MY MEAN-ASS ARTICLE...

When the first winter storm of the year hits, and the temperature drops below freezing, there's only one logical thing to do: stay the fuck indoors! Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and all that happy horseshit. "Why the bitter beer face, vinnie," you ask? Well, I'll tell you. I drive three hours through the less than scenic drabness that is Ohio interstate, only to come home to a house as cold on the inside as God's house is on the out. Joy of joys. Immediately, I figure the pilot light's out. Nope. Still there. So I give up and go to sleep. The next morning, I chisel myself out of the igloo that has formed over my bed. Spiders are downhill skiing on my sneakers. Hell, the Columbus chapter of the Polar Bear Club is doing their annual winter swim in my bathroom! But I can't talk to the landlord now. I have to go to work. When I come home, I shovel a path so my roommate can maneuver through our living room. He asks me why the heat's off. I tell him it's on, and that we live in a crackhouse. So where's the point in this vindictive little pop song? I'll tell you. My landlord's a good guy. He doesn't bother us, and we don't bother him. And to tell you the truth, when something in this mock-dilapidated abode needs Bob Vila surgery, he sends his little repairman out to do it pretty damn quick. That's not the problem. The problem is that when he comes over to fix what's broken, he does it in this charmingly inefficient, half-assed way. Why replace the broken furnace, when you can replace the unsalvageable parts in it instead? Why? For the same reason you don't replace a busted pacemaker with a slightly better one you found at Sal's Pawn Shop: because it's gonna fuckin’ break, too! So you wouldn't think the brick-humping repairman would get lippy with me when I call him back two hours later to inform him that it's breaking as we speak. You wouldn't think he'd get lippy, but you'd be thinking wrong. Of course the shit's going to break, asshole. You replaced broken with near-broken! Like it's my fucking fault you're the dullest blade in Cutlery Barn! Sorry I had to pull you away from eight hours of PBR and ESPN Fly Fishing. Maybe if you'd stop replacing our goddamned busted furnace parts with discarded pieces of Robbie the Robot, we wouldn't have to call you in the middle of your favorite episode of The Red Green Show. The moral of this story: If you're going to be a landlord, be a good one. No. If you're going to be anything, be it right, and be it well. Stop doing everything half-assed, or me and my fed-up army of middle-finger thugs will come to your house while you sleep and pour baked beans in your slippers. Now excuse me while I Zamboni my bedroom floor.