The Chronicles of Calamity Nigel

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It starts here:

So, yesterday I had fun going to my second favorite place in Portland. This time, though, I didn't go inside... I went down to Oaks Bottom and walked below the mausoleum on the outside. I don't know which I like better. In its grey concrete state of semi-decay, looming over the wildlife preserve with the sunlight in glancing slices through the alders and cottonwoods, it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I walked up the slope on steps made of pieces of railroad ties set into the dirt and could see, through one of the ground-level windows, the crypts with a view. I wonder if they paid more for those crypts.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Maybe not the world. But it starts somewhere, and maybe that somewhere begins when you fear that someone you love is dying without you.

Today, I began with the most mundane, of cleaning what I've made and leaving it in someone else's hands.

We did what we could do. We spent time in the store at the glass factory. I use "we" in the loosest sense.

Feeding time. and then we went back to a place that fascinates me, a place I want to share. A man dressed in white in the distance moved through the swamp with what looked and sounded like a leaf blower, a tank of some unknown substance strapped to his back. The grey wall to the north, the ignored pieces of metal protruding. We saw what looked like a piece of crypt pushed down the hill into the swamp; a concrete block veneered on two sides with marble. The sun was out, glorifying the grimness of the mausoleum with brightness. We walked up the railroad-tie steps in this mottled light, under the trees, I eager to show the familiar to someone who had never seen it before. We peered in the window at a crypt carrying the name Richter.

After this, edging along the concrete ledge to the corner of the building, and finding an odd door covered by a long-neglected awning, finding the corpse of some strange unidentifiable animal at the edge of a pile of aged building debris. One of us climbed down to poke it with a bit of stick, but it became no more identifiable, spine and paws and possibly a head in a fly-covered mobius strip of mystery death. The reinforcing bolts splayed from the building carelessly, sprayed over with a mural of wildlife more eerie than the plain decaying concrete it had been. After edging back along the building we descended the steps, and only a few feet further down the trail found another compelling reason to climb up the slope again, alongside an aged log lying perpendicular to the mausoleum. Near the top were exposed and decaying roots covered in yellow mushrooms, and beyond that the roots of the building itself, surrounded by debris discarded from some supposed earlier attempt at improvement. We stood in a nook looking up at a spalling wall of concrete with visible stained glass windows within, and to our right side a garage-sized protrusion with a large metal chimney and, on the west side, a grated intake vent. I could not help thinking of my once-lover's cement tile, but my second thought was that we were standing in the old part of the mausoleum, flanked by the crematorium. There was a creek running down the hill to the south, but  rather than follow it we slipped back along the building to the north and descended the hill beside the decaying mystery animal, and walked up the muddy path to the car, and home.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Perhaps you remember this short essay I wrote about my dumpster-diving housemate:

The girl I live with is a dumpster-diver, and through her I've become one too. We've been friends for a while now, but I'm not sure exactly how long... eight years perhaps? She is tall and blond, a classic beauty with a tiny waist and old-fashioned ideas. She is from a wealthy family, and travels abroad at least once a year. She is a graduate student of chemistry, and a talented artist. She brings new definition to the term "eccentric". Everyone always said that we were a perfect match, and now we live together in a house that is growing slowly more and more full of things, insane things which we made or found or were gifted to us anonymously by friends passing by in the night.

Mostly, though, it's filling with things from dumpsters.

I know that over time people have begun thinking of us differently. We are building our future out of the things we bring home, a future made out of pieces of other people's pasts. Each dumpster contains an entire story; a bankrupt church with old choir robes, conference tables and a broken organ, or the former crack house with filthy clothes and unsalvageable, vomit-stained furniture. There are some dumpsters that you know, before climbing up and peeking over the edge, that you would need a hazmat suit to climb into.

Some dumpsters tell you, in fragments night after night, about the person whose life is being emptied box by box into it, for portage to the landfill. The mildewed makeshift endtable at first tells of poverty, but soon boxes of toiletries start to tell a story of thriftiness, of always being prepared for the future. An entire case of shampoo; four boxes of Irish Spring. Thousands of tampons. She was a hoarder, the former owner of what is now trash. We guess from her hats and the brightness of her costume jewelry that she was black, and from the beautiful coat with a fur collar that she was imposing in stature. There are no religious mementos... perhaps she was an atheist, or simply not a churchgoer. Perhaps those things were given away to family. In the dozens of romance novels, we find a name written in the front cover. These things come to live with us.

In the neighborhood, we unfold our story as we go out night after night and retrieve pieces of other stories, bring them home to hoard in our history. We can see ourselves growing old, doing this; we can see the overwhelmed look on the faces of the executors of our estate as they say "What are we going to do with all this junk? Should we just get a dumpster?" Those old ladies that lived in that house... the neighbors say they used to go out at night and scavenge through the trash. Their house is full of junk, of strange things rescued from the dump. They always seemed normal enough when you talked to them, but you could see them bringing things home all the time...

Tonight we're visiting the dumpster of a lonely old man who lived on 13th. He was really into Westerns, and his Chinese pornography collection is amazing.

Here is some more of that story. I have mentioned before that my housemate is crazy. Not non-functional crazy, but OCD/hoarder/compulsive crazy. It's challenging to live with, and as time goes on and she gets more stuff and my basement fills up and I have less room for storage, it gets more difficult. It is, at times, delightful in a "wow this is insane" kind of way.

There is a dead chinchilla in my freezer. When I asked her to remove it, she said she means to but she likes to get it out and pet it sometimes.

To fill out the story of what it's like to live with a hoarder, I decided to take some pictures of her space, including what used to be my rec room but is now... well, you'll see.

My former rec room view A:


Former rec room view B:


It's hard to get the full scope of the madness in these pictures. There are boxes stacked on the floor.

The stair landing area:



Glimpses of the sheer majestic chaos that is her room (I did not thoroughly document this area for privacy reasons)

Looking down:


Looking up:


Last, but far from least, the east end of my basement storage area:


The remaining corner of basement storage area is mine, ostensibly, for the time being.

[-Kel-]

this is a health departments nightmare.

[Richter]

I like the bones hanging from the ceiling.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

this is a health departments nightmare.

I was thinking more like a fire hazard.

[Telarus]

It really is. You should tell her (nicely) that she needs to organize that stuff or you'll start combing through it for disaster salvage.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That is the organized version. I am not kidding.

I just have to either wait for her to get married and move out, or I have to ask her to move. Hoarding is a manifestation of OCD and, unless she gets counseling, she's not going to be able to control it. She really literally can't.

[-Kel-]

That is the organized version. I am not kidding.

I just have to either wait for her to get married and move out, or I have to ask her to move. Hoarding is a manifestation of OCD and, unless she gets counseling, she's not going to be able to control it. She really literally can't.

[Kai]

OMIGAWD IZ THIS ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE BLOG THREADS?1! IMMA RITE A RANT ABOUT TEH CANCER KILLING APPLE TALK!


More seriously, that is a major fire hazard.


If she was a lot more organized that room would be incredibly cool.

[Telarus]

That is the organized version. I am not kidding.

I just have to either wait for her to get married and move out, or I have to ask her to move. Hoarding is a manifestation of OCD and, unless she gets counseling, she's not going to be able to control it. She really literally can't.

My grandmother had similar hoarding issues.  Good luck.  

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It's totally another blog thread.  This time I'm trying to showcase the more interesting aspects of my life, and demonstrate how my day-to-day experiences influence my creativity and inspire my writing.

I am hoping that I'll be able to survive financially without a renter by this summer. I could easily rent the space out again, but it's going to take a while to really thoroughly clean it, plus get rid of any of my own stuff down there that I don't want/need, so I'll need a couple of months of not having a tenant to get it into shape. It'll probably need repainting as well (not that you can see that it's painted in the first place).

Anyway, I'll post more about it here if it gets any more... interesting.

[Triple Zero]

More seriously, that is a major fire hazard.

This.

My flatmate's room used to look like that.

Well, except in his case it was actual trash, and this indeed looks quite nice.

Fire, however, does not care how nice something looks.

[Jasper]

It is often interesting to look at the living spaces of people with very different minds.  Thanks for posting that.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You're welcome! I'm glad you found it interesting. I wish the photos really conveyed the level of squalor... it's actually not nearly as pretty as it looks in the pictures.