I never get asked to house sit anymore. It’s like a thing you do in your mid- to late twenties, if you’re lucky, and your early thirties, if you’re single or cheating on your partner. I never openly cheated on my partner, and by the time I was really ready to, there weren’t that many people around to cheat with, and meeting new people is hard when you approach middle age, especially as a man.
You also have to be poor, or at least the poor friend.
What I liked about housesitting was the opportunity to try others’ toiletries unabashedly. Like you can take a whole thirty minutes in the bathroom with soaps alone, and lotions, and other tubes and pumps and bottles that contain scents, and you have no one waiting on you you assume presumes you’re pooping, stealing, or masturbating.
The last time I cheated on someone while housesitting was the weekend of a friend’s wedding. I was a week off bronchitis and still taking liquid codeine, meaning I was mixing liquid codeine with whiskey and vodka and the house was spinning like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz when I got home with my stranger.
I had also fundamentally misunderstood melatonin at the time. Someone in Super Supplements told me it was some kind of magic regulator of sleep and wakefulness, and it didn’t matter when you took it, and also that five milligrams was pussy bullshit and wouldn’t affect you at all. So, I took a fair amount of it.
We didn’t sleep together that night. We just slept. And when we were done sleeping we slept together in the most guilt- and shame-laden sex I ever experienced. I might as well have been sobbing on her chest. She might as well have been texting sorry to her contacts list. Maybe she was.
She went home like right after we stopped, we just stopped, because she had a lot of explaining to do as the Maid of Honor who left the wedding mid-ceremony to lay down in a field with one of the ushers. And I ignored a few texts from my girlfriend visiting her ailing dad, and I tried to push everything I’d just done with the stranger out of my mind and tried to work out all day to sweat out the guilt and the hangover–back then I worked out a lot for some reason. And I took melatonin in fistfuls to set me right and back to normal and couldn’t believe how hard it was to get off the couch.
8/3/2025
We need soap and paper towels and I need to get back to running and biking.
todd of tacoma 