For the last issue, I drank perhaps a few too many sips of cheap boxed wine while I was writing, and concocted a list, cleverly titled, “Things Not to Do While Your Roommate Is Sleeping.” In my defense, for the most part, the list was entirely innocent. At least 90 percent of it had absolutely nothing to do with Troy. Things like “Don’t eat a bag full of cured salamis and cheeses” and “Don’t perform maintenance on your personal pubic hedges, no matter how aggressively your freakishly pubescent body parts have begun to shed their fur.” And of course, being the drunk asshole that I can be, I added as a final touch, and in caps for unmistakable emphasis: “And most important, DON’T MASTURBATE WHILE YOU THINK YOUR ROOMMATE IS SLEEPING. TROY, I’M TALKING TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.”

Save. Print forty copies. Tape to the back of forty bathroom stalls. Wait to be murdered.

Now, before you write me off as a terrible asshole who broke some kind of deep, unspoken code about never tattling on your midnight-masturbating roommate, it was ostensibly a newsletter full of satire! At the very worst, everybody should’ve assumed I was making a horrible joke, except for all of the people I’d told the truth, which included basically everybody.

Regardless, Troy never mentioned it, either because he never shit in our dorm, or because he pretended, as always, he was too cool to care.

In any case, Troy was the last man I ever (reluctantly) shared a bedroom with. And I hope this story stands as a warning to any man who may consider sharing a bedroom with me in the future: Let it be known that this is my territory. What happens here is in my control.

And if you try to secretly masturbate behind my back, I will tell everybody we know that it happened.

ON LIVING ALONE IN NEW YORK CITY

There’s a point in the process of searching for an apartment in New York City, perhaps when you’re standing in a paper-bag-turned-bedroom, staring at a toilet beneath a kitchen sink next to an icebox plugged into a power strip that’s dangling from a hole in the wall, when you start to wonder if death might truly be the answer. A coffin costs less for the same square footage, after all. It’s got hardwood finishing, with bedding and draperies already installed, no year-end rent increases, no neighbors to complain that the TV is too loud, a solid foundation, and most important, no roommates to judge you for decaying in the same spot all weekend. It’s really the perfect arrangement, all things considered.

But a coffin isn’t always the answer, which is how I found myself, like millions of would-be New Yorkers every year, in search of a place my living, breathing body could occupy for less than the cost of sacrificing my firstborn. (Though, to be fair, I’d gladly sell my unborn children to a labor camp in exchange for a two-bedroom Greenwich Village loft with a washer and dryer.)