I have blogged before about my lovely new girlfriend and the strange circumstances which forced us into early cohabitation.

She's invited me to move in with her at her old place once the damage from the fire is fixed. I said yes for reasons of romance and economy. The place is actually pretty nice, and I also want to be around to help her out.

You see, Lisa's the youngest of three kids, and she's older than me, which means her parents are getting on in years. Lisa moved into an apartment in their house both to save on rent and to be around to help out. I think this is a very loyal and noble thing to do. The house is in quite the state of disrepair, so I figured I could earn my keep by fixing things, as I know my way around hammers and saws and such.

I am beginning to think my decision was made without enough information.

Lisa had told me her parents were insane. I thought that was cool, because everyone thinks their parents are insane. But there's insane like eccentric/elderly/quirky insane, and then there's insane like batshit crazy insane.

Please note that I'm not making up any of the following.

Lisa's Mom has been in the hospital with some strange staphylococcal infection which, until two weeks ago, her doctors had been unable to trace. This week she began to respond to some treatment which has stimulated her immune system, which is now successfully fighting the infection on its own. She’s finally coming home from the hospital today.

Apparently Lisa's Mom kind of keeps the household in line but she's been gone 2 months and Poppa's kinda gone off the rails. Two months with Mom in the hospital means two months Dad has been left to his own bizarre devices at home.

Take equal parts of hippie, hobo, Depression-era farmer, and Groundskeeper Willie. Add three more parts hobo. This next bit may not mean much to non-Canadian readers; but take Red Green, age him and his beard and his hygiene and his unique methods of fixing things 30 years, chuck him in the mix and you'll start to get an idea of what we're dealing with here.

One would think that when one's wife is in the hospital with some weird blood infection, one would clean, or hire someone to clean, the house she's coming back to. Not so. Pops thinks the world is too uptight about filth. As an example of this attitude; when his two dogs - elderly, incontinent, and probably overdue for euthanasia - poop in the house, he gets old car mats he finds in alleys and puts them down on top. The floor is thick with them, and the air is thick with...well, you get the idea.

Yesterday Lisa was over there trying to clean up because her Dad's cleaning skills are negative (in the unlikely event of him trying to clean he would inevitably make more mess). Her Dad was crying, piss-drunk on Navy rum and the inch from the bottoms of miscellaneous dessert liqueurs, and talking about offing himself. This is not new behaviour...he is trying to garner Lisa's sympathy, which is, and should be, firmly focused on her mother. Lisa knows that people who talk about suicide all the time are rarely actually suicidal, so she just grits her teeth and gets on with things.

Earlier in the day Pops had decided that his sick wife would need more room in their bed, so he took a flimsy end table he'd found in an alley, sawed it in half, and tied the halves end to end to the side of the bed. Tied them. To the bed. With scratchy nasty old rope he also probably scavenged from some alley.

Then he started talking about moving to Lisa's brother's house out in the suburbs. 'Might be a good idea to give Mom and Pop some separation', I think, but then Lisa informs me that he plans to live in the grandkids' playhouse in the backyard. We're talking plastic Tomy playhouse for four-year-olds.

Even though the playhouse homesteading idea is not going to happen because of its profound craziness, Pops's absence would probably be a good thing because then I could begin to deal with the yard. Without even getting into the unpruned trees and choking vines, the front yard has this hedge which looks from the outside to be about 3m tall. From the inside it's about 1m tall. The yard level slopes down from the house to the street, but he's filled the yard in with compost so it's level. He gets landscaping companies to drop off grass clippings and yard waste. You pretty much can't walk out there...there are pockets of decay under the surface and if you're not careful you could sink in to your thigh.

Pops poops in a bucket. He figures 'why burden the sewer system with such fine fertilizer', so that goes in the front yard too. So not only could you sink in to your thigh, but you could do it in Pappy's fresh nightsoil.

Oh, and the dandelions...he eats a lot of dandelions. Mixed in with his morning oatmeal. Dandelion greens are actually really healthy...I eat them sometimes in mixed salads or with braised kale or collards. I buy them from the organic market. Dude finds them in public parks, other people's yards, traffic medians...

To be fair, and by way of some sort of explanation, Lisa's Dad's life did start out pretty rough. He lived in Nazi-occupied Holland during the war and often had nothing but tulip bulbs to eat, sometimes for months at a stretch, so I can sort of see how the hoarding and bizarre ideas about self-sufficiency came about. But it's been 60 years now. Oddly, if you think of it a certain way, all this weirdness is part of Hitler's legacy. So at least I can blame the Nazis.

Fuckin' Nazis.

And speaking of dictators, you may be thinking that Mom will come home to rule with an iron fist. Again: not so. She apparently understands that her husband's compost-and-manure-intensive ways do not belong in the TV room and will relegate them to the outdoors, but she's got her own brand of crazy. She is an indoor hoarder. I have counted 4 fridges and freezers in the house, each packed with food. Old food. There are piles of junk mail and newspapers. What is it with crazy people and newspapers? They're like crazy person currency! Lisa says there's a room in the house which is filled with wool. Mom no longer knits, but she still obtains wool and puts it in the wool room. Lisa says you can't get in the room for the wooliness. Mom is also very fond of animals. I can see using humane traps for rats, but Mom feeds them. She says they're cute and that they have little rat families. Which they undoubtedly do, all in the walls of the house and in the cesspool of the front yard.

I haven't met her Mom yet. Lisa says that her Mom is the one you can reason with.

Lisa is normal now, but who knows what fascinating genetic qualities the years will bring out. I guess this will be my dry run.

If this stuff didn't freak Lisa out so bad, I would find it more than mildly entertaining. Actually I pretty much do anyway. I'm trying to get some laughing in now, because soon it may not be much of a laughing matter. Am I a bad person? I guess I'll get paid back once we actually move into our love nest high atop the madhouse.