The House of Filth and Vermin

Oh, Gentle Reader. Know you where I live? Have I yet harangued you with my story of my filthy lodgings?
Yes? No? Allow me to hammer home my point about how suck my current house is.
Last Thursday when I came home, it was to the strong odor of onion soup suffused throughout the living room and hallway. The next morning, the smell was somewhat abated but still detectable; I observed the crock pot with its stock of brown soup sitting on the stove, the surface of the soup now scummed over with whitish floccules of fat. The crock pot was still sitting there on the stove when I left to return to Orange County on Friday, and it was still sitting there on the stove when I returned to San Diego on Monday. It is still sitting there now, and I fear to even peer into it for fear of inhaling some bio-weapons-grade noxious mold. And believe me, gentle reader, when I say that this kind of health hazard is the norm in the kitchen, rather than the exception--the counter is ever covered with dishes flecked with bits of rotting food, and the whole kitchen has this thick, milky aroma hanging about it. Some days it is inhabited by a literal swarm of several dozen flies that will erupt into a black cloud if disturbed; other days I can see columns of several thousand ants marching up and down the walls. I am afraid to even go in there for the five minutes it would take to make a sandwich.
The ants in here approach intolerability. Even though I take great pains to leave no food lying around in *my* room, they march through as if they own the place. As if they were paying $625 dollars a month to live in this shithole of a house instead of me. Normally, I'm a live and let live kind of guy. I'm not the one to smash the spiders I see scuttling behind my bathroom sink or to take umbrage with the occasional moth I see clinging to the corner juncture of wall and ceiling. I don't want to kill bugs just because they're ugly; I think killing creatures only on the basis of aesthetics leads one into some very dangerous ethical territory. But I draw the line when animals start to threaten me. Ugly creepy crawliness, I can forgive. Biting, I cannot.
The ants gnaw on my flesh. They bite my toes and legs when I sleep, they bite the inside of my elbow and the backs of my arms when I am awake. These little Argentine ants don't pack much firepower, but their bites do sting for several seconds like the pricks of a pin. It's sharp enough to wake me from sleep, and painful enough to be a severe annoyance. I don't know why it is that they bite me--whether they detect some slight movement on my part and react as if threatened, or whether they detect that I am made out of meat and are putting in an honest if utterly ineffective effort to devour me alive. I don't imagine an ant's cognition is very complex, and it probably only has a few hard-wired responses to any stimulus--and I expect the ant's primary response to just about any situation is to chomp down on organic matter and return a great 50-ant's-weight chunk of it to the nest. In any case, their tiny mandibles clamp down on my skin and prompt a shout from me. The individual offender is quickly rubbed up into a crippled ball by my retaliating fingers; but the ants, being very community-minded, care nothing for sacrificing the life of an individual for the sake of the greater good. Sure enough, some other intrepid sister will try again presently to either slay this titanic beast that disrupts the well-laid scent trails with its oafish movements, or else to bring home a meal that will last the ant colony for years to come.
So the ants piss me off. This is to say nothing of the other unpleasant peculiarities peculiar to my current place of lodging. Like how, living in an unincorporated and rather economically depressed area of San Diego, I hear the scream of sherrif's sirens on a regular basis and hear the chop of helicopter blades as the sheriffs chase down some fugitive or other. Like how there are places not a mile distant where you can pass a man standing on the balcony of his apartment building and return three hours later to see him in the same spot--and assumingly you could repeat this process all day long and he'd just be standing there, causing one to wonder just what it is a person does for a living that involves standing in one specific place all day long. Like how the yards around here are filled with dead weeds and dead cars, and how stray dogs run up and down the street. Like how my roommates toss empty grocery bags on the dining room floor or leave crushed soda bottles lying in the driveway or put expended yogurt cups and greasy fast food wrappers right outside the door and feel utterly no compunction to pick any of this up, ever. Like how the last time I tried to say hello to one of my roommates he just stared at me as though I were speaking in some alien tongue.
I move out of this den of disease and filth on Saturday. The process of finding a new place to live was a stressful and time-consuming one, and couldn't have come at a worse time, seeing as how I was just starting graduate studies at a new school in a new city. But the details of my search could easily comprise another complete post, if not more. So, Gentle Reader, please understand that I will be a lot less crochety come Saturday, when I do not have insects chewing my skin off and I can draw breath in my house without fear of contracting cholera.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul

It's been a while since I did this whole blogging thing. Stepping back into it is rather like...I want to say stepping into a minefield or testing the temperature of the bathwater with my big toe, but both of those metaphors now strike me as supremely stupid.
Let's start over, shall we?
So it has been a while since I last attempted anything in the vein of a blog. My last blog, hosted by Live Journal, was a pathetic thing. I'd post essays on literary criticism and receive nearly zero response. I had maybe one or two regular readers, and they only read my shit because I had known them IRL (which translates "in real life," for those of us who still cling to the usage actual words). I had a number of irregular readers who posted comments like "What a great resource! Keep it up!" in response to my essays on literary criticism, which made me think that people were cannibalizing my essays for school reports, which pissed me the fuck off.
I had a lot of trouble handling a blog. Emotionally speaking, that is. I'd sit by and stare at my inbox, waiting for the copious comments to whatever wisdom or witticism I had posted that morning to come rolling in. Those comments never came, and I started to feel cheated and unappreciated.
I had thought that blogging would be the ideal means by which I could connect with my fellow man (and, I was very much hoping, my fellow woman). A forum where people will only judge me by my words and my ideas? Where I, as a person who fancies himself to be intelligent and literate and eloquent will shine among so many lesser, duller narcissists who spew their thoughts out onto the Internet? Yes, sign me up! Oh God, your very Heaven is no more than this!
A blog, I realized, is a piss poor way to achieve validation. At least for somebody as socially clumsy as I am, who has trouble making and maintaining associations whether on the Internet or off of it. As I browsed around the blogs of others, I saw that most of them were only connecting with pre-existing friends. Some were part of communities based on shared interests, but mosts of these interests were not my interests--I had no desire to participate in the anna positive community or one of the many Naruto fanbases or to hitch my wagon to the Fallout Boy fanclub. A few rare individuals had such command of language or ideas that they actually attracted discriminating interest from the outside, but these were rare. I thought I could be one. I can't.
So why am I doing it again? Why am I even thinking about blogging? Why am I typing out my thoughts in the full expectation that no one will ever read them instead of working on my homework for this coming Thursday? Well, I'd say it was the tequila I drank this afternoon, but I reckon I must be mostly sober by now. I think it might be because the attraction of plotting out all my interests in my profile in the slim hope that somebody will think I am cool and mail me to compliment me. Or it might be because typing my thoughts out in journal form, if nothing else, can serve as an organizing principle for my otherwise disorganized mind. Or it might be because I really hope that people will read what I write and connect with it and so we shall create this vast network of sympathetic and sensitive souls across the planet, and none of us shall ever feel alone ever again.
Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why. I'm willing to attribute this desire to demoniac possession. Seems as good an answer as any. In any case, here you go, Intarwebs. My very first new blog post. Anima Umbrae is back. And he certainly has a lot of other things he could/should be doing, instead...like working on his campaign website on Obsidian Portal, or reading up on pedagogical methodology in the writing classroom. Or sleeping.
Sleep. Yeah. How about that. Well, good night, Intarwebs. Sleep tight. Don't let the programing bugs byte.
Ohhhh. That was some witty shit right there.