A Brief Report of the Happenings of The Place

Here is what’s going on at The Place just now. I guess maybe you don’t know what The Place is because of a number of reasons. Essentially, which is to say basically, which is to say literally The Place is where I live. Other people live there too. The main things that go on at The Place is that everyone watches movies and nobody does dishes. I am also pretty ashamed of how we live here – there is not much furniture and I think there are maybe 2 beds out of the 6 bedrooms, which isn’t exactly an impressive fraction by any means, even if you reduce it. That’s not the main important thing right now.

The main important thing right now is that we’re losing a member for the next 5 months. SN is, in less than 15 hours, boarding a Ghana-bound series of aircrafts. This means that a lot [some (two?)] people cried tonight and everyone hugged even though we all smelled terrible because of the weather that I realize I have not told you about. I am sad about it too, I will miss her, but I don’t really do a good job at expressing these things. I will show my dedication by accompanying her to the airport – an act of support universally recognized because airports are universally pains in the asses to get to and awful to be in. Also: I showed up in a recent dream of SN’s wherein she experienced a brutal nosering-related injury and I was reportedly seen with some Trouble from the past. I didn’t know which part of the dream to be more concerned about, though the description of what happened with the nosering was much more troubling, at least on a visceral level. Apparently the dream was hyper-vivid because of drugs taken in order to prevent malaria, which I guess is a problem in Ghana. I hope I never have to worry about malaria or its treatment-related sleep-side-effects.

Another thing is that everyone gives me a hard time because I lock my door. I don’t think that this is strange; I have been in the habit of immediately locking doors behind me for the last 10 years, the only exception being my old house’s front door. I secretly suspect that everyone else secretly suspects that I am doing untoward things behind the locked door of my room, but this is hardly ever the case. The simple truth of the matter is that I desperately need to be able to physically keep people away from me sometimes. The knowledge that one is alone and can reasonably expect to remain as such until one chooses not to be is deeply reassuring. Everyone wants control over his or her surroundings. My surroundings are The Place.

Those are the main things going on at The Place. We have four porches, but we only really use one. Ants come up from the floorboards sometimes.