I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you all today in sunny, wonderful Ames, but I had to go to Atlanta. The good news is I am nearly as prolific as Stephen King, and the better news is I never write about weird-ass little kids with bizarre mental abilities, whacked out dogs or evil clowns that are not directly related to me.

I worked all of that out in therapy.

I do go on the occasional rant, however, and since I am somewhat pressed for time and under the immense pressure of flying for the first time in my pathetic life, I thought I would whip out a classic roommate rant.

This is not about my current roommate. I have had over 30 in my time, so in the interest of peace, I will tell you about some of the crazier ones I have had so you will be able to turn to that special someone you are currently shacked up with and say, “My GOD, I’m lucky!”

My freshman year there was Mike. We knew each other from back home. He used to push me around in junior high so when he asked me to move in with him, of course, I said “yes” like it was the freaking prom or something.

He had a bundle of emotional problems the way Jack the Ripper had issues with women. He made everyone miserable through his secret machinations. He could be described as Machiavellian if Machiavellian meant obnoxious, spiteful reject.

I was having a hard time adjusting to college like most freshmen. To ease the transition, Mike suggested we spend our first night in Ames at The Foxy Lady, a dark hole in the wall with strippers. Raised in a modest, Christian home, I agreed to go after Mike assured me that the cops in Ames NEVER went in the bars to check IDs. I don’t know where he spent HIS freshman year, but it could not have been Iowa State.

Ten minutes in the place, I was spread-eagled against an Ames PD prowler for being a minor on premises. My first day at college, folks, and it only gets better.

One week later, Mike thought it would be funny to ask out an old girlfriend of mine because she told him she had dumped me. I dumped her, but Mike assumed I was lying and that it would burn me to no end to have her in our apartment.

He asked her over the phone right in front of me. She turned him down flat, and I laughed myself silly. Then Mike threw a chair at me in retort. The rest of the year was just about as successful.

I still have flashbacks. He did things in the shower and then bragged about it. To this day, I can’t use soft soap.

After Pete and Kirk, my normal roommates, and I got rid of that freakshow, we got Dan the Man. He was the Chuck Yeager of couch potatoes. His mission in life was to actually exceed 24 hours of television viewing in one day. TV executives said it couldn’t be done, but he did it.

He smoked and chewed tobacco at the same time. He got mad if we left OUR newspaper on OUR coffee table because he would then have to wash it with soap and a wet sponge. He was quite, quite mad.

Then there was Bobo. He was trying to beat Dan’s TV record, and we didn’t even have cable. There is nothing more frustrating that listening to the theme song from “Quincy” when you are trying to sleep at 2 a.m.

He had a guinea pig he was ritually abusing for a science project or something. He never fed it or gave it water, but he would cut its hair every day. That thing was bald up until its untimely death from exposure.

The really funny thing is, Bobo wanted to be a veterinarian. To this end, he signed up for 18 credits a semester and then never went to classes. He slept until 3 p.m. because he stayed up late nights trying to out-diagnose Quincy, and that is just not possible.

He had one other inhuman trait that directly affected all of our lives. He ate 40 pounds of meat per day but only went to the bathroom once every TWO days.

We found this out one day the hard way when, after 45 minutes in the toilet, he rushed out of the house on an emergency plunger run to Wal-Mart. He told us NOT to go into the bathroom. So we did.

What we saw chilled us. It was the most evil thing you can imagine finding in a toilet. There are more modest cows in this world. The lid couldn’t even be closed and there was no water visible. Apparently, this guy had never heard of a mercy flush. Unreal.

He also fell in love with a stripper named Candy by Thanksgiving. He was absolutely convinced that this woman loved him, too, so he bought her a $50 necklace and gave it to her with a tape of all the songs he liked her to dance to. It was kind of sad. But it was more funny than it was morose so we ran with it.

I came home one day and he was soaking a wart in my coffee cup. It was probably an act of grim revenge for all the times I made him do his own dirty dishes and laughed at him for blowing all his money on that stripper.

Then there was Gordon, the mad Irishman. He accused me of stealing his Wheaties because when he left in May there was half a box and when he came back he was sure he had more than that.

I told him I hadn’t realized he had hidden a box of Wheaties in the back of the cupboard behind the rat poison. I told him I thought guys like him preferred Lucky Charms, and THAT didn’t go over well. He called me a bastard and threw a door at me. The circle of life continues.

He drank a lot, complained about Americans and expected me to answer for the crimes of my country. As if I could answer for American football and justify the weakness of our beer while being screamed at in Gaelic by a rabid, mother-obsessed U2 fan.

So remember, no matter how bad things get with your roommate, there will always be someone more psychotic to come along one day and make you realize that an efficiency is the one true path to happiness.

Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.