Squatting at the Vitamin Hospice

"I'd invite you back to my place

It's only mine because it holds my suitcase

It looks like home to me alright

But it's a hundred miles from yesterday night"

The Police, "Man in a Suitcase"

Once again my living situation has changed.

I no longer am sleeping on a couch. I have a bed. I even have my own room, for the time being. It is not my room really, but it is also not my room that is not my room, if that makes sense, which it doesn't.

I am partaking in a proud American tradition that goes back to the Pioneer Days. I am a squatter.

There are two other freshmen on the team, and they are staying in an off-campus dorm. Since classes don't start for another few weeks, their suite is mostly empty, and I am living in one of the empty beds. I will refer to this dorm as "The Vitamin Hospice."

I am a shadow, the Phantom of the Vitamin Hospice, a formless enigma, a Ghost in the Machine and the last sane man on this parody of a planet. And it feels like home already.

Going anywhere in the building usually involves avoiding eye contact with most people. I know one RA here, and she is entirely okay with my squatting, but I hear that usually RAs will kick squatters out. I want to avoid any suspicion. We keep our windows facing the courtyard closed. This makes me feel a little like a fugitive, and therefore like a little more of a bad-ass. I am entirely dependent on my roommates whenever I need to enter the room or enter the building after 9 o'clock.

The one advantage to squatting at The Vitamin Hospice is that anyone can buy a limited meal plan. Students living in nearby apartments sometimes buy them, since it is all you can eat. I have enough meals to last me for maybe another week. After that runs out, I will have to use the floor's kitchenette to cook my remaining spaghetti and canned beans. But by that time I may be moving again, going to altitude to train. However, that is a question mark, so I am prepared for the long haul.

I eat, sleep, and shower inside a building which I have no business being in. At home, I felt that my room was not my room, that it had a presence that was almost hostile towards me. Now I am in a room that is most certainly not my room, and I feel comfortable and welcomed. I feel that if I had to be more secretive to avoid suspicion, I would feel even more at home. I'm not sure why this is so, but I am still a little too tired to analyze anything very deeply. (This is why my recent posts have not been very good.)

My interactions with other members of the Vitamin Hospice (aside from my roommates) are very limited, both because of my sketchy living arrangements and my lack of willpower to socialize, which stems from my tiredness and emotional residue. (I suppose this last item is what most people would refer to as "baggage." I may not take myself seriously, but I at least try to avoid cliches.) I took a dump for an hour and read a science fiction book when people were over because I didn't really feel like socializing. Lame on a stick. Now, it was a good book and I enjoyed myself, but I realize that this is not how you win friends (or for that matter, influence people).

Since I do not have my music, the average quality of the music that I listen to has declined. In the house that I was living on, I feel like an inordinate amount Blink-182 was played. In some ways, this doesn't feel right. I almost feel like we are too old for that. At the tender age of thirteen, I somehow got my hands on a copy of The Mark, Tom, and Travis show, at a mall in... Utah of all places. My parents didn't know about it. After I got home from middle, before my parents were home from work, I would listen to this album. I loved it. I loved the mindless hooks and stage banter. They were swearing. And talking about sex! This was cool! I showed it to all my friends, because it would make me cool, because they were swearing and talking about sex!

I will always associate Blink-182 with the false maturity of middle school, when you think you're growing up but instead you're going backwards. This teen angst was emotion for morons, the catchy guitar hooks and simple chord progressions was music for morons.

But now I realize that Blink-182 is most the guys I went to high school with. They feel angst over strong yet surfacy emotions and cliche social situations, they can kind of play guitar, and they won't pass up the opportunity to make a good Cock Joke. And for better or for worse, these are the people that make up the world we live in. That's ok, Cock Jokes will never get old.

I want to listen to Bitches Brew in the cockpit of Spaceship Earth. (My brain is fried to the point where typing the word "cockpit" causes me to audibly chuckle. It must be all the Blink-182 I've been hearing lately...) I'm sitting in a room where it's permanent enough to unpack but not permanent enough to organize things, and I don't have the initiative to go out and meet people. It's Friday night, and I know that everyone I know is doing something fun while I waste my life trying to write things I don't have the intellectual capability to write and run at velocities that I am incapable of. I want to call someone, anyone, but I know I would just be taking away from their funtime. If someone were sympathetic enough to lend me an ear, I would probably become like my uncle; he stays with us and he just doesn't leave. He basically lives with us. He just showed up unannounced and didn't really leave. Now there is kale in my fridge which is not my fridge, back in New Gibraltar where the fog keeps feeding souls and gives them the energy to run in all directions and never sleep. Maybe they're even having fun on Mondays now, right when my compatriots and I all jumped ship.

I brought one belt down. And one day, that one belt is going to break. It's getting a little frayed. My belt will break and I won't be able to wear pants. Then I won't be able to go outside and... wait, that won't really change my behavior at all.

I said that I wouldn't be like this, I said that I would be outgoing and shake up the routine. The one thing that I did that I said I would do was vote. I voted absentee, so I don't even get a sticker. I am not entirely alright with this. But I did vote, and I (maybe) made a difference. And I kept a promise that I made to myself. So as long as I am squatting at the Vitamin Hospice, I achieve by simply existing a sane existence.