autumn oh-five.

i decided to go live in the college town in september 2005. i settled on the worst-looking place there was available: stalinist soviet structures didn’t come worse-looking than this. actually, it was a sixties-early seventies experimental housing unit that was poised to be torn down some years after its completion, BUT the funds lacked, so they just decided to keep it open as a housing facility, and watch it desintegrate merrily. ah, the belgian ways of doing things.

my first contact with my roommates brooke and ridge wasn’t so good. i walked through the dark cold war-style corridor when i saw two ghastly figures (one tall, one short) emerging from the emm… fog. one turned out to be a girl in a tartan skirt, and the other one a girl wrapped in what seemed to be a tablecloth. it quickly turned out to be a tablecloth, when they gathered around me and asked if i had a safety pin.

well, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but everything turned for the better. short brooke was an avid music fan, and a sneering, bitter intellectual on top of that. (give her a bottle of vodka and she’ll start to cry & lock herself up in the bathroom.) tall ridge was an avid eh… seducer of men. of course that didn’t always work out as planned. (give her a bottle of vodka and she’ll climb over the bathroom door to rescue brooke from her alcohol-fueled oblivion, then she’ll start to cry & hide under her bed.)

so we were stuck in our respective situations, but at least we were stuck together. decadent evenings with chloe helped as well: lots of cannabis, phil collins, kevin blechdom, chocolate brownies, and the more explicit peaches lyrics available. schoolwise, everything was just as bad as it’d ever be, since all the nice kids had flunked big time, and those who were left with me were about as exciting as Ambien 500. (of course there were some good people. i shan’t generalise. nooooooo)

well, something had to give, and it certainly wasn’t me. and this is where, deus ex machina-like, ‘louise’ stumbled into our classroom. probably wearing something purply and made out of cheesecloth.