Goth Soap Sitcom

By request of Clubfan/IRC, an update to the entire situation with the neighbours.

Yes, the neighbours, which is kind of odd. Just a few minutes earlier I referred to my living situation right now to yet another IRC comrade as goth sitcom of a kind. I didn't know how, why and where I ended up, but it's kind of interesting, which counts for something, I hope.

So, after getting my job I moved in this flat I'm at right now, without knowing it, the house, or the strangers spending their existence here. Sure, I've seen it twice, once my cousin moved in, another time I sat exactly where I am now, being so far gone after too many beers somewhen in the early morning of the 1st January 2015. Theoretically, I should have known better.

For once, the person who rented it before was a stinking pig when it comes to hygiene. I literally had a 3d model of Mordor in my stove, because he never cleaned it up. It also took more than three hours to clean the bath room, so it now looks at least somewhat white-ish again. All that didn't matter, the flat itself is great considering the heavy prices you gotta pay in the area around here. But...

Well, I signed the contract without knowing the flat, the landlords or anything. I moved in only three hours after having my signature down. This was a thursday evening. I spent the entire friday unpacking, cleaning and getting some food, until my cousin, the upstair's neighbour, came to help and get some beers.

The first warning sign should have been the Saturday morning after moving. I went to brush my teeth, got in the shower, grabbed the towel, got dressed, went into the kitchen, made some coffee and opened the window to the backyard. Where a man waved and greeted me, loudly so. Dressed in a suit reminding me much at Breaking Bad's cooking sessions. Cleaning a steel coffin, one you transport recently died people in. That's when I remembered, that this had to be the downstair's funeral home manager. And that the wonderful tree line in my view wasn't the start of the park, rather the back of the large graveyard. And that this large house wasn't some kind of factory, but the crematory. And that the shed I could see into was the coffin storage. Well... at least I got invited to have a breakfast, for which the rest of the house joined. The important part of the house that is.

The Undertaker turns out to be one of the friendliest persons you could possibly meet. He's always sticking around after work to have a chat if he sees you coming home, he shares a beer and he offers help whenever you need it. A really folksy person with the oddest sense of humor there is. As in, he offers to let in crafters if those can only drop by at working hours. Those crafters he greets with „I waited for you all day in here! The fuse box is right in the basement, if you would follow me...“

So there's that. A folksy undertaker, the scene is set for our soap opera. Let's introduce more characters. Me, you aleady know. Let's just... I don't know.

My cousin is another neighbour I already mentioned. He perfected the art of not caring. Entirely. I never once met a person so incredibly straight forward up to the point it starts to make you wonder how he survived all these years. It's not that he's not diligent, he really is. He is not stupid either. His tasks are always done, he is very cleanly and all that, he's just... straight forward and doesn't care about anything. He parked in front of our landlords, when they were here for inspections and left to get some groceries, ultimatively forcing them to stick around for two hours, as they couldn't move their car. His reasoning was: „I paid for it, you block it, I park either way, be glad I didn't went to get beer“.
Like, back in the day. Oh the memories. We usually organized a birthday party together with another of our best friends, a large one. Where we had bands playing, entrance for free and whatnot. Two things collided: A group of teenagers wanting to play, but not having a driver's license, us not wanting to drive. Consequently they were driven by their parents, and in one case, by their 68 year old grandfather. The other was that we read about "Wodka-Tampons". Yeah... right. The idea is to soak it in wodka and shove it up... god knows where, most sense would make the nose, but I doubt teenagers are mentally sound enough to think about the issue, else they wouldn't have come up with. So, for fun we wrote a piece of paper with "Wodka-Tampons only 1€ tonight!". When my cousin was asked what the mysterious "Wodka-Tampon" was, by the grandfather of all people, he proceeded to explain in detai. Well... anyhow.
The award for most "not caring" moment goes to his reaction towards his gf's career plans. Considering, it was kind of sweet, as his reasoning was "she knows what she does, I don't see a problem there, she can always go back". So:

At one day she decided to get a Rottweiler. He didn't mind, a dog person and all. A few months later his girl friend decided, over night, to just get up and quit her current, well paying job she's been working, because „it was boring“ and start a dog walking service instead. Like, asking people if they need their dog walked during the day and get money from it. She now earns more money than him, myself and the undertaker combined. Think about that.

Barney, The Rottweiler Of Death

So, these three persons alone are worth having around, as they make up for the most unreal conversations. At one point in the last month the topic of „barfing“ came up, down in the hallway, in front of the undertaker. This is a method of feeding your pets – selecting only raw food. Raw vegetables, more importantly raw meat. But where to store it? The trio actually discussed if another fridge would have place in the coffin shed, next to the coolings of the corpses. Imagine how you go to the undertaker's office to arrange the last goodbyes, when a window above the office opens and someone shouts: „honey, please get the meat. It's right in between Mr. Schmidt, the vegetables and Mrs. Müller“. You couldn't tell if the three were serious, but it was entertaining. Seriously, it has a flair of Six Feet Under to it.

Enter: The Landlors themselves. They are a chaotic duo, who doesn't reside here, but pops in iregularly. He's a drunk, like a text book, functional drunk. He walks around, smiles, nods, forgets, and drinks. She's an oldschool hippie with the tendency to go Nazi on regulations, probably combined with a mild or early form of Alzheimers. Both are never too sure if you live in one of their flats or not, but they will educate you either way. One of my friends came over, missed me, but got a talk about fire place regulations in gardens and how he was supposed to keep his basement storage clean and empty. Also, the obligatory speech about how more parking spaces will be built very soon, so we should watch out for the workers.

This brings me to our senior neighbour, Mr. Kitchen. He's two years younger than me, works as kitchen sales man, lives with his girlfiend, a psychology major and wears a suit every day. You can see him driving into the backyard in his expensive BMW, getting out, looking a little like a slightly overweight Harvey Specter, entering the house. Three minutes later, he is back down, at his caravan, getting out the chairs, wearing a metal t-shirt, holding a beer and chain smokes. He, too, like my cousin, doesn't care about anything. He also loves to grill meet. If he could, I swear to god, would grill every single day. While girlfriend makes fun of philosophy students or something, I don't know, she's fun too. At one point the two of them had a group of these philosophers over, discussing whether or not the biggest supermarket around was un-place or a non-place in current mainstream consumer society. This was hilarious. Nevermind...

Last, but not least, we have the two odd people you are bound to attract. The one is called Walther, is about 55++, a total drunk and literally only gets out to get food. I've seen him once in person when I was going out to get groceries. He almost had a heart attack on the stairs and ran away screaming. Only to come back two seconds later, telling me he was kinda shocked, by someone living here. This was two months after moving in. At night, Walther sings and dances alone in his flat. Or he watches us whenever we're outside in the garden. Whatever, he's cool, though he never joins and only communicates by pushing letters under your door – like politely refusing the invitation to a party.

The other one, whom we call „Traudel“ (I don't know his real name), is a junkie and a drunk. You see him a lot, he also is a nice, but very enstranged person. He comes home and parties hard every friday. You know which time it is, whenver the music starts to shake the entire building – 6 pm. It stops point blank 10 pm. Another hour of silence, then you hear something falling down one stairs, two stairs, three stairs, then the front door, then he's out to party harder. The only time I met him, he asked if I needed anything, he had it all – weed, cocaine, xtc, lsd, shrooms. Good for you Traudel, thank you, but no thank you.

Needless to say, the duo lives in the attic. Traudel also has aluminium foil in front of his windows. Not sure what he does up there.

Last but not least, the girl I blogged last time about – the cat lady. She's some kind of punk rock girl, any other description won't fit her well. She's got two cats, which she seems to throw against the wall from in between 10:30 and 11 pm, at least so it sounds in my rooms. She's a ton of fun.

As the scene is sat, the goth drama might start.

In the first weeks of living here I mostly got in touch with my cousin, his dog walker girl friend and the kitchen salesman from across the hallway. The undertaker I saw rarely, mostly only for a few minutes, when he was about to leave. Back then we did the ordinary bullshit to confuse visitors of the upstairs neighbours – in other words friends of my cousin and the cat lady I didn't know yet.

Whenever the kitchen salesman was at my place for a cup of coffee / a beer / random activities (such as playstation evening), we used to be in my or his kitchen – both rooms having view of the backyard, where visitors usually park. Whenever we saw someone about to enter the building we rushed back home respectively in a hurry and waited for them to come up. When the strangers went up, we met in the hallway. One of us was dressed completely sloppy, the other in a suit. Then we either started to yell at each other, or, what turned out to be more confusing to visitors, the sloppy guy tried to knot the tie of the classy dressed person.

In the past month / six weeks, I also connected more with the Zoo/Cat girl from upstairs. The Zoo story was told, but we also did other things.

Two more interesting ones included me helping her to disintegrate some larger enclosure for rabbits she built in a garden she rented. It started to rain and we were still out, trying to transport all the wood and whatnot from the woods into the bus we rented from dog-girl. Cat-girl insisted to transport the last, remaining heavy things the km or so to the bus. I shrugged and went into w/e mode, walking behind her, whistled Eric Idle's „Always look on the bright side of life“, both of us covered in wood, me smoking and drinking a beer. When we passed a (female) bachelor's party, who did their thing – screaming drunken. When they saw what I did, they looked at me in disgust, asking me what I think I was doing. „Supporting the feminist movement“.
Two hours later, after dropping off the bus at the dog girl parent's parking lot, we decided to walk back home. Covered in mud, drinking beer, smoking, totally exhausted. Just to explain, my town is about 50kms away from Nuremberg, which coincidentally hosted the large festival „Rock im Park“. Both cities are connected by railway and has exactly one trolley. We made fun of passing strangers at the train station, asking „where to go to Rock im Park“, because „we fell asleep in the trolley“. Oh, the looks.

The other story involves the dog-people (cousin and his gf) and cat-girl, as well as our landlords. Turns out the dog walking service is going so great currently, both of them simply have to move. My cousin is heartbroken about it, but having at least three dogs over night demands more than three rooms or 59m² of storage. So our landlords and my neighbours search for new renters. As we don't care about the landlord's opinion we decided to do a cast of our own at first. Then we stopped, because, apparently, when cat-girl, myself, kitchen seller and undertaker sit in front of the funeral home, staring into windows, is perceived as „slightly creepy and off putting“. Boring people all over the place!

So, anyway, the dog people just went out on a holiday this week. On Wednesday there were more people interested in the flat and the landlord wanted to show the rooms. So my cousin asked me to do the show. Remember how demented the landlords are?

I showed around all the people, including the landlord, answering questions about this and that, also about the dog walking service (which was a success, as one of them now wants to send her dog to dog-girl). At some point cat-girl knocked on the door, because she wanted to see the new neighbours. It was hilarious. The landlord thought she was simply late and started to tell her stories about the house, stuff like „we don't have drug addicts in this house, never had and never will! Here are only nice people, like the two in the attic, both have been around for more than ten years!“. That's when the two of us decided to grab a beer and listen to more made-up stories about invented renters in our house.
After the people left, cat-girl and myself left the appartment, alongside the landlord. By then she realized that the cat-girl was already familiar with the house and decided cat-girl in fact was dog-girl and I was her boyfriend. We played along (by not denying anything, but not correcting her either), standing in front of the flat for about ten minutes. Then walked down to my appartment, still followed by the landlord, who proceeded to ask where we were going now. „Well to my place, I guess“. The landlord was so confused that she stood in shock about ten minutes in front of my own door, before she realized I'm neither my cousin, nor cat-girl was dog-girl.

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for edit's sake, cat-girls cat, at least one of em

Later we found out that the landlord then knocked at the door of kitchen-neighbour to get the story straight. Who confused her more, because he pretended to not know anyone except the guys from the attic.

Oh, last but not least. Cat-girl was down here for a coffee sunday evening. She drinks milk, I don't, consequently she brings her own milk. In the middle of the night, around 1 am or so, I get a text, which wakes me up: "shit forgot my milk, need that in the morning. Can't get up without coffee". Yeah, kiss my ass, the milk now lives here. This is what I sent her all day on Monday.

6:30 Milk arrives in Nuremberg, Dürrenhof

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6:40 Milk at work

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[b]12:10 Milk at the HQ

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12:20-12:25 Milk at the 17th floor of the HQ

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12:40 Milk has a bit of home sickness in Nuremberg

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16:05 Milk at Hell's Angels Nuremberg

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16:10 Milk on its way home

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17:10 Milk at home

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… that's not drama right?

There's plenty of drama going on lately, mostly uninteresting one and not real one. But the complex social realtions and ties in this house make it hard to get what's going on. As in: dog-girl was super pissed at me for about a day, as I made fun of her plans to „re-organize the garden“ of the house they just rented. To explain, the garden wasn't taken care of in the past twenty years. Pictures related. Nice guy that I am, I helped nonetheless, ridicule was all the price I demanded. Seriously though, swinging a machete and whistling the Indiana Jones theme in such a place is fun.

The more interesting one involves the _entirely overexaggerated_ meage-a-trois the cat-girl, myself and cat-girl's (French) boyfriend had for the past weeks. I seriously forgot he ever existed, so did anyone else. Even when he was around, he wasn't leaving the appartment too often. He was an odd character of sorts, funny guy to some extent, but... well never here. He had a hard time finding a job, as he didn't speak German, English or understandable French. The past six weeks he spent in Malta, trying to make up for it. Not too well apparently, as he left earlier.

Just today, to underline the social relationship things, we had a Game of Thrones moment. I came home and received a text from cat-girl, asking if our basement was flooded, she wasn't sure and couldn't have a look in the morning, as she slept at her sister's. That was like around 3 pm. So I went down the basement, saw nothing and asked our Undertaker. Who then asked me who asked about the basement. I explained cat-girl wanted to know. „So your girl friend?“ „what“ „the girl friend of yours?“ „...no?“.

People spread rumors, the perpetrator being dog-girl probably. And not only to the undertaker.

Anyhow, I tried to explain I'm not the boyfriend. At this point the secretary of the undertaker, I quote, said „please stop, need a coffee and cookies first. This is bound to be awesome“. I explained more about she just dropping in sometimes, about the Zoo and whatnot, defending claims like „we thought one of the flats was bound to be empty most of day“ and the looks that go along with that.

What I didn't know was the following: Earlier the day the kitchen-neighbour left for work and ran into the French boyfriend of catgirl (this is complicated, eh?). He was then shouted at in the backyard, about what kind of person he is and whatnot. Undertaker saw it. The French rushed off. Kitchen-neighbour told Undertaker French mistook Kitchen-neighbour with Gecko. Ze what. Undertaker and Undertaker-Secretary then proceeded to try to understand the story.

So... here I am. Slightly bored. Cat-girl's upstairs, puking her guts out, kitchen-neighbour is out with his band comrades – me not sure whether or not going to Munich tomorrow.

I don't know what this blog was or what it does, but here it is. Have fun Clubfan/IRC.

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