My cokehead/illegal alien/gay prostitute/pathological liar/thief/sociopath Armenian roommate

End of story: Resnik has a warrant out for his arrest, I got my laptop back, and I learned a few things; Never trust an Armenian, it pays to be friends with well connected bi-oriented attorneys, and gay bars can be a lot of fun.

What? Huh? Whoa.... let's take it from the top here.

About two and a half months ago I began rooming with a friend of a guy I know around the apartments here. The guy I know from the apartments, Mitch, is known as being a very nice, respectable guy who holds a good job, so I figured his 22 year old Armenian friend Resnik would probably be okay to room with. I've had a ton of roommates through all my past experiences (college, military, jail), and I've learned to put up with all kinds of people, so why not. At first Resnik was only mildy irritating, and since I'm all for tolerance, I put up with him. As time drew on, however, the number of things I should have kicked him out for grew larger and larger:

- He bragged to me about how his last roommate was easy to manipulate, yet he also would tell me constantly about how he considered me to be his brother and he would never lie to me or cheat me, of course. Hmmmm.....

- He was so obviously gay but so inexplicably in the closet it was ridiculous. Other than having all the trademark gay traits (tone of voice, body language, smoked menthol lights) he left gay magazines laying around, gay.com was now in my dropdown list of saved websites on Firefox and IE Explorer, and he asked me if I'd like to perform a sexual favor on him when he was drunk once. I even told the fucker that I've had plenty of gay friends before and it was no big deal to me. He was the one claiming Christianity, not me, so it wasn't against any of my beliefs, but he still denied it. Fishy, hmmmmm...

-He was a total slob. He smoked about a pack a day, so the living room smelled of the after effects of his aforementioned gay cigs. He never picked up after himself. He didn't have a bed, so I let him sleep on the couch until he could get himself a mattress set, which didn't end up being until the last couple weeks he was here when he stole one out of the dumpster at the Best Western.

- He was on drugs. He would brag to me about the coke he was doing and he was also dabbling in speed. Being a recovering addict myself (clean and sober for almost 3 months now), I was trying not to judge.

- He finally admitted to me that "I'm not gay, but I prostitute myself to men to earn some extra cash." Well, times are tough, but, um....

- He asked me if I like Michael Bolton. WHAT THE FUCK??? I should have kicked him out on the spot for this one.

You get the idea. This guy was the roommate of all roommates. Anyhow, when I came back from my Monday night class to find my laptop computer (worth over $1,000) gone from my room and nothing else in the apartment was even touched, it was just a tad suspicious.

I filed a police report and shortly afterwards received a phone call from a guy who I'd met through Resnik, Rick. Rick was missing a bunch of high-power pain medication from his truck (which he has a prescription for), and Resnik was the only one in his truck that day. I told him about the laptop, and he told me he had some ideas of where it might be. It just so happens that Rick's in the legal profession, so he told me to wait things out a couple days and he'd see what he could do. At this point I didn't know what to think. For all I knew, Rick was somehow in business with Resnik, but I couldn't see a reason for Resnik having one of his buddies calling me to inform me that he stole the laptop, so I really didn't think this was the case. It wasn't. Rick began working with the local police (who I had come by and escort Resnik out of the apartment) and in a couple days he recovered my stolen laptop from one of Resnik's low-life friends.

But the story doesn't end here. I got to go play undercover imposter-gay 007 for a night. It was a suprisingly good time... let me elaborate..

Rick happens to be bi-oriented and had met Resnik through one of the local alternative lifestyle hangouts. They weren't involved romatically but had some mutual friends around the area and such. Rick had heard Resnik talking about me before, turns out he had a little crush on me (I'm a sexy motherfucker, what can I say). Anyhow, in an effort to get more information out of Resnik, Rick and I went out gay-bar hopping for a night.

The plan was for us to pretend to be lovers to get Resnik worked up enough for him to start talking (shouldn't have been too hard, the guy never shut fuck up anyhow) and record it all on tape. Well, Resnik wasn't out that night, apparently he's in hiding since he knows he's fucked, but I did have a pretty good time at the gay-bar. No, I'm not switching teams here, but the gay bar definitely has some perks.

- Better music, if you happen to like techo (which I do), and are tired of having to sit through hip-hop radio tune one after another.

- The gay bar actually is a big confidence trip for me. I was attracting gay guys who I would think would be out of my league. I generally get along great with gay guys, we're both social anomolies in way, and they have more to talk about than the fucking local NFL football team.

- I got two numbers that night.... from girls. They both seemed genuinely interested and were glad to get hit on by the one cute straight guy in the place. The one was fucking gorgeous, the other was a cute as hell bi-chick. At a gay bar, being a good looking straight guy makes you a rarity. Your value to the straight chicks there is tripled, you're a scarce resource instead of just another asshole who is probably just trying to get them in bed. It's also cool that the kind of chicks in gay (not lesbian) bar are generally the kind of girls I go for- good conversationalists and more open minded/liberal than average. Rick tells me that some straight guys actually go to gay bars to pick up chicks for these very reasons.

Rick also would like to hook me up with his sister. He says she looks kind of like the one gorgeous chick whose number I got the other night and is pretty confident she'll like me. He says they have the same taste in men, sooooo....(can this story get any fucking stranger?)

Sure it can! But I have to leave out certain information which is just too sensitive to publish in good conscious. Even via blog.

Anyhow, life is somewhat back to normal for me. Refer to beginning of story.

Paradigmology and Other Predictions

First off, let me point out that I forgot to post a blog that I had saved a little bit ago (What the Purple Box Meant), and for those of you who care to check it out, it's the one right below this one, of course. Now, for our featured presentation....

I've got a few predictions. Not so much for the year 2006 but for the next 25-50 years or so (pretty wide range, I know, bear with me). The first of such predictions is what will be a new emerging science which I would personally dub as Paradigmology, the study of differing interpretations of reality. So far, sciences have concentrated on measuring the physical world around us and little has been done in the way of objectively measuring man's perception of reality. Philosophy, insofar as I can tell, is largely speculative and is not based on any cold, hard facts. This will all change soon, and labs will use new technologies to quantify all sorts of emotion and thought. I'm not talking about already used subjective techniques such as being asked "how happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10", I'm talking about devices that will be able to tell you how happy you are on a scale of 1 to 10.... the worst mistake you can make is to think these other people around you live in the same world as you. You heard it here first, folks.

Next prediction, the evolution of Pop Culture. Pop culture as we know it has been stagnating lately, as far as I can tell. Seinfeldk, for example, was highly entertaining, but broke no new ground. It was, in effect, the I Love Lucy of the modern era. I don't think I have to comment much about the lack of reality in "reality" tv shows, though I think these shows were an important precursor to a not-so-far off jump in entertainment we are likely to soon experience. Now, I'm not sure the exact verbage (<-common error in the English language, verbage is a sub-standard word at best) to describe what I'm getting at, but I think that movies and TV programs will soon have a much more genuine quality to them, they won't feel like movies as we're accustomed to, the gloss will be removed, they will have an unprecedented "real-life" feel to them. This will begin as an underground movement, and many people will think it sucks, but there will be films and TV programs of this nature that will indeed gain popularity.

Finally, our current period in time will be looked back at as a rather peculiar point in the history of man. Historians will marvel at how current civilization has all the ingredients to create virtual utopia right here and now, but yet still we flounder in relative position to what we could be as a human a race. This final prediction is kind of a no brainer, I don't think any generation does not look back at the ones before it as being somewhat bourgeois and quaint, but this current period will have the distinction of being a quasi-self actualized humanity and will be likened to a fault in a database system where all the right information is present to extract the desired knowledge but there is a breakdown at some point and the information remains buried and useless.

phewwww! I think for my next entry I'll blog about new flavors of pop-tarts or something, I've had enough intellectualizing for a while.