Cohabitation

A very wise man once said that two men can never truly peacefully cohabitate, that all they can accomplish is a bitter cold war of buried hostility. This is true. Has always been true.

Therefore, let me tell a story:

I do not think my roommate is unintelligent, mean, annoying, or in any way unlikable. He is a pretty good guy, all told. All that being said, I sometimes hate him. This is for no other reason than men are territorial by nature. I like my house best when he is out of town, and the opposite is true, I'm sure. We have lived together longer than I have ever lived with anyone for one unbroken stretch, including persons I may have been having sex with and/or married. I hate him, sometimes. Never when he is there, I have no problem when he is there to speak to.

No, I hate him when he is not there and his living evidence annoys me. For instance, I walked into the bathroom and found four articles of reading material, they were:

1. Don Quixote, Cervantes
2. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
3. Travels With Charley in Search of America, Steinbeck
4. Swank Adults Only!!!, Various women in states of feigned ecstasy

3/4 of the reading material in the bathroom was mine. 75% of it would not offend a girl I may or may not have brought to my house. One fourth of the reading material has on the cover, "Put your penis in sticky Venus!", and my favorite, "Innocent angels spreads like Hell!"

Remind me not to teach graamar from the annals of porn.

But there, sitting ugly and garishly appointed in pinks and greens straight out of the Crasstacular Journal of all Things Dirty, was some girl wearing some type of fishing net with a finger pulling her lower lip down and with eyes sloppily drooped in a manner that is either trying to be sexy or simulating a seacow with missing chromosomes. That dirty filth rests on top of Travels With Charley and now I am worried about opening up that amazing travelogue because I'm afraid that a hand that has touched a penis and then touched the magazine that sits on top of my book that I would grip in my hands may not have been washed. I thought Oprah's book club was bad for Steinbeck, but her ugly giant "O" sticker on the cover of East of Eden could never dissuade me from fine literature quite so much as that well-thumbed copy of Swank.