Relax. You're In Capable Hands.

Good evening. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Sam's housemate. Like Beethoven in Beethoven Lives Upstairs, I live upstairs, though unlike Beethoven I'm not hard of hearing and I know just a smattering of German: schadenfreude, perestroika, joie de vivre, not much more than that.

In striking contrast to Sam, I do as little as possible every day. Mostly I sit with my back to the camera like Don Draper in Mad Men as I marinate in cultural anxiety and Brylcreem. I've been working on a sonnet for the past year, and I'm nearing completion of the third line, the only trouble being that I can't think of the right rhyme for "wispy." Neither "crispy" nor "lispy," if that's even a word, will do.

Longtime readers of this blog have become used to medical themes and leitmotifs. The good news is I feel eminently qualified to carry on this tradition. My father, you see, is an M.D. Some of you science pedants will say that knowledge can't be passed on from dad to kid, the way that I inherited (say) my god-like physique or skill at the caber toss. Well, I used to be with you on that one, until full-grown adults started asking me for medical advice upon learning of my dad's profession. When I'd tell them I lack the expertise that allows doctors to diagnose bunions at a glance, they'd put their socks back on and turn away hurt and confused. They seemed to genuinely believe I was withholding some cure-all. Oh, bless their hearts, as they say in the South.

My connection to Sam is that we were raised as brothers. Each afternoon of our golden childhood we would walk through the forest and hunt wild boar and pick daisies and ride a long pendular rope swing, letting go at an apogee of some twenty feet over a clear cold mountain lake, into which we'd fall with a ha-ha and a splash. Hm, or maybe what we'd do is hunt daisies and ride wild boars and watch Swingers on TNT. Hard to say, my memory's all fogged up from the Xanax. Anyway, what eventually happened was, Sam betrayed me, and I was cast out of the community and forced to fend for myself on the blasted heath. I subsisted on locusts and honey. And there was much beating of breast and gnashing of teeth, let me tell you. My raiment was rent and my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and, lo, my iPod ran out of charge.

However, one day I received a text from Sam and there was a teary, some would say overly drawn out, reconciliation such as you find toward the end of Shakespeare plays and Bollywood movies. We swore a blood oath never to watch Swingers again, even if there was nothing else on, and I agreed to write his blog for him while he went on spring break.