The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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The Roommate
Continuing on the previous monster comment, by 2021 I wound up with two non-paying roommates. The first (and subject of this comment) is flat out my fault. I made a drunken promise to move in with this guy (and replace the last sucker that was letting him live more or less for free), felt bound by honor to do so in spite of knowing that it was a terrible idea, and did so. He’s not an awful roommate (lazy and useless, sure, but not all that difficult or disruptive aside from his annoying chihuahua that isn’t housebroken), but the place I moved into was as close to a third world slum as you’re going to find in an American metro area, complete with idiot upstairs neighbors doing laundry in the bathtub upstairs and leaking water everywhere (causing water to leak in and eventually collapse my bathroom ceiling, which took ages to get the slumlord to half-assedly repair), a junkie adjacent neighbor with the nastiest, most roach infested apartment I’ve ever seen (which meant that we all had an unkillable roach infestation), zero sound insulation or insulation at all (This made for obscene electric bills during the winter and I was still cold.), and everything was just so old and rundown that it was impossible to clean/keep clean; even the air perpetually felt dirty and humid (probably because of all the mold and because it was located in a swampy area; I suspect that the whole place and surrounding roachboxes have only been spared from demolition because the owner would have to spend a considerable sum improving the ground before constructing the three over ones favored by developers here), and a non-functioning stove. But hey, at $400/month for a two bedroom in a fairly nice neighborhood close to campus you get what you pay for, and I didn’t spend enough. I left and kept paying the rent rather than keep living there, the roommate inherited some money and paid me for a year up front, and all was fine until that money ran out, at which point I didn’t have the heart to kick him out because he makes basically zero income and has nowhere else to go (His parents are gone, he has no siblings, etc.). It was easier to eat the rent and utilities than to provoke the drama storm that kicking him out would be.
The second roommate (another friend of mine; I’ll never entangle myself financially with a friend again) had just broken up with her boyfriend, I got her a job at University to Go (She really was good and made the most money she’d ever made in her life doing it, but just couldn’t make herself wake up on time and show up when she said she would such that she burned the bridge with dispatch.), and for the first few months she paid her share and everything was great even though the apartment we moved into was a bit spendy for my tastes at the time ($900/month when I’d never paid more than $475 in my life. Three years later, that now $950/month is actually a pretty nice deal relative to what’s out there now such that it isn’t worth the costs of moving to downgrade.) until she just quit working/paying. I was already stuck with the lease so I just dealt with it and let her run up a tab that’s now over $10K in back rent that I’ll never get because she’ll never have it unless she wins the lottery. She did eventually find herself a rich boyfriend (a screwup/slacker whose daddy owns a coal mine) and moved in with him, so it was relatively low effort to kick her out, and now that the lease is ending at the shithole I moved roommate number one into my current place (As annoying as he may be, the marginal cost of moving him into an empty room is basically zero, vastly cheaper than paying for him to live in a shithole and have to hear about it every time something breaks.), so enter the current situation:
Last time I mentioned that he was in bad health (morbidly obese, congestive heart failure, takes more pills than your average 80 year old, etc.) and it hasn’t gotten any better. For reasons I don’t understand he was denied for disability, but the heart failure is probably sufficiently advanced (a high-end stage 2 to low-end stage 3 I would guess) that he really should be getting it (and food stamps, etc.). His condition is his fault (You can be 400lbs or a cocaine addict, but both are not sustainable, and his CHF would be vastly less problematic if he were a compliant patient and heaven forbid drop some weight. I have 70+ year old relatives with CHF, big people at that and one also suffers from COPD, who get around better than he does.), and at times its hard to tell malingering (wearing a fucking CPAP while awake watching TV; for fuck’s sake the oxygen concentrator, aka. smoker machine that he got during covid is less noisy/creepy and if he really can’t breathe sitting still in his gigantic recliner that takes up a third of my living room then he should start looking for nursing homes or call his drug dealers and beg for the strongest hit of fent that they have. Curiously, he doesn’t need that stuff when sitting on a barstool.), but he really is fucked and while I get mad when I see pizza boxes pile up by the trashcan (I guess he makes enough bumming off other friends/selling off his Xannies and whatnot that he can afford fast food and his phone bill.) I don’t have an answer.
My apartment is on the second floor and itself is a two story unit so the stairs (which mutual friends have told me that he bitches about incessantly) may correct this issue in a short time. Either he’ll get fed up and find another friend to crash with or that aortic aneurysm will blow up, he’ll be dead in 30 seconds, and he’ll finally get his wish (I’ve heard more than I care to about his suicidal ideation.). He’s recently developed a mysterious gout-like (but not gout; he has that too and this is allegedly different, some variety of autoimmune disorder he thinks/claims) illness in his knees that renders him nearly bedridden (or, more properly, recliner-ridden; the bedrooms are upstairs). At the rate he’s going he’s going to be immobile soon (One would think that watching his dad die 500lbs and bedridden would dissuade him from following the same path, but I guess not.) and if that happens I swear that I’m gonna call adult protective services or whatever and have him tossed into a nursing home before he can blink because I’m not a nurse and don’t plan on becoming one. I have the local social worker who deals with that stuff’s number saved in my phone.
The only thing I’ll say in my defense (and I really should be defending myself for being so spineless/conflict averse that I let these situations fester, even though the truth is that I don’t have a good enough excuse) is that I don’t hate him; I hate the situation but it can be hard not to conflate the two. I want to toss his stupid fucking yap dog (He does the fake “service dog” thing with it at that.) that he carries to bars to curry attention from women into a woodchipper/off the balcony (I promise that I won’t actually do that because in fact I’m touchy about animal cruelty.) but it’s not the dog’s fault that it was raised by a shitty owner. I swear that he was a much less shitty friend before the heart failure (why I feel obligated to help him, and I’m not the only one) and I remember the man he used to be (a fuckup self-sabotaging train wreck, but he at least worked and would drop anything to help a friend).
Man I feel you, as somebody whose high school best friend kind of turned into a lazy stoner with severe relationship instability who just keeps making bad decision after bad decision, believe me I understand.
But you really need to put some distance between you and your friend. Although we definitely have some responsibility towards our friends and offering them a place to sleep or some financial assistance during a hard time is maybe even an obligation if you are close enough, the key factor there is: “are they earnestly and honestly trying to get themselves out of that position?”
If yes, then help without question. If no, cut them off. Even people who are trying to improve their lot in life or get out of tough circumstances don’t always succeed, to not even try and instead to leech off of other well-meaning people is a recipe for disaster that you want to be as far away as possible from.
Seriously, start eviction proceedings tomorrow. You don’t owe your friend anything anymore. If you were in his shoes, would you expect people to tolerate your bullshit? Would you ever stoop so low as to treat your friend the way he is treating you?
This sounds harsh but I have been in your shoes with my own friend. This guy was like a brother to me but at a certain point I realized I would never have abused the friendship to the extent that he did. I have plenty of other friends who are losers with no financial or romantic prospects, the difference is they don’t take advantage of me and treat the friendship with respect.
You know this already, but the answers to "Is he trying to help himself?", "Would I expect a friend letting me stay at their place to put up with this level of shit?", and "Would I do this to someone I call a friend?" are all no. I've had other friends in bad situations with broken decision making ability and they might've taken forever to repay loans, toed the line of "only calls me when his car breaks down", or whatever but they always did repay me eventually. I at least have the excuse of the first roommate being a woman that I was once very madly in love with. This guy doesn't respect himself enough to quit his slow-motion suicide in spite of a litany of friends who've tried to help him. I've done my damnedest to help, given him an insanely long leash, and he can't even be bothered to hustle and grind for welfare benefits, find some bullshit low-paying remote job, or even try to take care of his health, let alone repay me.
Fresh out of a brutal intervention on this subject from an IRL friend I arrived home and was asked to help make his bed (aka. just do it myself because that's faster) tomorrow because his knee hurts too much to move. Like, holy fuck, if you're that hard up you need to be in a nursing home and your needs are flat out beyond my ability to help, forget questions about deserving. We're reaching "I feel the need to defend myself" territory. If I let this fester I'm going to wind up a live-in caretaker and I'm genuinely afraid of what that would provoke from me in terms of anger and resentment.
He's lived here less than 30 days and isn't on the lease so there shouldn't be any legal issues. He'll be getting an eviction notice within a week. When talking with friends earlier I predicted based on my educated guesses that absent change he'll be bedridden within 6-24 months. If he's asking me to make his bed two weeks in that prediction might've been optimistic. My apartment is not a nursing home, end of story.
I work retail and can't really spare that much, but are you going to have any big expenses you're struggling to meet?
Nah, I'm going to be alright. I'm just going to have to pay my taxes late because the money I had allocated toward that got eaten up by a big car repair (engine replacement due to a cracked block, but the car is fixed and should be reliable for quite some time now with minor to moderate work in the future that I can DIY on weekends). It's not a big deal, as IRS penalties and interest are much lower than, say, credit card interest. I'm just militant/nervy about money as a habit due to growing up in a spendthrift household with perpetual financial crises, and in a temporary crunch while I'm waiting for my belt-tightening to render fruit that I've known was going to suck for awhile.
If worst comes to worst, I can make it with the new job, University to Go dinner shifts once the dog days of summer in a college town are over, and picking up a bartending or door shift here and there, but I was just disappointed because I came into the new job feeling like I was taking a step forward and it's a sidestep at best.
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