I’ve been touting the benefits of self improvement for a while now. I really am in the process of designing a better life and fashioning myself into the kind of person I want to be. Well, I recently took a very big step. I kicked my renter out of the house. I don’t need his rent money I don’t want him around. Why is this significant? Here’s the story:
George and I have have been tight for close to 17 years. Tight. Sometimes realtionships carry on out of habit after the person who was so special to us has completely dissappeared. George has been in and out of trouble over the years. He was a spoiled brat with an upper middle class upbringing fast on his way to becoming a lawyer. But he never had it in him. as soon as George got to college and out from under the umbrella of his overprotective father, he crashed and burned. He made it one semester at Michigan State University and flunked out. the guy was out of gas from the start.
So he comes homes and gets a job and a local comic sci-fi store. That’s where he and I became friends. He was always a lot fun. Lazy, unmotivated and undependable, but that didn’t matter to me at the time. Well I moved to LA, worked with the high and mighty for a while and five years later moved home to marry the love of my life. In the meantime:
George is diagnosed bipolar. Tells his father that he hates him in a family therapy session. His father dies that night of a massive brain hemmorage or something. George continues sliding downhill, his stepmother completely cuts him off. In this time, George smokes more and more pot. Two other friends cut him off at this point.
Meanwhile, I come home from LA like nothings happened and we’re friends again. Well, i get busy getting married and stuff and fall out of touch. During this time, George, in a paranoid episode, gets into a fistfight with his stepfather and goes to the Macomb County Jail for nearly nine months. It’s from here that he gets back in touch with me after some time out of touch (again). Silly me, just keep giving him chance after chance. He comes off as a nice guy and snow’s alot of people.
Getting to the point, I’m going to skip alot of the story. It’s 2008 and I’m getting divorced. It is the worst experience of my life and George, to be fair, is there for me. almost from the beginning he’s offering to move into my basement and pay me rent to help me out. She walked away and left me with the house after the divorce.
I didn’t want him to live with me. I knew better. He’s a slob. He’s unmotivated. He’s a bad influence to be around. Well there were a couple of mitigating circumstances.
- He got social security. As pathetic as that is, at least I was garuanteed he’d always have the rent money every month.
- He got accepted to a very prestigiuous school. He’s an artist, and I got him back into his painting. He got accepted to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit on a full ride. Not easily done.
So I figured he’s moving up in the world and he’s be busy this will be managable. Well, the whole summer he sat in his underwear in the basement. I was already ready to kill him. He finally starts going to school, goes for a month, cries and bitches about how hard it is and stops going. And starts sleeping all day. And I mean all day. So I put him on notice around christmas time and he swears he’s going to give it another go. He does. Same thing, back to bed all day. Slob. Unmotivated.
I kicked his ass out. You are the sum total of your five best friends and I can’t have him factoring into my GPA anymore. This is my first week of having my house back to myself and being free of him. So far so great……….