2008 Is Off To A Crazy Start

When I woke up yesterday morning, I didn't expect to have a roommate that day. Hey, unusual things happen at unusual times.

"Jacob" is sitting in my living room as I type this, and he just woke up. He had moved last year up to Montana with his girlfriend to open a restaurant, and things seemed like they were going well. Last month, he called to inform me that his girlfriend had stolen $2,000 in cash as well as one of their dogs and flown back to Chicago, where she grew up (and coincidentally where Jacob and I grew up, although we didn't know her at all--he met her online when they lived in Wisconsin four years ago). Why? Well, she left a note calling him all sorts of bad things, but she really didn't explain anything. However, a few days after she left, Jacob received e-mails and chat logs from...wait for it...the wife of the guy Jacob's girlfriend left him for! Apparently, she and this moron were writing love letters to each other and plotting this whole thing. They used to date before she met Jacob, and I guess it was a situation where she came from the gutter and got homesick. She also used to be a druggie, and Jacob found out later that she had recently started that shit again, courtesy of the boyfriend of a worker at the restaurant. So she just totally fell off the wagon and lost her fucking mind, and now Jacob's in deep doo-doo because he can't keep up his house payments and business payments thanks to the stolen money. He exercised some bad judgment. coming to Chicago to look for work and plan a move back here, and oh yeah, to screw the wife of the guy his girlfriend left him for. (They started talking on the phone about stuff and wound up forming some kind of connection, which I thought was a bad idea from the get-go.) Well, the wife announced after a few days that she's moving to Detroit with family, and he decided to get out now since there obviously was no immediate future for them. Did I mention that the girl just had this moron's baby??? Can you say Springer? Thankfully he had a friend whose house he could crash at for a while. He's my best friend since 1st grade, so I couldn't turn him down when he asked to stay with me until next week. Plus, there's some karma at work. Someone was a Good Samaritan to me on Thursday night, so it was my turn to pay it forward. Some guy gets off the train every night at 11:00, the same time as me, and Thursday night was under 10 degrees. So his wife was there waiting to pick him up. I've never spoken to the guy or anything, so I just watched him get into his wife's car, wished I had someone picking me up, and started my usual three-block walk home. Suddenly, the guy rolled down his window and yelled out to me, "Want a ride?" I guess he always noticed that we walked in the same direction every night, so he thought it would be a good idea to take me home since we were all going that way. Turns out they live like two blocks from me. I was very thankful for their good deed. And now I'm doing my own good deed for my buddy. I'm not even going to talk to him much about his fucked-up situation, because I think he needs to clear his head for a while. We'll just laugh and catch up on shit, and of course watch football on Sunday. Speaking of which, my horrible picks for Sunday's games will come up tomorrow morning, so if you want to know which teams to pick against, stay tuned.