A one month... monthiversary, I suppose.
I've spoken a time or three on the topic of my dear room-mate Vince, and since it's a topic people seem fascinated by in a sort of horrified way, I see no reason why I ought to deprive you goodly folks of more tales of my amazing cohabitation with him that you, my gentle readers, can marvel at and in some small way appreciate further your good fortune in living with anybody else, or perhaps more fortunately yet, nobody at all.
This past month, I've been running a series of experiments. It began one month ago today, when I noticed that Vince had - as is his wont - left some dirty dishes in the sink. While as a matter of habit I have habitually cleaned up any such messes in the kitchen as a reaction to what I consider an ordinary adult aversion to seeing post-meal filth cluttering up the home, I decided this time I might like to try something a little bit different. This time I would leave it to Vince to handle on his own and see how long it would take him. He had, after all, demonstrated a truly epic level of sloth, self-indulgence and irresponsibility in so many other fields of late, I felt it was a valid field of inquiry, and one which the scholar in me felt a burning need to learn the answer to.
Days went by, and then weeks. The stench began to grow steadily stronger and stronger in the sink. A few dishes came and went, but there were a few "old regulars" like his blue-lidded Tupperware containers with noodle remnants and his glass full of some increasingly-scummy-milky substance (see picture, below). All the while, I kept on placing my own dishes and such in the dishwasher immediately next to the sink, keeping them carefully separate from those in the sink so as to keep the results of the experiment pure and pristine.
In the mean time, I set up a number of other experiments in series. "If the kitchen garbage bag is full to over-flowing, will Vince eventually take it out on his own, or will he leave it like that forever?", "If we run out of toilet paper, and I refuse to buy the new bag for the eighth time in a row, but rather keep a private horde in my bedroom for my own personal use, will Vince eventually clue in and buy some toilet paper without needing my prompting to do so?", "Will Vince ever take out the recycling when it's his turn, or will it just pile up over and around the recycling box forever?", "Will Vince run the dishwasher if I don't, or will he leave it full of dirty dishes forever", and "Will Vince wipe up that smear of blood on the bathroom counter that he or his girlfriend left, or will I need to do that for him". All were all topics of significant interest on my part.
Each of these, in their turn, ended with predictably disappointing results. He turned to using paper towels from the kitchen rather than purchasing toilet paper (paper towels which I had bought), he let the kitchen garbage bag overflow onto the floor, the blood on the counter ended up getting wiped clean incidentally when I was doing my routine cleaning of the counter in a moment of piquant disgust, the dishwasher went unused except for when I felt the need to run it to satisfy my own sanitary distress, and so on. He DID take out the recycling after just three weeks of it overflowing, and I took that opportunity to praise him for it, hoping that - like a dog - some positive re-enforcement might motivate him to further acts of hygiene. Sadly, this was not to be the case.
Today, one month in, the kitchen sink is largely full of his filth, many of the items having been there since day one and still there to this day, like old veterans still hanging around to tell these johnny-come-latelies that there WAS a day when the sink is clean, and NO our old minds aren't playing tricks on me, I was there damn it!
Vince can see this, day in, day out for a solid month without feeling any urge to clean it. He is more of a man than you'll ever be.
I have no particular desire to be his daddy, holding his hand and walking him through these rudimentary tasks, but I begin to feel that he lacks the necessary brain power to contribute anything but filth in the absence of something closely resembling parental guidance. Somehow, that critical part of the upbringing of a child where they learn that the household tasks that their parents teach them to do as kids are not merely for the parents' benefit but in order to inculcate them in the child just never happens with him, and as a consequence, he's incapable of functioning as an adult in this sense. When I tell him to do his chores, he seldom does them either, which tells me that he's not capable of functioning at the level of a child, either. A dog or a cat would know not to leave their filth in the area where they live and eat, and so he's incapable even of functioning at what I would consider a basic mammalian level. I would characterize his level of hygiene, thus, as somewhat akin to a worm or a maggot, who is content and comfortable living amidst their own filth.
This poses a bit of a conundrum for me: An adult, you can talk to about these things. A child, you can teach. An animal, you can train. A worm will never be anything other than a worm, though, and will never do anything but what a worm will do. Even a maggot will never be anything better than a fly, and I don't care for either, to be quite honest, and I begin to sense than in Vince, this is exactly what I'm forced to live with.
Perhaps in a short while I'll tell you folks about his truly magical girlfriend. The sort of woman who decides she wants Vince as her special guy is someone worthy of a tale or two herself, I can assure you.