Home Invasion!

Our home has been taken over. It's full of intruders, strangers, and people who don't have my best interests at heart.

The bathroom's being redone.

This means: I can't shower; I can't urinate; I can't wash my face or hands.

I smell like Ernest Borgnine's underwear.

Reduced to the most base behavior, I wait until nightfall to go to the bathroom outside. I'm using "baby-wipes" to clean myself which produces that weird baby diaper odor: not fresh, not clean, just chemically altered. My dog wants to eat the bathroom workers' faces off.

The absolute worst part? I've been forced to take showers at my mom's apartment. Nothing's changed since high school, pure hell. ("Whatever, Mom! Get off my back! Gawd!") To achieve the full effect, I should sneak cigarettes and listen to awful '70's arena rock (outside of country music, the only option growing up in '70's Kansas City).

Home contractors are a strange lot. They don't like to work more than a couple of hours a day. Communication is an alien concept to them as is a full day's work.

Yet, here I am, keeping hope alive, believing these yahoos. Each day I'm told, "Oh, yeah, we'll be finished tomorrow." Each day, a little bit of hope dies. And I smell a lot worse.

Sigh. Back to Mom's apartment. ("I already told you, Mom! Gah!")