zealot and the other was a real estate developer. Then one day they could meet on the LRT and fall in love and there'd be little jokes about one of them always burning the toast. Would you watch a sitcom like that? Sure you would, because you're pathetic. I gotta go to work.

television is just fucking great

Now I'm going to sit in front of this computer and stare at my own shit like I'm two years old. No wonder I'm so boring. Get up. Get up from the chair and do something. Right now. Fuck.

Don't forget to publish this, you fucking retard. Don't just get up from the desk and fucking put it into the mass oblivion where all things should go that don't matter worth a fuck. Don't just never touch it again. Make sure and validate yourself and your total waste of time by clicking that red button. Also be sure and google for an image that completely captures the helpless mental and spiritual squalor of your self-created useless purgatory. Don't worry, we'll wait. Look for something good.

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Tonight will be one of those lifestyle augmentations that keep me broke while making me cooler. Caribou, who used to be Manitoba, (I hate it when people use the word nee, unless they're actually referring to a married woman's maiden name, and even then it's kinda gross) are playing at New City with Junior Boys and the Russian Futurists. I haven't seen any of these acts before and I like them all, so that means I gotta go, right? Gotta go look at all those same goddamn hipsters one more time.

What would happen if I didn't? It's just a dumb show. I've seen a million of 'em. My baby bought tickets already so we may as well go, though. Plus this is one of the best things about living downtown: instead of dropping a twenty for a taxi and conceivably losing any manner of billfolds, purses, cameras or clothes in the backseat, we get to stumble home. Besides, I get paid again in 175 hours. A working man should get to go enjoy himself.

It's spitting rain. It'll help keep the dust down.