The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude.

August 1st is a dark day in the history of Minneapolis for tragedy has befallen our fair city two years in a row on this precise date.

Of course, there was the Wednesday afternoon when an-up-until-then harmless bridge killed thirteen of our citizens and inconvenienced the rest, and then there was yesterday, when I officially moved back to Minneapolis. At press-time, it's unknown which equally horrific episode will incur the most casualties.

I am officially a citizen of Uptown once again, which carries with it no significance aside from parking my ass at the Green Mill five nights out of the week instead of three.

My apartment is located two blocks away from the lake, and two or three blocks away from the fun parts of Uptown. It's fully furnished with utilities taken care of, as I'm sub-leasing from a woman who is leaving the country for nine months. There's a deck and a backyard, and a closet big enough to put a desk into, which promotes it from closet to an office where my clothes and underwear are also located.

There are problems with the apartment. For instance, it also seems to be a wormhole back to the year 1986, where it is forever trapped. The decor, the rotary-dial phones, the last time the circuits were inspected. If you attempt to smuggle something from the year 2008 into wormhole, 1986 will invade that something, and transform it into the 1986 version of that something. Which I think is the reason that all my DVDs turned into Beta-Max copies of Top Gun, and I'm updating this blog on my "new" Commodore 64.

My landlady has her own set of quirks as well. She's a shockingly serious woman, almost as if she were the result of Ben Stein and a thesaurus deciding to get drunk one night and just see what happens. I have all access to the apartment, except for a den which has been blocked off, and I am under strict orders never to invade her Forbidden Cave of Mystery and Danger. I am not anxious to break this rule, as I'm fairly certain the den would send me to 1886, and then I'd have to become a Blacksmith and fall in love with Mary Steenburgen.

And instead of a bed, she sleeps on a fold-out bed, and insists that I not try to replace with an actual bed. Does anyone have any pointers on how to make one of those more comfortable?

She also hasn't left yet. When I arrived with my first bundle of Josh-stuff*, she was still in the apartment. Despite the rent check having exchanged hands and emptied out of my account. There is an agreement that she is able to come into her Forbidden Cave of Mystery and Danger whenever she needs to, but I will be given advanced warning.

That being said, shortly ago, I received a call from Landlady, informing me that she was standing inside the apartment, making popcorn, and deciding to have a garage sale. Whether it's with mine or her stuff, that'll be a late-night surprise when I get home from work tonight.

I guess the same can be said on whether or not I have a roommate.

Thus far, it's one of the more bizarre living arrangements I've stumbled into, but even I didn't like freaky-weird risks, I wouldn't even be looking on Craigslist to begin with.

So, if you're in the neighborhood, stop on by. We can sip beer on my deck and talk about art, or whatever those pseudo-hipster Uptown douchebags are into nowadays. Or, if you want to find out what your life would've been like had you just hit that baseball in the big game, I've nearly perfected a method of sending messages to the outside world of 1986.

Oooh! We could fix the bridge before the bridge gets broke! Look at that, silver living.

*Which, I'd like to point to all friends that I made this move all by my lonesome, so file that away for the next time you move.