Somewhere in mid-southern Ontario, in a mid-size city, of intermediate age and middling aspirations, is a typical Co-op medium-rise building of average height and standard structure, inhabited by predictable people of conventional ambitions, routine lifestyles and mediocre incomes and IQs.

From a distance, all the usual patterns of day-to-day life seem to be in order. They all eat, sleep, work (well, some…) and try not to think too much about their lives of uninspired ennui. Closer inspection will reveal that a few, however, by either fate, accident or intent, have had the strange fortune of having the mind-numbing monotony of their lives broken up by events that may be any of: coincidence, directed angst by a vengeful deity, or, more likely, simply randomly strewn tribulations drawn by chance from the distant thin, turbulent edges of universal chaos.

This is their story.

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As our series begins, we find…

The sun was high in the sky one warm summer’s noon hour, over 222 Gofera Drive, in a bland little city in central Ontario.  Two-twenty-two was an unimpressive and architecturally anonymous medium-sized high-rise that functioned as a middlingly-successful co-op and home to over one hundred families, many of whom put the “funk” in dysfunctional.  Though every one of them had a life style based on a search for minimal effort and simplistic equality, some, as they say, were more equal than others.

Garth Meerschaum stomped into the living room of his newly refurbished apartment on the ninth floor.  He strode crankily over to where his wife Frappé stood dreamily, looking out the freshly scrubbed window at the cityscape below them.  “Frap!” he boomed.  She jumped.  “Haven’t I told you a thousand times before… don’t squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube!!” he yelled.

As Frappé recovered her senses and calmed down from the sudden fright he’d just given her, she brought her mind back from daydreaming about another renovation she’d been planning for their apartment, although the paint was barely dry from the latest reno she had effected.  “S-s-sorry” she spluttered.

“Yes, you are!” he continued in his harangue.  “How can you always forget such a simple thing so consistently??!!”

“W-well…  I was just thinking about how nice it would be if we moved the Ming vase over to the other corner, rearranged the east side of the living room, and put Grand-uncle Lothario’s cremation urn above the oak humidor on the Victorian shelving.”