Home: Jake's Take (9/23/07)

Okay, the tour:

The house we live in -- which we share with one girl in an apartment upstairs, and a vacated apartment downstairs -- has no doorknob. It recently broke, refusing to turn, and the landlord's solution was to remove it completely. Now there's a hole where it used to be, about the size of a baseball. This does not fill us with fear.

This door takes you to a stairwell, which takes you to the second-storey door to our apartment, which, if you're me, takes you directly to the couch in our living room. We found it on a sidewalk. Most of the furniture in our apartment, in fact, came from sidewalks. Somebody should do a study on this, but we spend too much time sitting on that furniture to get involved in such a delicate venture. There's a lot of not-doing to be done.

Now, you may be under the impression that this means we're lazy, but you couldn't be more wrong, fake rhetorical person. My three roommates -- Jon (my best friend since high school), Travis (one of the few good friends I acquired during my dorm days), and Aaron (another good friend who just happened to grow up with Travis) -- all work at a local pizza place and go to school. I work in a warehouse and go to school as well. These activities take up the majority of our time, and they're all done out of the apartment. When we're back at home, sitting is the name of the game, and it is a game that we play very well and with great aplomb.

The next room, a smaller second living room attached to the kitchen, is where you'll usually find our other roommate, Dave. Dave doesn't pay rent, spends a good 23 hours a day sitting, and pees on our things. He is a cat, but these are still starting to become Problems. It's only fair that he pull some of the weight, but he has somehow tricked us into feeding him, cleaning up after him, and petting him while we're stoned. Suffice to say, he's the smartest of the lot of us.

Our kitchen was the real selling point for the apartment. We've got a double basin sink, an electric stove, a big refrigerator, and an island counter. There's also a dishwasher, but we don't use that for fear of spending too much on water and losing our highly advanced motor skills. Unfortunately, the kitchen as a whole is just too much power for us to wield, and it is always covered with dishes, food, and half-finished cans of Pabst. It is a war zone mixed with a supermarket explosion, dipped in Pig Pen from peanuts. The food, however, is stashed away in our dozens of cabinets, where it stays relatively clean.

Beyond the kitchen are the rooms: Aaron, Travis, Jon, bathroom, and me. They're all about the same size, the only difference being that Jon's room is carpeted where Aaron, Travis, and I have hardwood floors. This was Jon's one condition, granted because he did most of the legwork in securing us the apartment.

My room is my home. The rest of the guys spend most of their time in the living room and the kitchen and only really go to their rooms to sleep. They are Social People, who like interacting with others rather than being hidden away in a corner. Also, Aaron doesn't have a bed, so his room on the whole is kind of depressing. Me, I like to have time and space to myself, and I have a very comfortable mattress on a box-spring and rolling rack. Every room I've had since I lived with my parents is covered with junk. The walls are my autobiography. Printed pictures, posters, movie stubs, funny fliers, and amusing scraps of whatever get tacked, taped, and otherwise stuck to every surface. I'm still working on the room in the apartment because we've only been there a couple of months, but already I have a big poster for Sean Penn's film adaptation of Into the Wild and a printout of the cover for Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man. There's also some psychedelic artwork and a photo looking over my city of Portland, Maine, from the top of a parking garage.

Parking garages, strangely enough, were the home of the four of us last year. Travis and I lived in Portland Hall, the only dormitory in Portland; Jon lived in a run-down building on Cumberland Ave.; and Aaron lived on St. John with a couple of roommates who he never really hung out with. Despite the distances between us, we all hung out nearly every day, drinking beer and finding stuff to do. We invariably made our way to the top of the garage on the Eastland Park Hotel, where we could look over the back bay; the garage at Monument Square, where we could look over the Old Port and see to South Portland; the garage at the Customs House, where Casco Bay and the Maine State Pier were practically beneath us; or the garage at the bus station, right in the heart of the city. Walking around in the streets -- which, by the way, is the only way we had to get around -- seemed claustrophobic compared to the roofs of these parking structures. Up above it all, we could look out on the significance and insignificance of everything and realize, if just for a few minutes, how small we all are.