classic ed

this past week has been 8:30 to 3, and today was 7:05 to 2, so i took a long nap that just ended.

i wake up to my brother, screaming. he's back again. after the worthless shit couldn't find housing for his final semester of law school (he only had all summer to look, and he didn't start looking until the week before going back), he spent the past 4 nights in a ymca and came back, i don't know why. i wake up to him screaming his lungs out, my mom asking him to be quiet, and him saying, i can't, i can't!

when i was in college ed would come into my room and take out books or movies or so on, and use them in whatever fashion. and then they would get left wherever he was finished with them, and lost, scratched, or ruined in some way. i'm very picky about the condition of books. but just because only a few people would care if a book's spine was creased doesn't mean it's ok to crease it. the owner might belong to that subset of people. the example that stays with me is that he took all of my jd salinger books, and i found one of them in the trunk of my car, months later, with a hole punched through the cover. a fucking hole! straight through the entire book! how the fuck does that even happen? what level of disregard does that take? i still can't figure it. i only see someone with a drill fucking working away at the book to make a hole. hard work had to go into that!

i would ask mom to keep him the fuck out. i don't have a lock on my door here. she more or less harped on ed long enough that he would rather leave my stuff alone than listen to my mom if i had to complain again.

so i get out of bed, and ask what the problem is. his clip. a giant wooden fucking clip. $90. $90?? from linley, or some shit. ashwood? what the fuck? when i was moving my room around, i moved my bed. under my bed is a drawer of porn. i put that drawer in his room, on top of a plastic container thing. i'm not done moving around so it was still there when he got back. evidently there was a clip thing that got scratched (as in one scratch) by my drawer o' porn when i placed it in his room.

anyways, he's waving a bigass wooden clip around in my face, like the ones you use (oh, it's a clothespin) to hang up laundry on a line, and screaming about how it was a gift, and although it cost $90, it would cost way more than that to replace. when i bring up all of my stuff that he has screwed with, he says, how much is a book? max $20 (as if he's only ruined one book of mine in my lifetime). then he makes the claim that the value of his big wooden clip thing makes the value of any of my stuff that he has fucked up over the years worthless. after naming a figure for their worth, he goes ahead and says they are in fact worthless. that's his law school edumacation talkin. then he actually says, all of my stuff is more valuable and more important than your worthless books and movies. that's pretty much verbatim.

at this point i started laughing in his face. i wasn't faking or anything. i called him a stupid fucking moron for spending $90 on a giant wooden clip. and something about, you see a valuable item, i see a giant fucking waste of $90. i mean, christ. for a wooden clothespin? what the fuck is wrong with him.

he goes on to make the claim that his giant ash wood clothespin is art. he asked me if i knew what a picasso was. i started laughing harder. when i looked at him like _he_ was an idiot, he thought he'd drawn blood and followed up by asking if i knew what a monet was. wow. wooooow.

this whole time the kids are in the hallway also, asking him to stop yelling. mom is asking him to stop yelling. mom finally loses it and starts screaming about how tired she was (very valid) and that she needed to sleep. he throws his priceless clothespin on the ground, and tries but fails to slam his door. what a beautiful example of impotent rage.

he came in here afterwards, much calmer, and asked if we had an understanding. much more reasonable. accepting of the fact that i probably didn't realize that any of the crap strewn about his room (the place is a dump. there's shit all over the floors. literally no floorspace visible. and not in boxes or bags. just all over the place, like an actual dump) could be valuable. i don't know why he didn't do that in the first place, instead of uncontrollable screaming in front of his two kids right before they went to bed.

my brother, the biggest waste of everything in the entire world. the prepositional phrase in the entire world modifies waste of everything, in case you're not sure which way to read it.