This is my House

"There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.

Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?”

Louis MacKey, from one of my favourite movies, Waking Life.

I don't know who MacKey is, I just think about this segment every now and then, and relate to it. Suffering from not enough life, then sometimes suffering from an overabundance. And the thing that bugs me about this quote is that it digs into laziness but doesn't reflect much on suffering, even though that's what it opens on.

I understand why a lack of life causes suffering, you're bored and want things to happen. I can understand why an overabundance of life causes suffering, because that's what I'm experiencing now. But that little monologue says nothing more about suffering. All it does is dump on slackers. I wonder if the director, Richard Linklater, wanted this to be a counter point to his otherwise strong showing for Gen X ideals in Waking Life.

I wanted to know what to do when you suffer from the overabundance of life.

An overabundance of life for me is cleaning the house of a hoarder of 46 cats, who shared one litterbox -- the entire house. There's wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling garbage, but it's been pissed and shit on by 46 cats who were neglected, abused, and suffered greatly. A few kittens died in the house. I found the bones, said a quick prayer for them, and wished them peace in the afterlife. The cats were taken by the SPCA but sadly most had to be put down. They were severely constipated because they didn't want to be pooping in garbage, or in the corner behind the TV, or on the granite kitchen counters which were never used for cooking, or pooping all around the first floor powder room toilet. They wanted to be taken care of. These hoarders, who claimed to love cats so much, also killed them painfully and slowly with neglect.

The cats were taken in 2019. It's 2023 and the mountains of cat shit are still everywhere.

The house smells like the last stewed toxic shit in an old invalid's diapers after they'd died in a heatwave. The smell was horrific, truly in the sense of the word - horror - it caused the panic you'd feel if zombies came after you. The horror I imagine feeling at the sight of a zombie coming after me wouldn't just be the dissonance of seeing the dead move, but also the idea of being touched by something stinking, putrid and rotten, dripping in disease.

Then I was inside it, for days at a time, crawling in it, cleaning it. I found bed bug cities living in the couch, right overtop of a neighbourhood of black widow spiders. They have a mythical feeling to them, their shiny black metallic bodies. I scooped one up and put it outside, and did so for a few more before realising I was trying to save black widow spiders while there was an everest of garbage to climb into and clean out.

Every day I cleaned I thought I'd seen the worst of it. We did the living room, the bedrooms would be easier. Nope, the bedrooms have dead cats in them. Once the garbage was all out, I thought that was it, over the hump.

Then I looked in the utility closet and it was a rotten asshole of Satan - black mold everywhere, black widow spiders crawling in all crevaces, and a moat of cat shit that had absorbed an endless leaking of water from shitty plumbing. In the center of it all, resting like Jabba, was an oversized turd that had grown on moat-water to the size of a human fetus. I shoveled it out, bagged it, mopped out its afterbirth, and stopped the leak. A black widow spider ran up my bare arm and I screamed, slapped it off, slapped shit on my arm, and then went back to work. I sprayed the black mold with mold-x, wiped, sprayed, wiped, then poof my hand went right through the drywall and spiders fell all over me like confetti. Jabba laughed at me from inside the garbage bin.

I thought that was the worst of it.

Then we pulled up the carpets and caused a dust-storm of dried cat shit and bedbug turds. Fortunately we were in our hazmat gear, plastic wrapped from head to toe, on a hot day. We filled our goggles and gloves with sweat, panted for breath as we tugged on nasty piss-soaked carpet, and yanked as hard as we could. I put my tetanus shots to the test by cutting myself on the nails from the tacking as I'd forget where my hand was resting and plopped it down on a strip of upright nails. After doing one stairwell, one hall, and one bedroom, I tapped out. My endurance failed.

I thought that was the worst.

Then we did the laminate flooring in the living room. Dust of catshit everywhere - check - but it was surprisingly wet underneath each board. Actually it was really slimy with this brown goop. Each board came out like a used sex toy. Plop. Pill bugs crawled underneath. The wall looked a little black and crumbly where we exposed the wood. Yup, that's the frame of the house that looks rotten. The moisture from the endless leak must've traveled under the floorboards, under the insulation, and to all corners of the house.

That was the worst, because it confirmed this place was cursed unhallowed grounds, like the Pet Sematary.

I want to pull a Dr. Gonzo and thrash and moan in the bathtub, waiting for that one fantastic note when the rabbit bites his own head off, before somebody throws the radio into the tub and I am free.

Galileo 2 Goes Live

Galileo 2: Judgment Day made it's debut at Ropecon and Gen Con, and is now live on the Lamentations e-store. I'm incredibly proud of the sales, I'm proud that anything I've done has materialized into reality. http://www.lotfp.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=441 On a counter-note, I'm crawling out of a pit of burn out, but am likely going to groundhog right back in. The book editing involved a week of all nighters writing, early morning calls to be a daddy to my kids, and going to work during the day. I survived that on manic hyperfocus but once it was done I nose-dived. But then we had to move, in a heat wave, with no help and a broken elevator and 10 flights of stairs. Then uhh... we bought a place which was destroyed by hoarders and water damage, and is filled with shit, and I gotta clean it out and renovate it. Adventure Idea. 17th Century Janitor. You play an adventurer who's hard up for cash, and there's a chateau that needs cleaning, with a hint of treasure protected by a great evil within. But there is no monster or treasure, they trick adventurers into pushing a broom with some bullshit story, but it's just work and that's the scary part.