The roomate, who is the permanent resident in the house, is working in South Africa for a few weeks, and she took the neighbors with her. Apparently she is the source of stability in the building, because since she left things have swiftly gone awry at our usually placid address. You know the Bill Cosby bit about how when his wife leaves town all his kids start eating chocolate cake for dinner and trashing the joint? That's me now.
For starters: the leg through the roof, explained yesterday. Now add to roving children to the mix. Our gardener, who lives in a two room house out back, has got some of his kids and one of his wives up from the rural hometown. Two days now I've been woken up by kids giggling and stomping around chasing each other with boogers outside my window.
When they're not making noise in the morning, Socks, the dog of our house, has taken to woofing at me in the morning to let her out. Now Socks is usually a pleasently lethargic bitch who likes nothing more than laying in the driveway sun during the day and on her sheepskin rug through the morning. But with the neighbors gone, their new puppy Ugali has taken to sneaking through the fence to play with Socks. It's like in high school, when your parents would leave town and these kids you didn't even know would show up and ask you if were having a party that night. Around eight in the morning, Socks starts whining at me to let her out so she can go play.
These dogs beat the spit out of each other. All day long they're batting one another in the face, biting one another in the ass, chasing birds or lizards of kids with boogers on their fingers.
Socks is getting old--she's starting to show that wiggly canine cellulite--so she tries to take a break every now and then in the dog bed on the porch, which is made of woven reeds. Ugali is never having any of it. She waits for Socks to lie down and then plows into the dog bed, tail wagging, teeth bared. The bed itself has almost completely come unwoven: it's about three dog fights away from just being a pile of reeds. Socks doesn't seem to notice. Reminds me of my friend Brian at my friend George's house during Mardi Gras: he jumped on George's childhood bed, bed shattered, Brian shrugged, fell asleep. Socks is similarly uninterested.
Anyway, I've been a pretty passive non-force in the center of all this activity. Lots of reading and writing. Most active thing I did yesterday was to watch splatter horror film Cabin Fever and then walk around the house saying, "Oh my god that movie kicked ass. Oh my god that movie kicked ass."
Did you all know about this? I think it means we're serious.
