it is impossible to be 100% miserable when you paint your nails all different colours. 90% misery maximum
Funkadelic - Can You Get To That
"Things that/Might be found in a pill bottle include a tiny photograph."
Hello:
- Last week my grandmother told me a story about her friend Jean that sounds like a joke or maybe a parable - something that raises more questions than it answers, contains an inscrutable but crucial truth about human nature at its core. Jean is one of my grandmother's best friends from high school; like my grandmother, she is 92 years old, healthy, and living happily alone in an apartment building downtown. Unlike my grandmother, she does not have many family members living in the city. Knowing this, her two sets of next-door neighbours (one couple on either side) slipped notes under her door to let her know they could pick up groceries for her if she wanted. She went out to thank each of them. The first apartment, she knocked on the door and the wife answered. They chatted for a minute, Jean said thank you, the neighbour said no problem, etc. Then Jean went to the second apartment, where the husband of the couple answered the door completely 100% head-to-toe buck naked. Jean jumped back; the man was very flustered, obviously embarrassed. Eventually, he gathered himself enough to go: "I'm so sorry - I thought you were my wife."
- This morning, walking around the neighbourhood, thinking about how inferior walking is to biking and what a chump I was for doing it, I kept noticing people on their porches - reading books, smoking, staring at their phones, sipping coffee. Even in the blowing wind and unseasonable cold, people are itching to get out there. I saw a man giving a woman a quarantine haircut on a chair in their front yard while their two young kids looked on, laughing. I even saw a young bearded dude sitting at the base of his walkway uncomfortably draped around a small, jagged decorative rock, trying to look casual while reading Camus. (NICE TRY, BUDDY!) It's a very porch-y neighbourhood that really blooms to life in warm weather - a quality I love and appreciate even in normal times but for which I feel extra grateful now. Plus I talked to Penny a little bit yesterday about how good everyone's gardens are going to be once it gets a little nicer out and now I'm looking forward to that too. People really go nuts with the roses around here; many of our neighbours are retired and have a lot of gardening energy to burn and it shows, wonderfully, all over. Plus hydrangeas! And those gorgeous towering soft-focus yards full of cosmos that lean out onto the sidewalk! Trees with leaves that rustle and canopy over the road, that filter the streetlights at night! Cat politics! The great urban outdoors! Yesterday smoking a joint out the window of the back room at like 10pm I watched the fattest raccoon I have seen in quite some time amble across everyone's garage roofs like a character in a videogame, unsteadily negotiating the changes in height and shingle texture, eyes shining in the dark. Raccons! Squirrels! Cat politics. Skunk avoidance. Maybe they'll let one of the peacocks out of the High Park Zoo again, to boost morale. (Remember when that happened?? People would text you pictures of the peacock when they saw it around; it'd pop up on instagram.) Summer! Thank god the next thing is fucking summer. We're so close.
Something longer to listen to:
Longform podcast: Elif Batuman
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)
these people aren't technically my roommates but they are people I share a floor/ceiling with so i think it still counts?. the people who live above us are a Cool Couple who let their twin children just fully run wild without ever telling them no. often lately the dad will let them out into the backyard of our building, which my window looks directly down onto, when the mom can't stand them or has work to do. he uses this time to just really shred on the guitar for an hour or two. the kids chase each other around the yard screaming at each other and whipping rocks at the ground while the dad just dials up the wah-wah on his sick axe. i cannot imagine how hard it must be to be a parent right now, let alone the parent of two feral demons, but it's also very loud and the kids are so screechy and sometimes i do want to drop kick them into the yard next door.
Dreams:
(submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
A lot of my dreams all take place in this one very fancy hotel complex; sometimes it's on a barge and sometimes it's not, always it is connected to Japan in some way - like if you take the right public transit route from its doorstep you'll end up there somehow. Last night I was in the big complex of branching caves that sit many levels below the main hotel building. I have been there before in other dreams; they are full of lots of weird stores that open and close at strange times and often contain clues to a broader mystery I feel I am supposed to solve but never can. Last night I was just wandering around and every single store down there was closed. There was a very spooky feeling but also it was a little beautiful to be alone in this place. I was afraid the cave was going to collapse and no one I was able to text could give me a good answer about whether that was something that had ever happened before.
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:
Red on Roundball dribbling drills with Pete Maravich
I love this one I LOVE IT