Intruder Alert

The Lizard Brain Is A Foreigner

I have become a workhorse. My mind is clouded with thoughts of marketing, people management, deliverables, and all the other things that come with it. This is a pleasant change, but when it comes time for me to sit down and put together a Substack... I feel as though all I want to do is talk shop.

And fuck that. Instead, I'm going to tell a story. It's pretty funny, but I have to say it wasn't the most enjoyable sequence of events to live through.

On Monday last week I moved apartments. The chain of events that preceded this involved a visa run, mild cold-like symptoms following 12 hours in an air-conditioned vehicle, a stand-up comedy set, all of the madness that goes into a pre-move apartment clean and pack, and then the move itself. I'm travelling light (<20kgs) so it wasn't the most back- or ball-breaking move, but all moving sucks especially when you're hectic in the time before and after it.

Anyway, I got in and got set up, and went about doing a New Apartment Laundry cycle. For whatever reason, my instincts told me to leave a bunch of towels outside the bathroom just in case. When I got home they were soaked all the way through and the bathroom had flooded. Number one on the 'all that glitters is not gold' list for the new apartment.

The landlady is responsive though. I told her what happened and she prepared to dispatch some people to fix it. Then I took my clothes out of the washing machine - dirtier than when they went in. Strike 2, and immediately added to the landlady’s list.

Then, on Wednesday night, I jumped into bed around midnight and swiftly fell asleep. A short time afterwards I woke up. I had no obvious reason for waking up and my brain did its little retrospective analysis of events to try and reconcile precisely why I had returned from the early levels of sleep.

Conscious brain: what the fuck? I was asleep, and falling deeper into it. Everything was absolutely acceptable and fine. What's going on here?

Unconscious brain: your ears heard something that you had no business hearing. You need to find out what it was and why.

Conscious brain: ugh. Fine. Eyes, open up and let's take a look.

My eyes opened and my conscious brain went from mildly disgruntled to actively threatened, as I saw the white light of a mobile phone torch moving around the inside of my kitchen. In the time it took my eyes to open and my brain to compute the information, I had flung my sheet covers off my entirely naked body and leapt from my bed, screaming 'Hey, raus!' at the intruder. (Turns out my lizard brain operates in German. That was a very interesting thing to reflect on after the fact)

In my kitchen, wearing shorts, but no shoes and no shirt, was a middle-aged white man, half-way through extending his arm towards my fridge. Clearly recognising the scream as an indicator that he was not in the place he was supposed to be, he turned towards the door (without directly looking at me in all my furious rage and nakedity [to explain the word choice]), mumbled 'wrong apartment', and walked out without apology or concern.

I stood for a few moments longer, staring at the door and feeling my heart pump with all its might, wondering what the fuck just happened. In the apartment I had lived in previously, the key opened the door, and it was not possible to simply unlock the door for future entry and exit. The key went 'beep beep', and the door opened. But once the door closed again, there was no opening the door without the 'beep beep'.

Evidently I had forgotten this fact and not locked my door. Additionally evident was that some drunken fool had not seen the very clear signs that it was my apartment and not his (standing immediately outside my door is a table with a case of water on it, a clothes rack with slightly dirtier clothing than I'd have liked hanging from it, a mop, a dustpan, shoes, and numerous other signs of NOT YOUR FUCKING APARTMENT littered around the area), and wandered in without a care in the world.

I stayed awake for the next two hours, watching the cortisol flood through my system, as I nurtured the fire of burning rage and anger towards the upstairs neighbour while he obliviously reorganised the physical location of every piece of furniture in his apartment, using a tried and tested technique known as ‘dragging them across the floor with no consideration for the downstairs neighbour who may or may not be three minutes away from a heart attack’, for those very same two hours. It was abundantly obvious that the upstairs neighbour was the foolish intruder.

The next day, having sufficiently calmed myself, I went upstairs to have a level-headed conversation with him to make sure he knew where he lived, and to ask him not to wander into my apartment at half past one in the morning again. The guy that opened the door had a silhouette identical with the apparition from the evening before (surprise, surprise), was, from his accent, American (surprise, surprise), and had not a word of apology to express for his foolish miscalculation. Instead he said 'you should lock your door'. Now, this is a point I am willing to take from friends, family, and independent observers learning of the situation after the fact, but, as the midnight intruder, an apology is expected. My calm dissolved, I gave him a bit of a spray, and we left on good terms, energetically both agreeing to go fuck ourselves.

The following day the washing machine people came and made a few tweaks and adjustments, and I messaged the landlady again saying 'thanks for your swift help on my apartment. By the way, the guy upstairs is a fucking idiot and I hope he accidentally falls down the stairs and injures himself quite seriously'. (I am, of course, paraphrasing. Google Translate doesn't quite capture the nuance). She responded by saying 'he will move out soon, don't worry', to which I replied 'when he goes, can I take his apartment and have the top floor?', to which she replied 'yes'.

The moral of the story is this: sometimes you have to yell at intruders in your apartment, butt-naked, in German, flooded with cortisol, at 1:36am on a Thursday if you really want to get ahead in life. I will have the top floor by the end of the month, and I look forward to strolling into the abodes of those peasant level six dwellers when the time comes.

I hope you're all having a better week than I did. Much love, and catch you soon <3