Up to No Good

You might have guessed from a previous post that I’m not too happy about having my place sold from beneath me. That’s what happens when you rent a house, though. You know going in that renting one is usually a temporary thing, until the owner moves back in (which happened at the last place I was renting), or maybe until some greedy old Scottish asshat finally becomes aware of the white-hot real estate market, and wants to sell his rental unit and run like a mad bastard with the money to Florida. The signs were there:

Setting: Months ago. Argus is eating a pizza when the phone rings. It’s the landlord, and he’s struggling for breath on his end of the phone.

Landlord: This is (name), your landlord. I was wonderin’ will you be home tomorrow night maybe?

Me: I guess so. Why?

Landlord: I thought I might come over and paint the garage of the place.

Me: What the hell for? It hasn’t been painted in thirty years.

Landlord: So you agree it needs it! I’ll be over by four.

So he ended up painting the garage this inappropriate, toothpaste-white colour, which I couldn’t care less about, except that he also painted over this really great oil-change schedule I had written on the wall for myself. It's so stark and sterile-looking now on the inside, I feel like I’m backing my car into an ER or something when I come home. Maybe I'm off base here and white is some great garage colour, and it's true that I haven't seen too many garages, but I'm sure they shouldn't be painted Colgate-white.

A couple of months later, he called me up to tell me he’s selling, and to accommodate people who want to come look at the house, at their convenience.

Isn't that a daisy.

And it’s a pain, it's a royal pain in the ass. Today, six people came for a walk-through when I was making my huge-man dinner. I’m supposed to act friendly and all when they come through, too. I wish the damn thing would just sell, but the fact is, it’s a dump that’s listed at a price that’s too high.

So my roommate and I decided to enjoy a little passive-aggressive warfare with the real-estate people. It's all we've got. We take their cards when they come, and post them on our dining-room wall, in plain sight of all visitors. Beside each picture is a rating. The placement of the cards is dependent on their rating. And at the top? It’s my cat, with a score of 10. The message to the real estate people who come here and sneer at my bathtub is this: You all rank lower than my cat:


My cat rocks.

The other thing we’ve done, it’s to make our place look as bizarre as possible to scuttle any possible sale until we’re good and ready to move out of here. So, this is Clint – he’s the God of the Stairs, and he guards us while we sleep. He’s in 3-D, with real pants and cowboy boots tacked to the wall. A girl who was here today actually screamed a little at the sight of him, and the real estate agent was very unimpressed with me about the whole thing:


"Get three coffins ready."

And this, it’s our fridge. I credit my roommate the creative work on the collage, I had none of the inclination he did to bother dressing the thing up. You can just see the tops of our respective 2005 Celebrity Death Lists, prominently displayed on the bottom door. He's up 1-0 so far: Carson bought it about a month ago:


Waldo is in there...someplace.

Finally, the basement, or what we call, the Shooting Range. We like to leave things lying around with bullet holes in them, to leave visitors with a vague unease when they are checking things out down here. Sort of like, at any moment, something bad could happen if they stick around too long. This is my roommate's Daisy Red Ryder - for this picture, we had just shot the hell out of the can you see in the background, and he wanted to document the rampage with a shot of his sidearm:


Happiness is a warm gun.

So hopefully the plan works out. Our place has air conditioning, and we're going to need it through the summer.