The Creatures Shall Not Defeat Me

I live in a big house. Well, I live on the first floor of a big house. 2 bedrooms, lots of closets, living room AND dining room, plus 2 porches. I also have a garage and a big backyard. I am very lucky. However, I am also an artist, so that means there is never enough room for all my shit. Perhaps if I lived alone...alas, I live with Cousin Roommate who is also an artist. We have a lot of shit.

I have tried many arrangements in order to allow us both enough space in this incredible shrinking apartment. First we confined all the art stuff to the dining room. The hoard laughed at our efforts as it spilled into first the living room, then the kitchen, and finally my bedroom. After that I decided that since A) Cousin Roommate is sort of a recluse and B) I haven't been having many indoor parties lately, we should each have our own room for arting in. I took the former living room and Cousin Roommate expanded into the entire dining room. Also, at that time, several of our friends joined us in an adventure wherein we rented a huge studio space downtown to try and get the ball rolling on something (something some of us lost sight of, or never had, or whatever - that's another topic).

With the duel studio rooms going on, the hoard grew much more slowly and I was actually able to move, art, and breath in my space. However, recently, the downtown studio space became a thing of the past. Suddenly the hoard was back, with teeth. My "studio room" looked like 6 episodes of "Hoarders: Buried Alive" all smooshed into one colourfully lit area. Even breathing became hard.

I cannot art in those conditions. When I cannot art, I became restless, then angry, then depressed. Also, it's winter now and I have to fight against punching the stupid out of people harder than the rest of the year as it is. Something had to be done.

So I have moved into the one room in the basement that doesn't necessarily scream NIGHTMARE. All the other rooms are pretty terrifying. There is even a Murder Shower.

I used to have a "lab" down there when I first moved into this place with my former roommate. But a series of very soggy events led to everything I had worked on being ruined. I cleaned the room out but before I got my shit situated, I decided to let the place be used by some very cool people who were running a pirate radio station because fuck the FCC. The room has been abandoned for a very long time (ever since my paranoid landlord thought the antenna on the chimney was a bomb) so I'm back, baby.

Now here I am in a conundrum. You see, the spiders and other disgusting critters in the basement don't understand that I pay the fucking rent. They've been squatting on my dime so long that they are understandably pissed at me now that I am making them leave the only place that isn't a dank hell hole. But fuck 'em, right? They can have the whole rest of the cavernous, dark basement. I'm not going into the Murder Shower, even on a dare, so it's yours, assholes. Oh, that's not enough space for you relatively small monsters? How 'bout the haunted coal room where the light from 4 LED flashlights cannot penetrate? You'd thrive in there, you beasts. But, no. They keep coming back to my area. And now they've called in reinforcements.

It's my fault. The other day I got tired of nicely explaining to these stupid spiders that they could go over there or over there or even over there and I wouldn't tear down their webs or shoo them with paper or anything at all. Plus, they eat silverfish, I think, so I don't even kill spiders that have bodies smaller than my thumbnail as a rule. One spider, bigger than the ones I had tried reasoning with a million times, startled me. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye coming straight for my face - i'm assuming it wanted to get in through my eye to my brain so it could take control of my body and make me leave. At the time, I was working with my heat gun so I did the most logical and instinctual thing, which was burn it with a 700degree blast. Not nice, I know. And when I was 19 I caught the curtains on fire at my apartment killing another spider using a lighter and hair spray. I should have learned my lesson because this time the consequences were much more serious than flaming draperies. . .

The spiders have let bats in the basement. I'm not joking. Or a bat, anyway. There is no other explanation for that bat's arrival mere minutes after the spider's death. The survivors rallied in support and called on the creature of the night to frighten me. What they don't know is A) bats are one of my spirit animals and B) I've been inoculated against rabies. Bring it on, shit bags!

Actually, it scared the shit out of me. I've even been having dreams where I'm trying to give one of my friends an artichoke and I notice that there are flies on it but the flies are actually little tiny baby bats. So I don't give her the artichoke which makes me sad because, for some reason, in my dreams she really likes artichokes.

They've invaded my studio and they've invaded my dreams, but they shall not defeat me.

Come on! Really?!

I can't be the only one. Is it wrong of me to disengage after watching 12 of 13 episodes of a show because the offspring of two brown-eyed people had a blue-eyed kid? I mean, if you're going to do that, i'm going to need photographs of the grandparents showing at least 1 with blue eyes. It bugs me. Whatever. It's totally irresponsible, though, when two blue-eyed peeps have brown-eyed kid. How much of the budget would get eaten up by conacts? Really? No one would spring for Daniel Radcliff to wear green contacts? That's not the thing that set me off, but it' a good point. Anyway. That's the kind of thing that makes me throw remotes. I'm just saying - people know science, bro. Gaaal!