It all started three and a half weeks ago when Tall Mike left the fucking back door unlocked and ajar again. Usually, a possum or one of the neighborhood cats gets in and we rustle it out in the morning. This time though it was fucking beloved punk icon Jeff Rosenstock. He snuck in and locked himself in Garrett’s old room.
At first, we were stoked. Confused but really stoked. Jeff Rosenstock was in our house. That’s RAD. But the whole first day, he stayed locked in the room, ignoring us when we tried to talk to him. Then, just after midnight, he finally emerged—only to grab a stack of my records and scurry back inside. The only reason we even knew he left was because Short Mike’s girlfriend, Harmony, saw him.
It didn’t take long to figure out what he was doing. First came the singing, familiar both because it was Jeff Rosenstock’s unmistakable voice and because he was singing songs from my own favorite records. Then came the horns. Finally, the Bandcamp releases started—two albums a day, all ska, all from my collection.
At first, it was incredible. Jeff gave each album a ska pun, so my roommates and I skanked and sang along to albums by the Ska-cteau Twins, Belle and Ska-bastian, and Simon and Ska-funkel. We drank to London Ska-lling, smoked weed to Ska-bbey Road, and played video games to Nashville Ska-line. It was great. Until it wasn’t.
But it wasn’t the albums. Those were still awesome. The problem was that Jeff was living in our house, rent-free, leaving unflushed growlers in the toilet, and eating all our spaghetti. He barely spoke to us unless spaghetti was involved, and even then, all he would say was, “More spaghetti.”
We don’t know what to do. Our shithead landlord is useless, so we didn’t even bother asking. Jeff also saw right through the elaborate, cartoonish Rube Goldberg-style trap we set outside Garrett’s old room. Desperate, we even emailed Laura Stevenson for help, but all she replied was, “You shouldn’t have fed him spaghetti.”
Someone has got to help us. Jeff just dropped three albums by Explosions in the Ska, and yeah, they rule, but I can’t take this anymore!