May 12–19, 2003 — Like barnacles on a boat

After we arrived home from tour, Jeff had little tolerance for the piles of my belongings that crowded the floors in most rooms of our apartment. Each day I would hear the same complaints about his inability to open the back door in the kitchen because it was blocked by IKEA boxes and about the inconvenience of having to weave between garbage bags of clothes each time he walked down the hall. When I removed the last of my belongings from one room, his complaints would continue at the same pace, concentrating on the rooms that remained. When he went away for the three-day weekend, I resolved to have everything of mine in my room before he returned.

I realized on Saturday that Sunday was the twenty-third anniversary of Ian Curtis’s death. (Ian Curtis was Joy Division’s lead singer.) I tried to rent Stroszek, a German movie that was supposedly Curtis’s favourite, but it was out, and I wondered if someone else might’ve had the same idea.

This was as much excitement as my long weekend managed. While Jeff was gone, the phone didn’t ring a single time, not even while I was at work. (We have call display, and one of our phones tracks every incoming call; this phone cheerfully announced zero new calls for three consecutive days.)

Our landlord is showing the upstairs apartment to a lot of people. The rent is a bit expensive, so she is having a hard time finding people to rent it. When I see that she is sitting on our porch waiting for prospective tenants to arrive, I settle in on the chair in the living room and peer beneath the venetian blinds. Some days there are several groups of people looking around upstairs, and I examine all of them, deciding who I’d be happy to live below and who looks like they’d make us move our piles of shoes out of the shared entranceway.

I like going upstairs and walking around in the empty rooms after our landlord is gone. I wish the upstairs apartment could stay empty forever.

There is a man who lives in the apartment downstairs. We only hear from him when we are making too much noise. While we were playing Risk, he once rang the doorbell to ask us to stop rolling dice on the floor.

Mike lived in my room before I moved in, and I asked him if the man downstairs had ever banged on the ceiling while Mike lived there. He said it had never happen.

I was putting together a bookshelf at around 12:30 am one night, and I guess I was making much more noise than I thought. He banged on the ceiling, and the floor shook. It was a bit like a ride, and I was tempted to keep making noise; it is difficult to give in and be quiet when the punishment for making too much noise is so entertaining. But I decided to end my spate of inconsiderate behavior and finish building my bookshelf the next day. “Don’t start a war,” Jeff told me.

If the man downstairs ever asks me what I was doing that night, I am going to say that one of my bookshelves fell over on its own and I was trying to clean up. I sound less inconsiderate that way, and I have become much better at lying.

Meanwhile, Jeff’s war with my belongings is at an end: The back door is accessible, and the hall has more in it that belongs to him than to me. I felt very productive after my hour of tidying up spread over three-days.