I haven’t really had the will to write anything for a while now, but I am forcing myself to sit down and write this blog because it is quite brilliant – one of those things that really needs to be written. I’ll probably serialise it a little bit because it is quite complex and the story is still ongoing.
Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post, we were having issues with one of our flatmates. Mark came back from the USA and was dismayed (to say the least) to see Matt still hadn’t left. He told me he had words with Matt as soon as he came home, then went into his bedroom to find one of Matt’s cats had thrown up on his bed – a real warm welcome home!
Mark and Roger decided the kick out date was Saturday 15th – having waited one month for Matt to leave, two weeks of which he hadn’t paid any rent. Mark’s girlfriend Hannah, their friend Raj and a couple of other people came round to help out with the removal – Matt took serious offence to this, seeing it as us trying to stand as a united front against him. We must have been the least threatening heavies in existence.
Essentially we had 8 hours of melodrama trying to get Matt to agree to leave the house. He claimed he didn’t know why he was being kicked out (“I am fighting an injustice!), that the thefts had nothing to do with him (he had already blamed several friends of his at different times) and that the law was on his side.
To prove this last point, Matt called the police. In the interim, he looked up the B.C. laws online – then read them out. Roger told him these laws didn’t apply to him because he hadn’t signed a lease (Mark, Roger and Jesse – the guy whose room I took – are lease holders; Matt moved in on the same unwritten agreement I did). This led to the highlight of the day’s arguments:
Matt: “Dude you can’t just interpret the law!”
Roger: “What do you think a lawyer does?”
Matt: “…You hipster rich kids with your university degrees! You know nothing!”
One plain clothes officer showed up after Matt’s call, who arbitrated this highly logical, intelligent argument – and told Matt he was in the wrong. The officer left, but Matt kept going. I left at this point to go downtown, but when I returned an hour or so later, nothing had changed. Matt’s belongings were mainly still in his room, there were arguments going on in and out of the house, and Matt’s girlfriend Kelsey was on the grass at the front of the house with the boxes that had already been removed.
I went back inside just after Mark changed the locks (which now, due to the wonderful branding, reads “DEFIANT” on our front door) and we had a discussion about what was going to be done: either let him back in until the end of the month; or keep going and kick him out right there and then. We went with the latter option – the former would just lead to the same stresses all over again delayed for a fortnight.
I asked what had happened since I had left and apparently all I missed was more melodrama: Matt – who had lung cancer (or so he said, sometimes it’s hard to tell with pathological liars) – was at times writhing around on the floor and allegedly coughed up blood, screaming “you’re killing me with the stress! You’re shortening my life with this shit!”.
He was trying to blackmail Mark and Roger into letting him stay – trying to play on their compassion. I am glad I left this post long enough to find this great accompanying quote in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
“Why yes I can,” said Midas Milligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. “The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.”
Then the police had returned. Matt had called them again. Two cars this time with four uniformed officers – perhaps just a little over the top.
Two of them spoke to Mark and Roger, the other two spoke to Matt and Kelsey. I stayed inside with Hannah and the others. After maybe half an hour of deliberation, the police Matt had called said he had to be off the premises “by sundown”. A nice catch-22. Mark and Roger wrote up a contract on the spot saying Matt could use the garage to store his belongings in until the end of this month, then they had to be gone.
Kelsey came by the next day to pick up the cats. You’d think that would be the end of it…
