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submitted 2 days ago by Angel@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

[CW: Racism, Verbally Abusive Behavior, Substance Abuse]He's starting to have serious "boy who cried wolf" vibes, as in I should just ignore him as hard as possible every time he does this shit. There's so much going on with him.

Here's what happened today:

I woke up very early because of my goofy sleep schedule. I went to bed around 7 or 8ish last night, and I woke up at 3 am today. I was feeling quite peckish as soon as I woke up, so I went to the kitchen to prepare myself some food. He hears me, he goes to the kitchen, and he starts to shout at me (which is ironic considering the nature of his complaint) because he said, "People are trying to sleep and have to go to work! Get the fuck out of the kitchen!" Thankfully he was telling me this when I was basically done preparing the food, so I was able to GTFO, but there are some major concerns with this guy.

His language seems incredibly manipulative here. He falsely stated that I've been cooking at a super early time (i.e., from midnight to 5 AM) "for the past 3 nights," but this is total bullshit. How do I know? Easy. To start, I send my girlfriend a good morning text and a good night text every single fucking day. I'm able to identify the points in which I went to bed and woke up due to these texts. Second of all, basically every time I cook, I'll cook a massive batch of something like pasta, beans, rice, or vegetables, and just reheat it. I'm not cooking massive batches three damn nights in a row. Third of all, he self-admittedly struggles with memory loss. He's in his 60s and literally struggles to remember my name even though I've been living in this shitty complex for over a year now. I kid you not.

He threatened to tell the landlord on me if I were to do it for a "fourth time," and he was saying, "You're finished if you do this again!" This is obvious cap for a few reasons:

  1. He's made these kinds of threats before, and he never follows through with them.
  2. He himself told me that he does not like to tell the landlord any concerns he has. He feels that if it can be solved without involving her, he'd rather do that.
  3. To expand upon point 2, if that's the case, then why didn't he complain about this to me directly sooner? He said he's been noticing it for 3 nights, but this is the first time since I've lived here this man has ever complained about me cooking at a very early time. However, the reaction was disproportionately ragey for a first time. It wasn't a simple, "Hey, could you be a bit more quiet in the kitchen around this time? I just wanna make sure I get a good sleep because I have to go to work." He shouted and started issuing threats of trying to get me evicted in a first-time complaint about this matter.
  4. To expand even further, he told me that he complained to the landlord already when he had his "sleep interrupted" by me the first night out of these supposed 3 nights. This is bullshit. If he actually did that, the landlord would've texted or called me to let me know. Hell, I saw the landlord in person yesterday, and she still didn't say anything about this.

I took my food, went to my room, and I just ate uncomfortably, but there is so much to unpack about this man.

He gets irrationally angry over trivial things, contradicts himself, is a major hypocrite, makes threats over these trivial things (that he'll never follow through with actually because he's all bark and no bite), lies a ton, makes baseless accusations, has angry outbursts, and then says contradictory shit once he calms down and "apologizes," literally uses racial slurs against me, and smokes and drinks excessively.

Some examples of these things:

  1. Stovetop Roaches

He one time saw a few tiny roaches on the stovetop and went off on me and accused me of being responsible for the roaches because I had just finished cooking. However, I see this as a "correlation does not equal causation" type of matter because the house, in general, has a roach issue. I see those same exact kind of roaches way up on the kitchen ceiling sometimes, but that doesn't mean that I got food on the ceiling. I make sure to do my best to clean very well after I'm done eating.

He baselessly accuses me of being the reason why the roaches are there, stating that the roaches specifically must've come from my room as well. He says this in a fit of rage, but I'm trying to calmly explain to him why what he is saying is highly flawed in a rational and objective manner. I'm not trying to insult him; I'm merely trying to give him insight, but I can't get two words out of my mouth before he uses those two words to scream over me about some shit that is either tangential or false. Because I realized that there is no functional point to me trying to talk reasonably to this man, I just go into my room and refuse to engage further as he is still screeching. And yes, he did the same kind of "You're finished" eviction threat and called me the n-word during this moment.

So what's the contradiction? I went outside a bit later to take some trash out, and he's on the porch smoking a cigarette to calm down, I suppose. He uses this time to apologize to me and give an explanation for his extreme anger, and during this apology, he says that the roach issue is a house issue and not my fault.

Remember this?

He baselessly accuses me of being the reason why the roaches are there, stating that the roaches specifically must've come from my room.

Yeah. I just nodded along to his apology because I saw no material benefit in me correcting anything that came out of his mouth, but in my mind, I knew this would not be the last time he goes apeshit.

  1. Another Kitchen Mess

I leave the house one night to go to the store and pick up some food, and he's on the porch. He asks me, "Did you use the kitchen today?"

Now, here's the thing: his entire point of having this conversation with me hinges on me answering "Yes" to that question. This conversation is ultimately redundant if I say "No."

And guess what? I truthfully told him, "No, I did not use the kitchen today." Despite this, he still carries on the conversation with me, which is just an implicit accusation of me lying.

He says that he noticed a kitchen mess earlier today (despite me not having used the kitchen at all that day), and he gave me a lecture about the importance of keeping the kitchen clean, so I immediately pointed out the contradiction by acknowledging how it's flawed for him to be so accusatory if I answered "No" to his question about whether or not I used the kitchen that day.

In response to that, he says, "I know it can't be [other roommate] because I've seen how he cleans! He does it well!" but obviously, this has so many flaws:

  1. That other roommate isn't the only roommate besides us two.
  2. Not everybody cleans with the same efficiency every time they clean. Some days people are more lazy than others. This is true for virtually any task.

And 3. I responded with an anecdote where I told him about this one time I woke up and immediately went to the kitchen to make breakfast. When I went to the kitchen, I saw a shit ton of crumbs on the stovetop, and the "stovetop hot" light on that indicates that the stove had just been used. Now, obviously, I couldn't have been responsible for this because I just woke up. I don't have a magical ability to cook from my room at all, let alone when I'm asleep.

My point with this anecdote is to establish for him a clear-cut example of a time someone in this residence made a mess in this kitchen, and it could not have been me. His response not only greatly missed the point, but it showed a glaring example of his hypocrisy.

He said, "Well, if you see something like that in the kitchen, just clean it up and act like it never happened!"

  1. That's not the point of the anecdote. That's exactly what I did because I don't see any material benefit in going on a witch hunt to find who did it and give them a lecture about it, unlike this man.
  2. Why doesn't he do the same? This is the hypocrisy. Instead of pestering me because you baselessly assumed that I made a mess you saw in the kitchen, just clean it up and act like it never happened, like you said!

After I pointed out these things, he says that he's not accusing anyone, but rather he is just speaking to me generally and claims that he is telling everyone else in the house the same thing as well. This is obviously cap because if this was the case, why didn't he lead with this? Why did he bring up a rationale for why he thinks that another resident could not have been responsible for this? It makes no sense.

Once again, he was yapping so much nonsense that I just walked away and carried on with my trip to the store.

  1. Pot Calling the Kettle Red

I've given this example of his hypocrisy before, but to keep it short this time, he one time cooked a big-ass pot of chili in the kitchen. I saw him doing it with my own two eyes.

The next day, I go into the kitchen to make some spaghetti; I grab the pot, and I see a ton of red stains all over it.

The thing is that I didn't address it with him or anything, but boy, did the hypocrisy piss me off. I just ended up washing the dish properly and proceeded to cook, but my blood was boiling more than the spaghetti water was in this moment. It almost made it hard for me to continue cooking.

  1. Late-Night Snack

One time, I was cooking in the kitchen after midnight, where I was making a big pot of spaghetti (I eat a lot of pasta), so I don't have to prepare it later, and the man literally comes into the kitchen and puts a pan right beside my pot and starts preparing ham and eggs... past midnight. Makes the complaint he did earlier today rather ironic then, right?


The bottom line is that I could go on to give more examples of this dude being a total asshat, but you get the point by now. He's awful, and I wonder why he is this way. I definitely do think he is suffering from some kind of condition of poor mental health, and there was another Black person in his 20s who used to live here and he told me that he believes the same thing. This other Black person literally told me that he entirely stopped using the kitchen simply because of this man. He's now moved out, and I'm envious of him, but I'm also happy for him. This old white man apparently was married and has a son, and I feel so sorry for his ex-wife and son having to put up with this man in the past at all. I hope they're okay now.

I have a theory as to why he is this way, and it pairs very well with him being racist and ageist towards me. I think he feels a lot of insecurity about the fact that, in the construct in this residence, we're in the same position on the hierarchy. He has no formal authority over me, so he manufactures artificial authority with moments such as these. He's a tenant just like I am, not a landlord. I think he does all of this controlling, hateful stuff because, as an old white man in his 60s, he feels uncomfortable and insecure knowing that a Black person in their 20s who moved into this residence with a food service salary is in the exact same living situation as him. I'm not judging him for being in this living situation, of course, but that's might be how his mind is perceiving it.

He's incredibly broken, and with how much he smokes and drinks, I don't expect his life to carry on much longer. Honestly, all of these interactions tell me that, should I find out, I really won't have any bit of sadness in my heart when it does happen.

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[-] ShimmeringKoi@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The two parts that stand out to me, other than the slur which is pretty dead-dove-2 , are the roaches thing and the crumbs thing. Of course he's decided that the roaches must have originated in your room, because....he will probably never admit why he thinks that. But then the kitchen thing, where he gets accusatory, decides you've done the thing, and then when you give an example of you not doing the thing, he turns it into an excuse to tell you you're supposed to clean up after other people. Oh, just read what you wrote about inventing authority lol. Yeah, seems right on the money. I don't really have much to add unfortunately, just that that fucking sucks and I know what it's like to be accused of doing things way more than you actually do by someone with severe memory issues. Although the person in my life is a sweetheart who genuinely doesn't mean to and takes accountability, so I can only imagine how much more frustrating it must be from someone with dubious intent.

this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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