This election season has been incredibly stressful for many Americans. Everyone realized at some point or another that they were sick of hearing about the election and wished nothing more than to never hear about it again. The severity of this reaction varied from person to person obviously, but I am quite convinced that my roommate's reaction was the most severe.
Starting quite early I could tell that this election had done something to him. He started speaking in a southern drawl and referred to himself in the third person when inappropriate to do so. I will admit, having known the kid for just over one year now I did find this strange. Strange enough to move my bed into the closet of our shared bedroom. It is a two bedroom apartment, but we both called dibs on the room to the left, and neither of us being particularly good at making compromises, decided that it would be best if we both just shared the one bedroom. My closet is a nice closet, though. I would estimate that it's about 7'x9'; large enough to fit three grown men and the refrigerator that is in our kitchen. I do not recommend moving refrigerators into closets though since the number of outlets available to you declines rapidly when you have three grown men and a refrigerator in a closet. Not being able to plug the refrigerator in would lead to all of the food spoiling which is unpleasant for every party involved as spoiled food does not smell good and makes you need to go to the bathroom more frequently: a terrible combination when locked in a closet with three grown men and a refrigerator. I was able to avoid such an event though by running an extension cord into the closet.
A few weeks ago my roommate brought home a new shirt from his politics club. I asked to see it, and upon looking at it I made an offhand remark about it being a polyester blend material which I thought felt nice. After I said this he froze up and just stared at me in disbelief for a few seconds. Longer than anyone should stare at another person over a compliment about a shirt. He looked offended somehow.
Considering it was still daylight outside I figured I would watch some TV in our living room until my roommate came home from his meetings. I say meetings because I don't actually know where he goes on Tuesdays after his 9:30AM geography class. He usually saunters back to the apartment anywhere between 3:00 and 6:00PM on tip-toes and seems surprised to see that I'm still awake. Which is odd because we go to bed around the same time as each other and I have never been asleep between the hours of 3-6, mostly because I'm afraid of what he will do if he comes back in and sees that I am asleep between 3:00 and 6:00. This Tuesday was different though. He came back to the apartment around 1:00PM with a potted plant and a smug look of satisfaction. He quite deliberately placed the pot down onto the coffee table directly in my view of the TV. Mentally noting that this kid had just brought a fucking tomato plant into our apartment, and sensing that he desperately wanted me to ask him about it, to pique his interest in the thing, I started to ask him: "Yo man, what's up with the plan-", before he cut me off and launched into a powerful and incredibly pointless diatribe against polyester blend shirts. I do not remember the entire rant due to the ridiculous nature of the whole thing, but I do remember him saying "I worked night and day for 12 years to prevent The War, but I couldn't", which I didn't realize he said until he finished speaking and silently retreated into our room. Not being sure what to make of what had just occurred in front of me, I pushed that godforsaken tomato plant to the side and continued watching Alaskan Bush People.
Things began to spiral out of control shortly after The Tomato Plant Incident. His fake southern drawl became more pronounced to the point where I could no longer ignore it and called him out on it, only for it to backfire in the form of him getting three more tomato plants. Further, in what I assume was a passive aggressive powerplay, he moved the TV away from the window to behind the couch so that if you were to sit on the couch you would be looking at a blank wall with the TV playing behind you. He put those dumb-ass plants where the TV was so that they got optimal sunlight I guess. Also, I noticed he had been researching cotton looms and if the name Fluffy was ever a trending baby name between 1910 and 2015, as per the Google search results page on his open laptop. All strange enough, but I began to actually worry for him when he began obsessing over Brexit and "what this means for us". "Us" being he and I in our 600 square foot apartment in Glassboro, New Jersey, USA. It meant nothing to us. I tried to relay this to him only for it to be shot down every single time with "THAT'S JUST THE LIBERAL MEDIA BRAINWASHING YOU". The thing about that statement is that no matter what it is being said against, there is no counterargument. It is the ultimate be-all and end-all of political discourse with no chance of ever coming back from it. These kinds of interactions only increased as the election drew nearer and nearer. The peculiar part though is that I couldn't tell if he was for either of the candidates. In this election it was quite common to not like either candidate, but when it came down to it everybody knew who they were ultimately going to vote for. Not my roommate. Every single scandal and leak that would emerge about either candidate would send him into fits of rage and prompted him to write long drawn out Facebook posts that he thought all of his followers read and would adopt his point of view. He would binge-watch Tomi Lahren videos for hours and hours. Have you ever seen Tomi Lahren? She is not a person that you can binge-watch without wanting to skin yourself alive with a potato peeler. He then would counter that by reading every Huffington Post and Al Jazeera article written about Trump. Was this confusing? Yes. But was it as confusing as him doubling down on the tomato plants and ripping up our carpet only to cover the floor in topsoil and fertilizer so he could plant the fucking things? No.
He did just that though. Having come back to the apartment after going home for the weekend, I walked in and found that the front half of the room was completely destroyed as he ripped the carpets up and dumped bags and bags of soil on the newly exposed asbestos tiles and splintered wood. Those goddamned plants weren't even planted well. They were just stuck into this mound of dirt with the least horticultural skill I've ever seen. Looking like he had just come off of a 3 day meth binge, my roommate stumbled out into the living room talking about the upcoming harvest and how his loom will be here soon, and also about how Amazon Prime is bullshit because they charged him twice for the loom. Needing a break from this fever-dream of an existence, I went home again the following weekend.
When I returned the following Monday morning, I found my roommate sitting on the stoop of our apartment with a hand rolled cigarette with what appeared to be homegrown tobacco. No idea where he got this though, as there were no tobacco plants inside our apartment, only tomato plants. Unless he mistakenly identified the bay leafs in the cupboard as tobacco leaves, which as I write this, I realize is definitely what happened. As I went to open the door he pulled it shut again and told me that he had carefully read over Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution and found a loophole. We were going to secede. To no avail I tried to reason with him and talk him down from this crazed state as we made our way up the stairs to the apartment. He kept telling me about how the Constitution states how to join the Union, but makes no mention of how to leave it. He leaned in real close and whispered into my ear: "All we ask is to be let alone". As we walked inside he made his way over to and stood in front of his grotesque garden and explained how our economy would be based on these cotton plants. We would export our product to other countries until we cornered the market, then place an embargo on our heaviest importer, thus forcing them to recognize us as a soverign entity. I noticed out of the corner of my eye his cotton loom, sitting in shambles as he clearly had no idea how to assemble it correctly. The sunlight poured in from the window behind my roommate onto the plants. You could see all of the dust and dirt floating in the air through the sunbeams. Slightly unsettling though considering how much fertilizer he had been dumping on this ever-expanding pile of dirt. The amount of concentrated ammonium nitrate in our living room coupled with the fact that my roommate was standing right next to me smoking a cigarette was a cause for concern. Still talking about export taxes and such, he turned away from me and looked towards the plants, at which point his rambling became slower and slower. We both stood facing his dirt pile plants protruding out at various angles. Plants that were now covered in unmistakable, ripe, red tomatoes. He kept talking, perhaps to persuade himself that he wasn't seeing what was right in front of him. His cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth with a slowly smoldering light orange glow. He finally stopped talking and we stood there silently in the dusty time-bomb of a room.
