so, after pointing out that turning off the fan gave me hemiplegic migraines on both sides of my body and i was going to turn it back on, the property owner comes back down to talk today, insisting i'm nuts and i should turn it back off. he had a hard time believing that second-hand smoke could trigger migraines, which is in fact widely known and understood. it's a primary trigger.

legally speaking, the fan is in my space. the hydro is in my name. i can run the fan where and however the fuck i want, and it's his prerogative to make whatever adjustments if he doesn't like it

but, i'm trying to be reasonable, here - both as a legal formality and as a human thing to do. so, i consented to a second experiment....

we at least agreed that the fan is only going to work on the side of the apartment with the bathroom, which he seemed to think was less profound than it is. sure, that's not the whole apartment; it is half of the apartment, and the half i eat and clean myself in. there's good reason to want to pull any bad air out of there. but, the fact is that i spend my time typing and reading and sleeping in the other side of the apartment, which is far more of my time. so, i volunteered downgrading to a table fan in the other room for now, and seeing what kind of effect it had.

i was still recuperating from two major migraine events in what was then the last 24 hours, so i went back to sleep. i'm expecting to start hacking when i get up in a few minutes to eat, but we'll see. i think i can smell it seeping in, already....

he swears up and down he isn't smoking, and, as mentioned, i'm not going to get into an argument with him without being able to reference any kind of proof. that's pointless. but, he didn't seem baked today, and i think i'm starting to piece together a story.

when i moved in here, he had a 9-5 job as an auto-mechanic of some sort. so, he'd leave early and come home late; it's fine, i'm quiet. he'd go away for long weekends, too. in fact, he mentioned he was rarely home, and that was kind of a part of the agreement - he wanted somebody that would be home most of the time, because he wasn't going to be. fair enough.

canada legalized marijuana at the end of october, 2018 and his habits started to change rather dramatically. he started skipping days - he claimed he got migraines, albeit not the crazy ones i get, and with the air quality around here it's easy to believe, even if i hadn't had one before yesterday. then, he seems to have stopped going to work altogether. his hours of awakeness shifted. he seemed to spend days or weeks inside....

the fact is that you can get addicted to aspirin if you try hard enough, but it is broadly understood that marijuana is not habit forming and is of least concern to recovering addicts or people with addictive personality types, except in the sense of being a gateway back in. now, this is a different idea than you hear with kids, which i agree is nonsense. but, have you spent time talking with addicts? my mother is a heroin addict and an alcoholic who has been on methadone for what is now decades, and i used to go to meetings and get-togethers with her and her second husband, who she met through aa. addicts will tell you themselves that what industry reps call "harm reduction" is not an effective means to wean people off of drugs, even if it's an effective way to reduce secondary costs associated with drug use. you can't give a heroin addict a joint and tell them to chill out; the weak marijuana high just triggers them into wanting a stronger opiate high, and they can't stop until they get access to it. so, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of addiction to think you can replace something stronger with something weaker. addicts go from stronger to stronger to stronger to death.

my thought was that maybe he went and bought a few grams and got thrown back into something else. certainly, something happened last fall.

the way he's describing it is that he was being over-prescribed for depression (he didn't specify the drug), and he claims he stayed home for months because he couldn't deal with the doses. he was afraid to drive, specifically. the medication was making him stoned, apparently. it was a kind of mea culpa in code.

he claims he's ok, now. and, indeed, he's been back to work this week. 

i'm not here to lay out a punishment for the guy, but i'm going to take what he said as a confession and a statement of intent that things will get better. and, i'll have to measure how things progress from here.

the fan was a mild concession. i'll probably clean it today, regardless, and work it in to my monthly cleaning routine, and we'll see how loud it gets once it's fixed up a bit.