a dog is really just an apartment horse if you think about it
(It's called that because I already had this hanging above my desk.)
Alice Coltrane - Govinda Jai Jai
“They say there is a dying star which is traveling in two directions.”
Hello:
Doro and I were talking on the phone about how maybe the important thing is just to write everything down for a while.
On Friday the last place Carlo and I stopped was the pet store. The cat has been restless lately, meowing even more than usual, weaving terrifyingly in between my legs as I go up the stairs. I think it’s just the season. We’ve been opening the window when it's sunny out, and now all of a sudden he remembers the air. Can you blame him?
After Moira's apartment and the grocery store and the roiling LCBO we went to Pet Valu and got one thousand pounds of cat litter because it was on sale and we had the car, but also I bought him this fucking $30 harness and leash so he can come out into the backyard with me in the mornings. When it gets warmer he can bask in the sun while I work in the garden, a routine we established last year when I was still in the depths of concussion and that I think maybe kind of literally saved my life. This new harness has stronger straps than his old one and is padded a bit like a life jacket. It's pretty goofy-looking, which is only fair. When a human brings a leashed cat outside, each of them is robbed of a significant measure of their dignity even as they are getting the thing they technically wanted. It is one of the most layered exchanges of sacrifice and payoff you can engage in as a pet owner. Humbling for everyone. Not unuseful. I wondered if he would let me put it on him.
But he did! Not only that, he bent his head forward the second we brought it out, and I remembered the way he had done that the first time we ever tried to put one on him - like he already knew what this thing was and what it was for. This is the thing about pets, and rescued ones in particular, that never stops being incredible to me: they come with a whole past life, and the only way you ever get to know it is in the places where your gestures overlap with the ones they used to know. What a way to know another creature.
Something longer to listen to:
James Baldwin: “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”
(Video cuts off before the end of speech, but the last sentences are in the comments.)
I really don’t like words like ‘artist’ or ‘integrity’ or ‘courage’ or ‘nobility.’ I have a kind of distrust of all those words, because I don’t really know what those words mean, any more than I really know what such words as ‘democracy’ or ‘peace’ or ‘peace-loving’ or ‘warlike’ or ‘integration’ mean. And yet, one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are kind of attempts made by us all to get to something which is real, and which lives behind the word. Whether I like it or not, for example, and no matter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me when the chips are down is that I am an artist. There is such a thing. There is such a thing as integrity, some people are noble. There is such a thing as courage.
The terrible thing is that all of these words, the reality behind these words, depend ultimately on what the human being - meaning every single one of us - believe to be real. The terrible thing is that all these words, the reality behind them, depend on choices one has got to make, forever and ever and ever, every day. I am not interested, really, in talking to you as an artist. It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for his integrity is a kind of metaphor - must be considered as a metaphor - for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this terrifying globe, to get to become human beings.
Pets, Interiors:
Visit @apartment_poem on instagram for more, or to submit your own.
Roommates:
(submit petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
You'd think that being home all the time would make him better at washing the dishes. You'd think!!
im thinking of telling my upstairs neighbours im infected so they stop having parties every night.
Dreams:
(submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
Very literal. Basically just about waking up to teach the class I was supposed to teach when I woke up. Kind of frustrating.
I was supposed to get married but I couldn't decide on a dress. I kept thinking of the dresses my friends had worn at their weddings - translucent, layered fabrics, very flowy. I thought maybe I'd go look for a sequinned jumpsuit - too basic? - at the fancy dress rental place next door to my job at the incredibly expensive hotel and was ready to be late for work in order to do it, but when I got to the store I discovered it had been bought by my bosses, three famous podcast hosts who had been buying up local businesses as investments. They were mad that I had been planning on being late for work. I had to bus the tables, which were all individual hot tubs, while waiting to see if the podcast guys were going to fire me.
Gentle reminder:
You don’t have to go on Twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Carlo's basketball corner:
Steph Curry shimmies at MSG
Chris Paul uses Steph Curry's own dance against him