Naked asian/Palm tree
When I came to California Lindsey said I could sleep on the couch once Kelcie moved out. For the time being I slept on the bed and Kelcie slept on the couch in the one bedroom apt.
No one in San Diego has air conditioning, but they do have gas burning stoves with open flames and three girls crowded into decidedly a one girl apartment. As time wore on we were sweatier and sweatier until Lindsey announced that she was comfortable enough around me that she was going to stop wearing pants.
"Okay," I said.
And so she has. But I haven't stopped sleeping in the bed. Kelcie did move out, kind of a long time ago, plenty of time for me to shift my evening routine to the couch and make it mine. But We are Used To It Now, me sleeping in the bed, and I have a spot. Mine is on the right, by the window, and I don't like anybody else to be in it.
When Kelcie moved out she moved into an apartment across the street which we can actually see into at night as if it is television, but for one large spiky palm tree that sometimes occludes her and her half-dressed homosexual Filipino roommate. Half-dressed homosexual Filipino roommates using palm trees for cover is something that happens in California. With regularity.
Kelcie being across the street causes our lives, already a source of disbelief and head-shaking in the Heavens, to resemble something like Seinfeld just a little bit more. Take Seinfeld, drop it in California, and replace all the Jews with homosexuals and you've got yourself a show.
This is Kelcie's first apartment. It is also her roommate's first apartment. As a result it smells funny and they both have run out of money. This happens to almost everyone the first time around.
You budget and you save (if you're smart,) but inevitably you're just never 100% prepared for exactly how much that's all going to cost. It's not just paying rent - its first and last month's rent, and maybe an additional deposit, to start an apartment up. It's not just paying the electric, there's a deposit on that too. Here you might have to bribe a squatter to get out of the living room so you can get your bed in, if you have one, and only the roommate does. Kelcie has an air mattress and a fan.
Add to all these normal, first-time-moving out concerns a habit that Kelcie has of spontaneously buying Things Which Are Stupid, and you have a situation.
For example, we went to the Del Mar Fair.
"Del Mar" are words you would typically hear in California describing a place you can't afford to live.
Kelcie found and put on a bright blue and yellow Lucheador mask at a vendor. It was quite authentic.
Then she handed a bored little Mexican a twenty dollar bill. It turned out later that this also was very real. This was happening.
"Are you serious? Are you going to buy that?" asked Lindsey, "for twenty dollars?"
A Lucheador gazed back impassively, her soul sold to her passion: Mexican wrestling.
On another occasion, thirty dollars of "waterless car wash" was purchased at a gas station in Escondido because "the lady was already cleaning my car with it, I couldn't not buy it."
I expressed my amusement that we have both worked in Sales of Useless Objects for a combined thirteen years. "You just got completely hustled by two strangers at a gas station. Who even knows who they are. You can't trust men in beards selling you something."
"It's a good idea. I'll wash my car now," she defended herself.
"You will not," I replied.
She did, just to make a point of doing it, in front of as many people as she could garner for an audience. This happened while we were trying to build a stand in the Wild Animal Park down by the Lions in the middle of the night. As we were busy putting up the tent, Kelcie spontaneously began to wash her car that we had driven into the zoo to carry stand things.
Somewhere, a lion roared his general disbelief.
And so, the effect that all this wreaks on the apartment is that the apartment has almost nothing in it.
It is, quite possibly, the finest furnished bachelor apartment owned by a woman and a gay man that anyone has ever seen. The contents of the living room are thus:
- four collapsable plastic camping chairs
- a folding card table (on the table) a MacBook, a Loaf of Bread, some change
- what appears to be an antique dresser belonging to a dead grandmother of someone (the only object made of wood in the room) which is supporting: an iMac
- cardboard boxes
This entire arrangement is garnished - or perhaps, better said, completely made - by the single decoration in the room: an elaborately framed and matted image of Elvis in a gold suit which reads "Elvis: The King of Rock."
The best part is that in the picture, Elvis isn't even doing anything. He seems to have been caught unawares, mildly surprised, trying on gold suits at Target.
As I look out my window at night, I can see him, looking perpetually just a little shocked, possibly regarding the room in which he has been entombed with dismay.
I plan on working up a King of Pop poster and hanging it up just opposite the King of Rock just across the street, analogous right down to that gold thong thing that someone let Michael Jackson out of the house with and onto a stage.
They will look at each other there, trapped in some sort of physics-bending infinite loop of pop culture and slaughtered dreams, and ask each other with their eyes, "Is this really it? Gold suits, some plastic lawn furniture and a naked Asian? After all that fame and fortune, this where I end up, for all time?"
It will be a beautiful statement rife with irony and desperation.
A regular work of modern art.
Partially occluded by a naked man and a spiked palm tree.
No one in San Diego has air conditioning, but they do have gas burning stoves with open flames and three girls crowded into decidedly a one girl apartment. As time wore on we were sweatier and sweatier until Lindsey announced that she was comfortable enough around me that she was going to stop wearing pants.
"Okay," I said.
And so she has. But I haven't stopped sleeping in the bed. Kelcie did move out, kind of a long time ago, plenty of time for me to shift my evening routine to the couch and make it mine. But We are Used To It Now, me sleeping in the bed, and I have a spot. Mine is on the right, by the window, and I don't like anybody else to be in it.
When Kelcie moved out she moved into an apartment across the street which we can actually see into at night as if it is television, but for one large spiky palm tree that sometimes occludes her and her half-dressed homosexual Filipino roommate. Half-dressed homosexual Filipino roommates using palm trees for cover is something that happens in California. With regularity.
Kelcie being across the street causes our lives, already a source of disbelief and head-shaking in the Heavens, to resemble something like Seinfeld just a little bit more. Take Seinfeld, drop it in California, and replace all the Jews with homosexuals and you've got yourself a show.
This is Kelcie's first apartment. It is also her roommate's first apartment. As a result it smells funny and they both have run out of money. This happens to almost everyone the first time around.
You budget and you save (if you're smart,) but inevitably you're just never 100% prepared for exactly how much that's all going to cost. It's not just paying rent - its first and last month's rent, and maybe an additional deposit, to start an apartment up. It's not just paying the electric, there's a deposit on that too. Here you might have to bribe a squatter to get out of the living room so you can get your bed in, if you have one, and only the roommate does. Kelcie has an air mattress and a fan.
Add to all these normal, first-time-moving out concerns a habit that Kelcie has of spontaneously buying Things Which Are Stupid, and you have a situation.
For example, we went to the Del Mar Fair.
"Del Mar" are words you would typically hear in California describing a place you can't afford to live.
Kelcie found and put on a bright blue and yellow Lucheador mask at a vendor. It was quite authentic.
Then she handed a bored little Mexican a twenty dollar bill. It turned out later that this also was very real. This was happening.
"Are you serious? Are you going to buy that?" asked Lindsey, "for twenty dollars?"
A Lucheador gazed back impassively, her soul sold to her passion: Mexican wrestling.
On another occasion, thirty dollars of "waterless car wash" was purchased at a gas station in Escondido because "the lady was already cleaning my car with it, I couldn't not buy it."
I expressed my amusement that we have both worked in Sales of Useless Objects for a combined thirteen years. "You just got completely hustled by two strangers at a gas station. Who even knows who they are. You can't trust men in beards selling you something."
"It's a good idea. I'll wash my car now," she defended herself.
"You will not," I replied.
She did, just to make a point of doing it, in front of as many people as she could garner for an audience. This happened while we were trying to build a stand in the Wild Animal Park down by the Lions in the middle of the night. As we were busy putting up the tent, Kelcie spontaneously began to wash her car that we had driven into the zoo to carry stand things.
Somewhere, a lion roared his general disbelief.
And so, the effect that all this wreaks on the apartment is that the apartment has almost nothing in it.
It is, quite possibly, the finest furnished bachelor apartment owned by a woman and a gay man that anyone has ever seen. The contents of the living room are thus:
- four collapsable plastic camping chairs
- a folding card table (on the table) a MacBook, a Loaf of Bread, some change
- what appears to be an antique dresser belonging to a dead grandmother of someone (the only object made of wood in the room) which is supporting: an iMac
- cardboard boxes
This entire arrangement is garnished - or perhaps, better said, completely made - by the single decoration in the room: an elaborately framed and matted image of Elvis in a gold suit which reads "Elvis: The King of Rock."
The best part is that in the picture, Elvis isn't even doing anything. He seems to have been caught unawares, mildly surprised, trying on gold suits at Target.
As I look out my window at night, I can see him, looking perpetually just a little shocked, possibly regarding the room in which he has been entombed with dismay.
I plan on working up a King of Pop poster and hanging it up just opposite the King of Rock just across the street, analogous right down to that gold thong thing that someone let Michael Jackson out of the house with and onto a stage.
They will look at each other there, trapped in some sort of physics-bending infinite loop of pop culture and slaughtered dreams, and ask each other with their eyes, "Is this really it? Gold suits, some plastic lawn furniture and a naked Asian? After all that fame and fortune, this where I end up, for all time?"
It will be a beautiful statement rife with irony and desperation.
A regular work of modern art.
Partially occluded by a naked man and a spiked palm tree.