Strange days indeed.
So here's what's been going on in my life. I wasn't going to talk about this here, because it smacked too much of self-indulgent whining, but I could do with a little self-indulgent whining at the moment. I can always erase it later.
For the past month, I have been sharing my apartment with my former Little Brother, now 26, and his girlfriend, 25. More about them in a moment, but first some relevant details of my apartment:
It's just about 400 square feet. 430, to be precise, but 30 of that is bathroom and a short pseudo-hallway connecting the two main rooms. The first of these is the combination living room/kitchen (like a kitcheonette in a studio), which is 15' x 10.5' (4.6m x 3.2m). This is where they are living, with all their stuff, on my fold-out sofa bed. The other room, at 15' x 14.75' (4.6m x 4.5m) is my bedroom. It is connected to the living room/kitchen by the aforementioned short (4'/1.2m) hallway, creating a broad U-shaped floorplan. There is no door to my bedroom, it's all open. And the bathroom is off my bedroom. All in all, not a good setup for this many people, especially if one of them values his goddam solitude.
Must... control... fist of death...
There's a lot of backstory to why they're living with me, but the bottom line is simply that they have literally nowhere else to go. He lost his full-time job back around Thanksgiving, and has not been able to get anything steady since then. Not for lack of trying, and not for lack of taking any demeaning, under-the-table short-term gig that came up. But they hit a dry spell where even those were getting hard to find, they fell back on the rent, etc., etc., and they ended up essentially getting evicted (technically they left voluntarily; the landlord did not want it going to court because the place was riddled with bedbugs so he waived their back rent and let them go). Oh, did I mention they had a baby in February? And that they already had a seven-year-old (the product of a previous relationship and not Mark's biological son, but he has raised him since he was a toddler and the boy calls him Daddy)? Yeah, those.
So they ended up at Mark's mother's house, about 45 minutes away from me in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of the regionally infamous Lowell, Mass, a former mill city with a long and colorful history of being a shithole. Jack Kerouac came from Lowell. The movie The Fighter took place there. I add this information partly as background, and partly (to anyone familiar with the region) to paint a picture of the type of character Mark is. He's a Lowell street kid, complete with the accent (similar to the Boston accent you hear in movies like Ted).
Anyway, Mark's mother's house was not a good place to be. For one, there are WAY too many people, including Mark's mother (a smoke-stained, foul-mouthed borderline who sponges off the system while ranting and raving about "niggers" on welfare), her husband (a jackass of a man who looks like he was cloned from a toad) his 23-year-old "little" brother (an enormously obese layabout and mamma's boy), the brother's girlfriend, and four younger sisters ranging in age from 12 to 16. The 16-year-old has state involvement, has run away, tangled with the law, etc. There are three bedrooms in this house, to which were added Mark, his girlfriend, and the two kids, all sleeping in the living room.
As you might expect, it didn't take long for this to break down. When they finally got kicked out, the mother called the police to report them for living in their car with the kids and having drugs on them (some weed and Vicodins that the mother herself had given them). So the kids got taken away by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and they got arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession (a fine, but not one they cannot afford right now) and have to jump through a number of hoops to get their kids back.
Two of those hoops are getting jobs and an apartment. They both have jobs now, finally. She took a job at McDonald's, which was easy enough. He had a harder time, but finally landed a regular job with a roofing company. But they both only just started (her two weeks or so ago, he a few days ago), so neither will see a check for a while. So I can't let them starve. And I'm not going to eat while they just sit there. So basically I've been supporting two extra people for a month.
It's getting a little old.
Someone look up justifiable homicide.