Over Christmas I went to stay with my folks in Australia. They live literally in the middle of Sydney. For over three days, there was an unnatural orange tinge in the air, and everything was covered in a fine layer of ash.

We live in a stupid insane world that doesn’t make any sense. I know I've said this all before, but I've been hit by it again.

My brother tells me that now that I’ve found a job, I should move to an adult flat, and I agree with him more and more. I read a list a while back, one of those stale emails that do the rounds – x number of ways you know you're not a student anymore. I still fit into all the 'before' pictures offered, and I hadn’t been a student for the better part of a year and a half. No that long ago, there was a room going in a flat where the other three flatmates all have full time jobs, where there was a cleaning roster. In the death house where I currently reside, four out of the six of us are unemployed. We have one person who is job seeking with a marked lack of success, because he doesn’t know what hours he will have to work around for his course this year. Another is finishing off a Masters, and is so confident of finding a job at the end of it that he talks of "when" he will go on the dole long term, not "if". The other Masters student, well, is writing a thesis, apparently. This is a little difficult to verify, given that he didn’t start writing it until well after the official due date.

I am 24 years old – in a week, I will have five dozen people calling me sir. Think about your teachers - the good, the bad, all of them. Well that's me now, kids. I'll even have a form class – 10TH, it will be called.

And yet, I live in a student flat. It stinks, there are holes in the walls, and mice live in our oven. The toilet constantly runs, and the fusebox makes an unnaturally loud humming sound all the time (fuck living under phone lines – try sleeping with your head 6 or 7 meters away from what sounds like a small beehive every night). It's a good night if the bar downstairs closes up shop before midnight, because no matter how tired you are, bedtime is when the music stops. Every time I see the landlord lurking about supervising the noisy construction work he’s got going outside our living room, I hurry past hopefully unrecognised, lest he casually mention a rent increase. We are missing several floorboards, although, in a happy coincidence, mostly only in the few room that are carpeted.

Anyway...

I was walking along the street a while back when I heard my name being called. I looked over, and across the road was Richey. Richey lives a charmed life, and his hobby seems to be giving me new and better reason to hate most everybody.

I asked Richey why he wasn't down the road at his then day job of processing applications at Immigration. It turned out that earlier that day he had opened an envelope containing white powder and a letter informing him that he would soon be dead of anthrax poisoning. Decontaminated (but told to call an ambulance if he felt so much as a sneeze coming on) he had been sent home, so had wandered around until I walked past.

I remember another incident involving Richey. He was walking home when he happened to see a man sitting is his car, masturbating while watching passersby. Not really wanting to bother, but figuring it was his civic duty, Richey called the police.

So he was shown a series of pictures, and immediately picked out the pervert in question. Months later at the trial, Fuckoid's lawyer asked Richey if the pictures he looked at were colour photographs or black and white. Colour. Is he absolutely certain the photographs were colour? Yes.

Aha, points out the defense, the pictures he was shown were colour photocopies of photographs, not actual photographs. This loophole put enough doubt upon Richey’s powers of recall, apparently, to let this guy off, so he is, as you read this, no doubt sitting in his car masturbating over the girl walking down your street.

Anyhoo, me and Richey went shopping today. We walked past one of the local homeless, who asked us if we had a spare dollar or two. Now, by and large, I don’t give money to beggars, because, a) I don't really have a whole shirtload of it myself, and b) Left wing ideals aside, we live in a welfare state (I should know, I’ve been avoiding it for long enough) and no one needs to be homeless. But in this woman’s case, it’s also true that she actually will spend it all on alcohol, in accordance with the stereotype. She has a regular spot visible from my bedroom window, where she sits drinking vodka until it’s finished, and she goes to beg for money to get more.

So anyway, we finished shopping, came home, and had a row with one of the flatmates because he needed some of our freezer space to store openly rancid meat that he figured was still good for eating some time in the unspecified future. I went to buy the flat soap (every few days I buy the flat soap and toilet paper – I also take out the flat trash, and help Richey do the flat dishes – You know, given that there are six of us here, I’m not sure this is the Socialist Utopia the other four are always ranting on about...) and, on my way back from the dairy, I saw the bum again. She wasn’t sitting in her usual space though, she was lying face down a few meters from it, with a bottle still clutched in her hand.

It was then I realised that she was probably dead. A suspicion that wasn’t much alleviated by the fact that as I continued walking, a police car pulled up next to her, and the cop started talking into his radio.

Now, did you pick up on the part I didn’t emphasise there?

I kept walking.

I am so desensitised to the stupidity and atrocity of my current life, so used to everything being dirty and strange and out of control all the time that walking past what logic told me was a dead body lying less than a hundred meters from my front door, in full view from my bedroom window, had only the most negligible effect on me.

Seeing a body this close to me, on a stretch of ground I walk everyday, should have provoked horror, fear, mystery, but all it did was increase the bad mood I was already in after the meat episode. I have my own problems, and anyone who is surprised at the idea of one of the neighbourhood homeless drinking themselves to death on a summers day hasn't lived here long enough.

As I’ve been writing this, she and cop have disappeared. I don’t think that there was enough time for an ambulance to have come and picked her up before I noticed, so maybe she just got up and walked off. I guess I'll keep an eye out for her over the next few days, if I remember.

All in all, though, maybe my brother was right. Every time I catch one of my flatmates in my room because he didn't think I'd be back so early, and every time I have to step over bottles and cigarette ash because one of my flatmates can't be bothered cleaning up after his guests, and every time I have to suffer through a discussion of the finer points of New Zealand politics juxtaposed with an in depth investigation as to why none of the pretty girls like him, I think to myself "No, time to go"

Just once, it would be nice to come home to a clean flat where the paint matched, where the flatmates didn't sneak into your room when you weren't there, and where you didn't have to keep hidden stocks of toilet paper. A flat where I could begin conversations with "So, how was work?" instead of "Hey, you know that bum woman who drinks by our place? Well earlier today..."

Of course, if I left, I'd have to take Richey. And Darmeus did fix my computer, and probably buys even more of the toilet paper than I do, so he'd have to come. Of course he’d probably want to bring his woman, so I can see this all snowballing horribly...

This flat is cheap, and it's less than a minute away from the bus stop I'm going to need all of this year. But I'm pretty sure it's actually chiseling away large parts of my psyche and driving me slowing mad.

--Apathy Jack

I've said this all before