Actually, I had nothing to do with it. It’s just one of those rare occurrences that happen only when the stars align just right. Being an introvert, I covet being alone, but due to the circumstances of my life, solitude comes only in brief, infrequent, and fleeting doses. Like today.

Bonnie’s at work, which is normal, as are both kids. Their work hours very seldom ever overlap, though, so one or the other is almost always at home. Of course, then, there’s Bonnie’s mom, who, with the exception of two hours on Sunday, is ALWAYS home, so I very rarely ever get the house to myself.

The only other one of Bonnie’s five siblings who even acknowledges their mother’s existence took her out to dinner this evening, so my reprieve won’t be long-lasting, but it’s still appreciated. My kids took her out a couple of weeks ago, and I had the house to myself, but that didn’t count because I had no idea they were all gone. I thought she was asleep in her room, so I was tiptoeing around.

When I was two, my parents fostered two boys from Mexico. They lived with us for four years, and the younger of the brothers and I shared a room. So, basically, for the first four years that my brain was online, I had a shadow. I think that had a profound effect on the way I turned out. For a few years after they left, it was just my parents, brother, and I, but after my parents split, it was just a revolving door of boarders.

When my dad moved out, he couldn’t afford a place on his own, so he talked a family friend, George, into getting a two-bedroom apartment with him. Then, six months later, my dad got his own place and left George with a two-bedroom apartment he couldn’t afford, so my mom offered him a room in our house. He lived with us for a couple of years.

After he left, there was almost always someone staying with us. One of my foster brothers moved back in for a year, and my brother and his girlfriend moved in for a year. Then, there was Ed. He was a slow adult whose mother had had enough of him, so she was trying to find someplace for him to go. He would throw frozen hamburger patties in the microwave for one minute and then eat them with mayonnaise. I think my mom intended to break him and make him civilized, but he broke her long before she ever had a chance to break him. I’m not sure anyone else has done that.

In 1999, my mom moved away, but left me in the house as a pseudo property manager. I took the room downstairs, and she rented the rest of the house to a horrible woman named Dena and her three kids. Deba was a human pig. To this day, I’ve never met anyone as disgusting as her, though Bonnie’s mom comes in at a close second.

I helped Dena and her kids move in. At the end of the day, when we had the moving truck unpacked, she announced that she was going to return the truck and bring back dinner. She returned about 45 minutes later with a box of doughnuts and a gallon of milk. Holy shit!, I thought, what the fuck did we do?

That was one of the most painful years of my life. After a few months, Dena took a lover – her boss, as a matter of fact – and he would come over on Mondays and Thursdays, cook dinner for the family, and then he would spend a few minutes bashing Dena’s headboard against the wall above my bedroom. It must have been some magic pussy because I can’t imagine her fat ass being worth all the effort he went for 5 minutes of smashing.

On Mondays, he would come over and wash all of the dishes he used to cook dinner on Thursday, and on Thursday, he would wash all of the dishes he used on Monday because nobody cooked dinner on any of the nights in between. Nobody would do any sort of cleaning for a whole ass year, as a matter of fact. They would let the trash can pile up as high as it would go before the dog got into it. She loved old wet coffee grounds. 🤮

My brother helped me move them out after one year. When we moved their sofa, we couldn’t believe all of the trash underneath it. There was trash all over the living room, too. We stood there for a minute, contemplating what to do, and then my brother left. He went to the garage and came back a moment later with a broom and swept all of the trash across the carpet, into a pile, and then shoveled it into a trash bag.

I’d like to say life returned to normal after that, but it only got worse. My mom decided to rent out the rooms to individual tenants. I got the master, my friend Cameron got the room downstairs, and then we rented my old room to Erica, who was the best roommate anyone could ask for. She basically lived with her boyfriend at his place. If that lineup had stayed, things would have been okay, but there was never a chance of that.

We had Sam, Mark, Eric, and Bob, who all came with their own unique brands of anti-social dysfunction. I’m not going to get into it here because honestly, I’m as tired of writing this post as you are of reading it. Suffice it to say, I moved out after about 18 months of that nonsense, and moved into the nonsense I’m living in now, but that’s a whole other story.