Karma Komplaints

I've really let my karma go.

Five years ago I was shown an apartment by an elderly Rastafarian. One of those uber-cool, feel-good, sun beaming out the no-sunshine-hole types. We talked for five or thirty minutes (accounts vary). I made him laugh, he said he liked my energy, and I got the apartment.

Back then I had no job, no higher education, no real style to speak of. Today I am a "young professional" (shudder) with a law degree (rounded up) and an array of nice shirts (six and counting).

But my karma credit, apparently, is in the red.

There have been complaints.

It started with a phone call, as so many conversations have before. Our beloved landlady  wanted to show our apartment that upcoming weekend. She asked me if we would clean the apartment first. She said that she was willing to come in and clean it herself, but would prefer if we could do it ourselves.

I said, sweet Jesus no, we will do it ourselves. Apparently she heard something else altogether. We'll get there.

Andrea and I go to Bluesfest that night. We come home, and the place is spotless. Suspiciously so. The furniture is rearranged. And Andrea's clothes and personal effects have been, um, gone through. At first I suspected a very large and dextrous rat. Then, a particularly volatile yet orderly water heater explosion. Then my thoughts went to June.

The next day I had a shower. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Except that I stepped out of the shower and into a screaming fit. June and Andrea were going at it full-tilt in the entrance way. I came out in my towel and tried to mediate, like a true Roman senator, to little avail. June was livid, positively livid, because a) we live like pigs at a paint orgy, and b) Andrea had the audacity to ask her not to enter our apartment and rearrange our world without permission.

Well, we had to get to our jobs and I had to be less naked to do so, so I told her to leave and told her that we would settle this the next day.

The next day, June invites me up for tea. That old tactic. She explained to me that she may have flown off the handle. She explained that she doesn't rent her basement for the money but because she lives alone and she likes to know that other people are moving about the house. She likes to steep herself in the good vibrations that drift up from downstairs. But, lately the vibrations haven't been very good. There's been a lot of negativity going on. And it's been getting to her. So she snapped.

Well, that explained everything to my satisfaction. Sarcasm font.

Apparently she recalled me giving her permission to enter and "inspect" the apartment. She was listening in between my words I suppose. I told her clear-as-day that a) I did not intend to give her permission, b) I never would give her permission, and c) any further actions of this sort will be met with swift and immediate bad karma. 

In regards to the filthy details she mentioned the two breakfast plates left on the kitchen counter, the shirt that Andrea left on her bed, and an empty salad container that she found after some forensic detective work.

I asked her to imagine, for a second, that she was a prospective tenant. Imagine walking through an apartment, admiring the spacious kitchen and living room, the faux hardwood floors and sanitarium-yellow walls, convinced that the place was a go ... until you spotted the shirt on the bed! The shirt that would surely be there upon moving in, and would never, ever, ever go away no matter what you did!

June explained that the concern wasn't our deterring potential leasees. If someone were to see the Caligulan madness in which we lived, she said, they would assume they could live the same way. Then calamity and whatever would ensue, and she would lapse into some karma-non-kardiac-koma. MmmmKay.

This all made more sense the following day. Four youngsters came by to view the apartment. This consisted of a five-minute tour of the apartment itself, and a two hour screening interview upstairs. I met them briefly. They were very nice, polite, well-mannered and attractive. They didn't get the apartment.

Who knows? Perhaps one of them sneezed. Perhaps one of them laughed at a joke.

Perhaps it was the karma.

 

Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Ottawa

This title is for film buffs and Nirvana fans. For everyone else, this is a post about a rat.

A great big scheming dirty wife-cheating rat. 

I'd better start at the beginning.

It was Sunday. It was raining. I think that U2 wrote a song about it.

I was sitting in our living room, drinking tea and reading a book, waiting for something eventful to happen. I heard a scurrying sound. I looked up. And saw a rat.

This is not to be confused with a large mouse. I know the difference. Remember the animated Disney film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes and Watson and all other goodly characters were portrayed as mice, and the villain was a large rat, and a drunken mouse called him a rat to his face, and the rat fed the drunken mouse to his pet cat? For some reason this is the only part of the movie I remember. Anyway, it was a rat.

It scurried and scampered and hit under the TV cabinet. I lay on the floor and watched it for a while, contemplating my next move. I call June the landlady upstairs. She says she'd come right down. She doesn't seem remotely surprised, which is worrisome. I try calling Ottawa's finest on-the-spot pest removal service and found out that they don't exist.

June comes down wearing flats. I tell her to go back upstairs and get some sensible footwear on, and to bring me some work gloves. She comes back down with two left handed oven mitts. Whatever. I construct a makeshift maze to lead the rat into a kitchen enclosure. I tell June to scare the rat with a broom handle, and out he comes. He is white with grey spots. He would be kind of cute if he wasn't such a dick.

I try and slam a garbage can on him. He throws his rodent bodyweight into my makeshift barrier, knocks it over, and disappears behind the fridge and out of view. We search and we search and we cannot find him. June thinks that he escaped out into the hallway and back into the hell from which it spawned.

At this point, I should explain why the rat is a "he", and not a "she", "he/she", or "it". It's because I refuse to entertain the remotest possibility that it could have been pregnant. Also because his name was Stanley.

I keep searching for Stanley and he is nowhere to be found. I concede that he is probably gone. June goes back upstairs. I board off the doors to the storage rooms in the basement, set two rat traps and install one of those high pitched anti-rodent sirens. Apparently June had these things lying around. I sit down, and open my book.

And there is Stanley again, in the kitchen.

I lose my mind and scream a feral, high pitch scream. Stanley disappears before I can get to him. Maybe he disappeared out the open apartment door (my bad). Maybe he's still in here. I just don't know. But I need to leave and get drunk.

I call June to appraise her of the situation, and that I'm leaving to get drunk. She says she wants into the apartment to "do what she can" with the rat. I don't deal with vagueness so I tell her she does not have my permission. She says she will call the police if she has to. I tell her that is the stupidest thing that I've heard in hours, and that she probably shouldn't have rented her basement to law students if she was gonna pull stuff like that. She relents. June is a strange lady. 

I call Andrea. Sweet Andrea knows nothing about anything thus far. She is off having a wonderful dinner with her man-friend, blissfully unaware. She texted me earlier, saying they were stopping by before leaving for dinner. I told them, no. There was an emergency, and they can't come home right now, but I'll handle it. So she might be a little edgy.

I call her, and it goes something (i.e. nothing) like this:
Andrea: Sooooo what's going on?
Alex: We, um, we have a stranger in the apartment.
Andrea: What? Like, some homeless guy broke in? Is he still in there?
Alex: A four legged stranger.
Andrea: Two homeless guys?
Alex: A small, furry, rat faced, four legged stranger.
Andrea: Two homeless guys gave birth to a hairy lovechild with a face like a ...
Alex: THERE'S A DAMN RAT IN OUR FRIDGE. Maybe.
Andrea: Oh. Well, why didn't you say so?

She is taking this well. I should have assumed as much. Georgia girls are tough as nails, after all. She grew up around alligators and komodo dragons and baptists. Rats don't scare her. She is my hero.

Anyway, this was Sunday. It is now late on Tuesday. There is new floor laid down on (half of) the floor. It's cheap vinyl flooring with a faux wood-grain look. It probably won't last a year. But it smells amazing, which is to say it smells like nothing at all.

And no rats. So I think we're in the clear. Which is such a relief.

It feels like the end of a Friday the 13th movie, where Freddy Kruger disappears and never, ever, ever comes back.

Right?