Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Real World:Nashville Edition


 As most of my readers will know I don't tend to share what is personally going on in my life. But with the most recent happenings it seems to be necessary to inform those who are curious as to what occurred. We shall title this adventure of Wt and Jule's "The Real World: Nashville Edition" So here's what happens when you take six people with vastly different personalities and have them stop being polite and start getting real...

It began with us moving out of our house and looking for a new living situation. One of our best friends (at the time) whom we shall name for this story Booby McRedHair approached us about getting a larger place because she was unhappy with the apartment she was living in. We understood that in accepting this arrangement along with her came her boyfriend Gamey McSlacker, and their two current roommates Gunny McPsycho and Casper the Gay Ghost. These names are not intended to be slanderous, but rather to bring humor to a time and situation that had been completely devoid of it.

We realized that moving into the living situation we were moving in six very different personalities: granted it was into a three floor townhouse so everyone had their space. The top floor had the master bedroom for Booby and Gamey and there were also bedrooms for Casper and Gunny. The middle floor was designated as Switzerland, one half the game room and the other half was the living room/dining room and kitchen. On the bottom floor there was a large room which we converted into our bedroom and there was the garage.

Now when we first moved in everyone worked day jobs except for myself since I was focusing on my writing which I mostly did at night. This worked for last than two months when both Gamey and Gunny both quit their jobs and began gaming almost 24/7. Now this would not have been a problem had it not been for the way gamey played, which was by yelling at the screen and constantly belittling the people he was online with. This became the source of our first major conflict.

By the time these issues had started to resolve themselves it was decided that Gunny would move into the gaming room thus allowing for two new roommates to move into his old room upstairs. This was decided without seeking our input or even meeting them prior to them moving in. With this move I began to feel very unwelcome on the middle floor and retreated into the bedroom where I stayed pretty much 24/7.

Even with all of this, we tried to see the positives in the situation. Julie and I had even discussed staying on another year beyond the one year mark. The Monday, mere days before "the incident", we had a household meeting in which we informed them of such. Looking back...well the signs were there, we just didn't want to see them.

That Thursday (Feb 21st) the power got turned off due to an old debt we were planning on finally taking care of literally the next week. But as luck would have it Booby, Casper, and Gunny were home. Now I should state that had they not both called in sick no one would have even known the power was off until it had already been restored. But as over-reactors would have it they decided to move the electricity bill into Casper's name. Meanwhile across town, my wife had left work early and was emptying out every account we had to pay the bill and get the power turned back on. Embarrassed and in tears, she texted everyone to let them know the situation had been dealt with and the power would be back on shortly.

The power came back on within six hours, but by then the damage had been done and the ball had started rolling. For the next day and a half no one in the household would speak to us. The hostility was palpable and culminated during the impromptu household meeting called the next day. The meeting began with them handing us an envelope that contained a threat stating that if we didn't get our finances in check that we could be evicted. We had never treated this as a landlord/lessee situation but as the six of them sat facing off with us. As Booby began to list off our many varied wrongs, I stopped her and asked a simple question “Do you want us to leave?”

Hemming and hawing around for a moment finally the answer was made of “Yes. We want you out.” We were then given the deadline of March 31st. As soon as we received this information we went through what appeared as the seven stages of grieving, which ended the next day...sort of...

Julie deciding that we were going to move out by the 1st of March and me agreeing to the challenge. We put out the call for places to stay and are now in the process of planning our next journey. At this point, we have some very good friends that have offered us temporary lodging. Where our destiny might take us is at this point unknown but we have received several offers within the Nashville area, one in Clarksville, one in Murfreesboro, and several well beyond Tennessee's boarders (Canada anyone?). By the end of March we plan to know more about where the spirits are leading us. but until then, we plan to keep it positive, learn from past experiences and as always Keep on writing.

7 comments:

  1. Best wishes with the moving .. and the inspiration this may bring to your writing. It's stressful but at least you have options and you and Julie didn't do anything wrong so clear conscience about shedding Booby, Gamey, Psycho et al from your lives.

    As a spur to more writing, is it worth remembering that one out of four homeless youth in the USA is/are LGBT? Being asked to leave over a power bill and because you're more sane than your roommates is bad; being kicked out by your family if they hate you being LGBT is devastating.

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  2. Sorry to hear about the chaos in your lives. I can only imagine the pit of unease in your stomachs. I hope it all gets settled very quickly.

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  3. I hope you're lead to the best place for both of you.
    Let the writing continue!

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  4. Keep your spirits high in the knowledge that you are both loved by many. :-)

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  5. (((Hug))) That totally sucks. :( I"m sorry. Good luck on your journey.

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  6. wow well the crew surely didn't have any problem sucking down the groceries others brought for your birthday, should've been your first crew... Community living is difficult at best, I liked that place but really wondered how long that could last. Too many personalities, too much jealousy from my one time observation. Hoping the best for you both, love an miss you guys hugs :)

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