CATHARSIS II

Wow,

I haven't had so much to report in so long, and I have to say, thankfully, that almost all of it is positive.

I'll work reverse-chronologically from tonight back to, let's say, about two weeks ago.

Tonight: I haven't had so much fun since the night before I threw up blood in the corner bathroom stall at the robot job. I worked a very fun day at the robot job, in fact; my services were leased out to one of the other companies housed within my building, tearing apart desks and cubicles to make room for new employees, who will be entering said company through the labors of ^^^their new HR associate^^^ (EXPLANATION: emboldened triple carets flanking a phrase or word in this entry are indications of chronologically-independent cross-references. I won't link them directly, but will rather cite them all and allow you to hunt through the entry to determine which items are being linked). It's always fun to build shit, as I do often in the robot job, but every once in a while it's refreshing to tear things apart lying on your back holding a screwgun at awkward angles in tightly confined cells. I don't know why this is the case, but in my case, it's certainly true. I got to leave early and arrived home just in time to see our good previously-unreferred-to (at least in the blog) neighborhood wanderer, Terrell Holley.

Background information on Terrell, italicized: Terrell is a young man who lives near my neighborhood and due to some mental challenges, the nature and diagnosis of which is absent to me, excepting the behavioral anomalies that indicate being a few proteins short of an enzyme, is unable to obtain gainful employment. Therefore he is relegated to the task of performing unsatisfactory manual labor long the lines of lawn mowing in the spring and summer, leaf raking in the fall, and snow removal in the winter. He has not yet mastered the business skills and social interactability requisite to earning regular clients for his services, mostly because he changes his prices constantly and cannot comprehend a potential customer's disinterest in hiring him. I've had him perform work at 237 Weldon on numerous occasions, mostly out of my desire to help those less fortunate than I, but from time to time I have to tell him 'no, thanks.' This does not stop him from relentlessly harping on myself and my housemates for work, and unfortunately the manner in which he does so almost always renders one of us frustrated, frightened, or just plain perturbed. For example, if he sees a car parked in the driveway, he'll assume that it's perfectly acceptable to pound on any available surface, be it a closed window, a door, etc., for a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to rouse somebody to pay him for some work he wants to do. At its worst, he finds that a door is unlocked and pokes his head inside to yell "hello?", without exaggeration, for ten to fifteen more minutes, until someone responds to him or he's arbitrarily deemed it time to move on to the next house. He has on several occasions awoken us in the middle of infrequent precious slumber. While this sounds absolutely unbearable and intolerable, (and, it actually is in every imaginable sense), he has this innocence that can only be encompassed by the mind of a person found wanting in the realm of cognitive lucidity extruding from within him, and is therefore practically impossible to have the ^^^"I don't want you to ever return to this property"^^^ applied to him.

So, there I am, pulling into my driveway a crisp two hours ahead of schedule to find Terrell at my front porch. He asks me for an advance payment to shovel my driveway at the end of the week, as he's checked the weather reports and has determined that Friday will deal a pummeling blow in the form of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide (these are not the words he used). I craftily and politely dismissed him, still bearing the full weight of cash in my wallet prior to our exchange, and proceeded to head inside. I found all the doors in the house opened, which triggered a slightly alarmed response, since everyone in the house knows to keep the living room door shut, damn Ralph and his upstairs Haven of Feline Prohibition. I shrugged it off and headed upstairs to the attic to check on the copious amounts of expanding foam we applied the night before (PICTURE). I decided not to say hello to my housemate Amanda because her light was off and there was no sound emanating from her room... ^^^she must be napping^^^. My investigations were curtailed unexpectedly by the front doorbell, which turns out to have been rung by one of Rochester's finest on patrol. He explained that he was responding to a call from a neighbor who said that our house was being broken into. I put two and two together, knowing Terrell's tendencies to infringe on our personal space, and explained to the officer that it was just Terrell trying to find someone to talk to about shoveling, and that he was harmless. As if on cue (and I later found out that it actually was on cue), immediately after the officer radioed back to HQ about the call being erroneous, Amanda emerged downstairs visibly distraught and on the verge of tears. She proceeded to explain to me that Terrell had not just shown up as I arrived like I had assumed. In fact, Terrell performed the following recursion*: Knock on door for ten minutes. Enter my fucking home and proceed to walk around downstairs, evidently looking for us, for another ten minutes. Walk back outside and close door, knock again. RINSE. REPEAT. FOUR TIMES. That's right, my friends, Terrell was in and out of my house for 45 minutes, scaring Amanda half shitless. The poor girl was hiding in her room ^^^on the phone with a 911 operator^^^!!! She didn't come down until the cop radioed to the 911 operator that I was back home and it was safe to emerge. Needless to say, the police now have a record of his indiscretion, and if he so much as looks at us funny, I'm going to ^^^tell him what he needs to hear^^^, and if he ever again decides to intrude, he's going to face several legal penalties. We calmed down and I took a nap.

Okay, now that I've gotten the negative out of the way, I can continue to recap my recent adventures.

Shit, I can't keep going... I've been a bit loquatious tonight, and I promise I'll continue the recap soon. So for now, This is Kevin, signing off. The upcoming stories will be great.

*Recursion, in this case, I chose to use based upon the Latin definition, simply, "a repetitive event", not (as some of you computer-savvy individuals might be inclined to interpret) a call to a function from within a previously run instance of the function itself.

OPEROSE

Eighteen hours.

Spent three hours driving.
Spent $15 on two free beers.
Spent the night in a closet.
Spent three hours on a tour bus.

God, I had the best time. Thanks, Paige.


Yes, I was a little selective in my anecdotal snippets. The rest of the story is just too cool to attempt a retelling in text.