"I long to honk upon the bong"
Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters
"Is a thing in your kitchen sink that comes to smell peculiar"
Hello:
- If you are curious about what I have been up to the past couple of days all you need to do is picture a shiny-faced woman in thirft-store athletic pants circling an empty school parking lot on her bike in wide, even loops with the new Fiona Apple album cranked up in her headphones, letting the breeze shift the tears out of the corners of her eyes and into her hair, occasionally switching directions so she doesn't get too used to going one way.
- I really don't want to keep hammering this point too hard but there are literally always new things to notice about your neighbourhood right now. It's not as warm as you might want it to be but spring is fucking breaking open out there. No matter how much you think you have already noticed, there is always more and more and more. It is literally impossible for a walk around your block to be boring, even if you walk around your block all day every day. No kidding. A gift! Cats, trees, mice, squirrels, raccoons, birdsong, front porch furniture, garden motifs. Dog traffic. Child art in the windows. Tiny daffodils. Shadow patterns and their angles when the sun comes clear through. Warp and weave of curtain shadow in your neighbours' windows. Little pinpricks of green.
- And at night it's even better! Do NOT get me STARTED on people's curtainless windows in the dusk!! (If I keep writing these newsletters for long enough you are going to end up hearing my one million tedious thoughts about it.) A lifelong obsession. Reason enough, alone, for city living. I remember once many years ago I was kinda talking to this guy and some night out on a walk I texted him I wish there was just a job where you could walk around your neighbourhood after the sun goes down just kind of gazing into people's windows but not in a creepy way and he said "I think that job is just called being a poet." Touché, sir!
- That is the only thing I really remember about that guy but if you're only gonna have one thing it could be worse!
- I may have already said this too but it's also the only chance you get now to eavesdrop on people, which may be the type of public human contact I feel most starved for on a day-to-day basis. Today I had the surreal experience of walking up our street and hearing three very separate spaced out porch-to-porch conversations so similar in theme and tone and content they all seemed like parts of a single hallucination. Like everyone in our neighbourhood was performing the same song in a mind-bending round. I can count the number of times when I have experienced exactly this kind of collective experience on one hand; they are a furnace time melts down inside. It seems important to notice the details, more and more with each passing day.
Something longer to listen to:
Really, the new Fiona Apple album. That's it.
Pets, interiors:
Submit pictures of your pets and spaces to @apartment_poem on instagram.
Roommates:
(Submit petty gripes about the people you share space with anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
This story is not about a roommate, per se, but about someone that is often lurking around my apartment building and who I run into in the course of my daily life much more than I would like to - my property manager (we'll call him Bill). The other day I was taking out the garbage. which is housed in a garage at the back edge of a small parking lot that 3 or 4 other low-rise apartment buildings share with mine. Making my way down the fire escape, I could see that another neighbour was on their way to the garage, too, so I started to think about how to practice social distancing while taking out the trash. I'd take my time walking towards the garage, so that they didn't feel rushed. I'd stand in sight of the garage door so that they saw me but far, far back so we'd always keep 6 feet. As I was waiting in my spot, exchanging light conversation with my stranger neighbour, Bill wondered over with a bag of his own to throw away. He marched right up to the lip of the garage, and waited only because my neighbour was on their way out of the narrow bin maze. As they excited, Bill turned to face them and no-coverage coughed, immediately followed by a belly laugh. "Sue me!" he said.
Dreams:
(Submit dreams anonymously to aparmentpoem@gmail.com)
I dreamt that I was in an apartment that people would meet up at to conduct extra-marital affairs. The arrangement was a lot like the plot of The Apartment, in fact. At one point a klingon entered the apartment. I was very hungry and my boyfriend agreed to take me to Dominos. This Dominos prepared the pizza right in front of you but they were inexplicably topping it with peach muffins. My boyfriend said I could get two mediums as it was a better deal than one small. This was a happy dream because in the dream world covid-19 didn't exist. Most of my other dreams lately acknowledge the reality of there being this virus.
Sometimes I have terrible nightmares, but they are so detailed that when I rouse from them I often struggle to resist falling back in. I need five more minutes of more wakeful dreams to solve them, I think, sometimes. Or, I get invested in the quality of detail. Last night I dreamed I was entangled in a vindictive, sick plot that was set in a large colonial revival mansion like the one I was building in Sims4. This one was painted dark mahoganies and velvet reds and was ramshackle, falling apart on the inside. We, a group of forlorn students were whisked away from here in what we thought was saving grace, but, we were brought to a modernist mansion inside a mall. There, a man, a boss, a corrupted authority instructed us to search and find the physical shadows of our loved ones (planted and buried in different places). We searched, elbow deep in dirt, for items that belonged to them to protect them from the boss, man, corrupted authority who held them hostage and threatened to kill them. In some cases, he already had killed them, and we dug to revive them. Then I woke up.
I dont normally remember my dreams but this one involved you. I was having a big fancy dinner with all my friends at the mall (it's a very specific labyrinthine mall that is based on no real mall but reoccurs in my dreams quite frequently). You were one of the guests, along with an incredibly handsome man that looked familiar but who I did not know, until I realized he was the boy version of you. I think his name was "Boy Emma," or maybe "Jake." You also brought your pet horse that you let me ride around the mall for a while. Then I had to go to the bathroom so I went to the janky bathroom in the basement of the foodcourt, and there was a girl in an empty stall who needed TP so I handed her some and her hands briefly touched and I didn't even think about coronavirus, I just thought, "ew, public bathroom germs." Then all the stalls were gross and dirty when I tried to use them and I realized its cause I actually had to pee so I woke up and got out of bed.
Gentle reminder:
You don't have to go on twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
I wrote about time for a special issue of The Local, which also features incredible insights into the day-to-day lives of people in Allan Gardens, people in virtual bail court, people in the suburbs, families without WiFi, teenagers, and PSWs right now.
Walter Scott in the New Yorker is two hundred steps ahead of me on this topic and also everyone, always
Moody Jooly's online shop is now open, just in time for today. I have a gorgeous little bubbler they made that is one of my most prized possessions; in the daytime it holds a bunch of carved tulips on my desk and if you live in my house and want to use it you have to say a special passphrase to gain access. (If you'd like to know this phrase you can find it somewhere very secret and hidden inside this email.)
Carlo's basketball corner:
Trae Young highlights - Oklahoma 2018