Jimbo

Here are some reasons, in no particular order, why I think my new roommate is going to work out just fine.

He hails from Alabama, and he kind of talks like Wooderson, Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused, which leads me to ask him to say lines like, "I get older, and they stay the same age. Yes they do."

I wouldn't call him a heavy drinker, but he has a Jim Beam or two every few nights. The other day he was making chili, and he reaches for the bottle of Beam and says, "Eh, what the hell. I'll pour a little 'Jimmy' in there." I asked him what does that do for the dish, and he had no idea. When he had finished his masterpiece, he says, "You know, you can actually taste the Jimbo in there." I would have thought that a bad thing, but he followed it up with, "It's real good."

It's getting nicer out in Chicago, and he had not seen the lake yet. He told me that he walked down to the lake, stopped to do a few sets of pull-ups on a tree branch, and as he's telling me this, he was showing me the scrapes on his hands. That's a man's man right there.

All five roomies participated in a night of margaritas, and he said, "I think I have the heartburn." The heartburn. Perhaps that's one you would have to hear him say to get how it's funny . . .

He's seriously considering brewing up some peach moonshine in the apartment.

I wanted to go to Aldi because I'm broke and needed lots of groceries, and knowing he had just got back from grocery shopping, I said, "You should go along just to make fun of weirdos." I was kidding, but he came along. And we did poke fun at a great deal of weirdos.

He pays rent, he's clean, and he's a gentleman. You would think this one would be the biggest reason, but I think the best thing is that he affectionately refers to his bottle of Beam as Jimbo.