My apartment

We had to pick something fast because by the time my good pal Dunkle arrived to Taiwan I had been staying in a dirty and loud locker room-style hostel with 13 other dudes who made "social retardation" seem like a gift compared to what they possessed. I had to make that crap palace my home for nine terrifying days where I was alone on this foreign planet simply struggling to find new and interesting ways to feed myself by making grunting noises and raising various fingers combined with a general rubbing of the belly to indicate my condition. I really didn't like having to live in the hostel and so upon Dunkle's much awaited arrival I was very eager to find some other place of residence with more comforts than just the five seconds of every minute when I received a cool gust of air from the room's only fan providing a most unsatisfying relief from the otherwise rain forest atmosphere of the hot and crowded room.

That first day Dunkle and I looked at 7 places all of which seemed ok to him and fabulous to me. I mean I was the one who had been living in a mental institution on the 13th floor of a building so old and decrepit that it swayed in the wind. We finally settled on what we thought was a quaint, conveniently located and inexpensive apartment located just a block off from the uber sheik Minchuan Shi Lu road. Well how lucky for us.

So please allow me to give you a little tour of our anti pussy pad.

We have now been living here for 7 months and while one might imagine that the delightful conditions of this beautiful little bachelor pad have improved and given it a "lived in" feel, it is quite the opposite. Each new day brings more neglect and disregard of all things proper and clean to this apartment which, if it were a child, would have already gotten us arrested on extreme misconduct and negligence charges.

As you walk to our apartment you will be blasted with the foreshadowing of our doom castle by the pungent odors of other people's trash and something that mostly resembles shit and a dead animal's baby. The smell can often become so strong that your walk to the door quickens to a jog in the hopes that through the door you will find solace from the horrid and dirty smells encircling the little back alley.

Your last bit of dignity can be used to give a nice wave and "Nee how" to the local barber who every day greets all those passing by while cursing them under his breath because he knows that they got their hair cut from "those bastards down the street" instead of him.

The walk up the steps would make more sense as a descent as you are basically going to some form of hell anyway. The key turns and the door loudly opens and you have made it into our squat heap.

Now if Dunkle's door is closed to his room that means that the rest of the apartment is almost completely dark as his room yields the only source of natural light in the apartment. I thought it rather unique that all the bedrooms had windows that looked into the other rooms but I now see how they were meant as a distraction from the fact that there are no real fucking windows in the whole dank and abysmal apartment!

If your shoes are wet do not worry as our lax dress policy around the house does not require our infrequent visitors to have any more respect for this place than we do. Sometimes we will invite the small courtesy of allowing someone to wipe his or her feet on the rug from the neighbors house but if we are in haste we invite those to simply drag whatever type of mess right into our dumpster of a home.

As you walk down the small and cramped hallway you pass into the wonderfully decorated living room that still only contains a couch and a TV. If you feel so inclined you are more than welcome to have a seat on the stiff and ugly colored sofa but do make sure to brush off whatever rubbish, be it food or Dunkle's toenails, from the seat as you sit down. You might feel the need to push some other kind of trash or general rubbish away from you but you will most likely be distracted by whatever various bug has decided to invade our house for the week. If you do happen to swat and kill a bug by smacking it against the wall please feel free to just leave the sticky carcass glued to the white wall so that we can avoid cleaning it up until it turns into another thing to bitch about in this eye soar of an apartment that's eye is really more of a butt hole.

As you glance around the null apartment you will notice a complete absence of inspiration combined with the type of carelessness you never really thought existed until this moment. You may even cry.

On rare occasions a patron visitor might have need to use the bathroom. This is usually rare as we hardly ever have any food or drink to offer that might provoke the need for one to use a facility. Nonetheless, there are often those who have consumed something out in the real world before entering into this uncomfortably awkward dungeon and we invite them to purge it out in our little WC.

The source of the freeloading insects is usually in the bathroom as they enjoy bathing on the top part of the toilet who's lid broke a mere two months ago and has been kept that way I imagine to remind us that every single thing we have is complete and utter shit and worthless. The bathroom brings to mind that photo one might have seen from the case files of some sociopathic murderer's outhouse. There are old tubes of tooth paste that have established colonies growing across them. (I think they may even be at war with the colonies from the old can of shaving cream.) When in the bathroom try to keep clean as our inattention to ever buying that second bottle of soap 5 months ago has lead to a bottle filled with water and shaken so many times that the plastic seems like it is beginning to wear through.

On the rare occasion that one of us has decided to buy some food, ei- pasta and cheap Ragu knock off sauce, you might make your way into the kitchen. Despite the fact that no one ever actually cooks there it seems rather dirty and has a generally devirginizing sleaziness to it.

While cooking be sure to give our pots a good scrubbing with the almost empty dish soap as the previous user has most likely not done an efficient job. The convenient idea of buying the cheapest cook ware became inconvenient right after its purchase. Since then the pots have taken on the same malignant appearance of the chamber pots used by thousands of soldiers in World War II. The nice thing is that with our pots you have no need to worry about the nonexistence of our spice cabinet because all the residue from the previous dinner-for-one-loser will most likely have broken off into whatever pitiful meal you are preparing at that moment.

Feeling sleepy? Why come into my room and have a rest. I can't promise you'll be sleeping on a cloud but as long as everyone else is completely still and the TV is off you might be able to have a small amount of quiet and privacy. Otherwise the once charming "window to the living room" in my room will be sure to grant all light and noise access to the tiny closet of a bedroom.

As you glance at my bed you may notice that the sheets seem a bit nonsheetlike. That is due to the fact that I never actually bought sheets except some pink ones with flowers that I gave away for obvious heterosexual alpha-male reasons. My sleeping supplies are actually just the stretchy thing and an old blanket I bought half priced from a street vendor. If you cocoon yourself just right with the small tissue sized blanket you may be able to get some sort of feeling of warmth and comfort. Of course there is really no need for extra warmth in an unairconditioned and humid room like mine.

That should last right up until you start to notice that you are actually laying on a marble slab that simply looks like a mattress. The stiffness of the mattress could only be comparable to perhaps laying down in the street. And maybe that is sounding like a better idea right about now.

You'll be happy to know that I do have a pillow. It is unattractively green with pictures of cows all over it and it feels a little like if someone stuffed five of those brittle airplane pillows into a potato sack and then slapped the imagine of some bovine adaptation of a animal on it.

Once you take the time to angrily murder a few more mosquitoes that have taken residence in your room like a couple of European Gypsies you can probably get ready to sleep. You can put your things in my closet which is easy to access since the door fell off a couple of months ago. Be sure to spray yourself one more time with Off before heading to bed and then it is off to sleepland where even the dream of a monster chasing you barefoot through streets filled with chomping crabs will feel like the ultimate adventure compared to the conscious knowledge that you actually live in this dismal piece of old cheese that someone made into an apartment.

When you wake up the next morning, the best idea is to just forget even asking if there is any cereal or orange juice and get the hell outside where once out of range of the poop alley you can attempt to have a real life where you have a real job and friends. If you dress yourself nicely enough no one will actually discover that you come from a squalid disease house that makes some parts of Africa seem like a spa in the south of France.

I have lived and stayed in many places in my life and I am sure to stay in many more, (as I naturally plan not to make this apartment my permanent residence) but this little spot truly put the canker sore on the top of the suck ass cake. I could move somewhere else or try to improve these conditions on my own but I could also just keep counting down the days when I will go out and resume my travels where I will stay in places that require me to flush the toilet with a ladle of water set on the side of the bowl. I guess my happiness here spawns from somewhere else than the place where I live or the places I will stay in the future.