"The onus is on us, to cauterize the pus, which bustles from our bum, when we've been drinking rum."  These are the first words I long (feverishly?) to hear from my new boss's mouth.  Instead he, Harry is is name, says, "Oh, you're here."  Something in his wending, veiny nose which keens unprettily for solitude and obliteration.  He will look down that mountain of yellowblue, at me.

It's not long before Harry is showing me the house I'll be staying in for a few days.  It reminds me of Bible camp.  There are big rooms with multiple beds in each room and furniture culled from Mrs. Keep-It-Til-It's-Junk's Garage Sale of Total Absolution.  At this sale, there also was sold a cardboard box filled with fluorescent leotards, a complete set of crumbling children's books, their relevance strayed into a storm for a pint of Guiness and never returned.  Looking back, Mrs. Keep-It-Til-It's-Junk should have filed for divorce.  Mr. Berate-Her-Cause-It's-Trash was by far the wrong choice.

I settle myself, wait, decide to drink three beer to lube introductions with my seven other housemates.  Because my room is empty it's easy for me to slip into the succulent patterns of aloneness.  Music and dance.  I check the corners of the room to see if anyone is spying on me.  I'm convinced, briefly, that They've lowered a camera into the room and are giggling to vomit-point at my antics.  When I notice the camera, I smile into it.

I want to go out tonight and I assume the local bar, Hooligans, will be comfortably rife with fleshed insecurities, quiet n' nervous targets for my sidle-up move.  (I will go to the club, it will be curiously empty, and I will feel sick.)

Meeting my roommates is fun.  We are quick to assure one another: I swear, I drink, I smoke, and I'm comfortable with other people smoking weed.  

It seems an internal barometer will clang religiously if the word fuck is not thrown out at least once every four or eight seconds.  A conversation might go,

"Fuck."

"Fuck."

"Fuck."

The desolate all-purpose talisman is hurled with dull vehemence over an abyss of social tension.  But where are my fucking manners?  Everyone I've met (so far) is really nice.  The hummed mantra, deftly undertone, seems to be: I no want no trouble.  And then: I want to meet a complimentary me, and we'll hang out together.

As I sit on the couch, swearing with profound frequency, subtly accepting a behavioral shawl of nonviolence and liberal accommodation, I notice there is almost nothing I can say, no fresh obscenity or plumed pretension, that would evict anything besides the thrumming par, "Oh fuck."  

There is an atmosphere of deferred everything- responsibility, aesthetic clue, marital push, value code- in favor of regimented relaxation.  This life, which is so often referred to as real life, that poignantly non-valuable monicker, replete and fetid with ambiguity and exclusion of so many worthy nervous systems, resembles more a hiatus from life than life itself.

The Bigness here is Smallness.  Smartness is Dumbness.  God is Godlessness.  I am becoming sediment.  "Oh fuck."