Apartment Politics with Karl Rove

Dick Does the Dishes

Yesterday was a seminal day in apartment politics. I'm not going to get into the specifics of what Dick might have said or could have said or did say, but I will say this: In this apartment, certain events transpired, which, taken as a whole, will have a profound effect on the way events transpire in this apartment henceforth and forthwith and going forward.

Some of you may remember the massive misgivings with which I undertook to live with Dick in the first place. Despite recent events, I must maintain that I was right. Dick is a truly irritating person. When he's not having heart attacks, he's letting the dishes pile up, and when he's not doing that, he's farting. Mental note: Live alone, always alone, and in darkness. Additional mental note: Destroy Dick.

The political life is a lonely life, but this is entirely my fault and I assume all blame for loneliness, solitude, etc. Such is my dedication to the grand calling that is politics that I have let certain other considerations slide. Not for me the merry life of the wedded. Some have said -- some factions have intimated -- that perhaps this is because of a lack of interest, on one side or the other. I trust that you, my faithful readers, will see such filthy lies for what they are: The dirty thoughts of dirty minds. Namely homos.

But today! Ah, today, perhaps all that has changed.

After a long and weary slog through our nation's capital, during which I was assaulted by hippies on the mall and mocked by an Arab cab driver, who displayed an appalling lack of gratitude as well as a deplorable grasp of the American vernacular, I came home to find a moving van outside my apartment building.

Well. Of course my first thought was that Dick had died during the day, and his relatives had come to cart off his worldly possessions, but no. As it turned out, it was an even more fortunate occurrence than this.

The door sprang open and a vision of loveliness appeared. Tall, blonde, pleasantly emaciated, her sharp face, intelligent and long as a horse's, poking out over a box of books. She plunked them down at the feet of the one of the movers, a sweaty person of some swarthy ethnic variety.

"There's your fucking tip," she spat, and my heart soared.

The meximalan picked up one of the books and flipped it open like a deck of cards. "Later for your book, puta," he said, and tossed it back into the box. I saw her flinch ever-so-slightly, with daintily repressed feminine terror, and I knew at once that I had met my soulmate.

Or was about to meet her anyway.

I strode up to her as manfully as my shrunken pants would allow and grasped her elegant claw in my moist palm.

"Fair lady," I said. "Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Karl, and we are neighbors. I could not help but observe your foul treatment at the hands of that unfortunate person. Let me assure you that I have friends who can have him sent back to his country of origin immediately. Perhaps we could discuss it? Over dinner, say? Or drinks?"

"I never eat," she said, eyes gleaming in their hollows. "I enjoy that feeling of hunger that deprivation gives me. Also, it makes me fucking hot. But drinks, perhaps. Here," And she handed me a book, with her phone number inscribed in the front.

I have long wanted to know how to talk to a liberal, and now Ann, sweet Ann, will show me the way.