men of the neighbourhood, exercising
Viagra Boys - Sports
"A sponge besides being an animal that looks & grows like a plant"
Hello:
- Adult man encased in Under Armour doing vigorous squats on a public path while his wife and young child watch from a few feet away, the daughter vaguely imitating the motions, clearly fascinated and incredibly bored at the same time
- Dad-type dude with the hat and the windbreaker walking down the street. Stops on the sidewalk when he comes upon me stopped in the road, balancing the bike between my legs, staring up at a tree. I heard a woodpecker and now I am looking for it. "Woodpecker?" the Dad Man asks. That's what I thought, I tell him. We both stare up at the tree a while longer and then he keeps walking and then I keep biking. We pass each other three or more times; he is circling the same three blocks clockwise and I'm biking around them the other way. We do not make eye contact
- Two long-haired kids doing bike tricks in the parking lot of the Catholic school, filming each other but still carefully keeping their distance
- The condos behind us, which I still call "the new condos" even though they've been here for years now, all have balconies that look out onto our backyard. The angle and elevation of the buildings means that all sound coming off these balconies funnels perfectly down towards us. Whether I want to or not (50/50 normally, 100% now that all other eavesdropping opportunities have disappeared) I can hear phone conversations, partner conversations, pet conversations, etc. as crystal-clear as if they were happening two feet away.
Other glimpses of information come through: one family has a beautiful, silken-haired golden retriever, and I've seen another couple bringing their cat out for leashed walks on the building's slight front lawn. Another woman used to have her friends over for dinner every Saturday night and they would get hammered and start singing '80s power ballads out on the balcony at so exactly the same time every week you could literally set your watch to it. One dude reads naked on his couch a lot - and though I would actually prefer not to know that, his place is literally directly in the spot you land on when you're standing at the stove stirring something and your gaze drifts idly out the window. Very few of these people have curtains. I often wonder what they think of us.
Yesterday while I was watching Jeopardy Louise yelled "EMMA EMMA COME HERE QUICK!!!!!" from the kitchen so I did and what we saw was that the guy below the naked guy had installed two gymnastic rings somehow into the ceiling of his balcony, and was now attempting to use them to do some kind of tough guy workout. It was getting dark outside. Haloed by the evenly spaced tungsten bulbs he'd installed perfectly the summer before, clad in all black, leaning into the high wind, he kept hoisting himself up, doing leg lifts or flipping upside down and just kinda hanging out there for a while. He looked uncomfortable but determined. Sometimes a very small dog would trot out of the apartment and come watch him for a while, then go back in. Every time he lifted himself up or let himself down he'd let out an enormous cartoon HNRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH!!!! that sounded, I am sorry to say, like someone either trying to lift a car or shit one out. The wind was really blowing very hard. Occasionally, between reps, he'd have to stop to untangle the rings from each other while staring out into the middle distance with a look of real plaintive determination. Even when I went upstairs and closed the blinds for focus I could still hear him grunting. I cannot remember the last time I have experienced something as purely delightful as this and I do not know if anything will beat it anytime soon. I hope he doesn't give up.
Something longer to listen to:
Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro's SLAM cover shoot
(Technically this is also something you can watch but I have been thinking a lot lately about Bam's automatic t-shirt folder and I wanted to broadcast it out into the world so you could maybe think about it too.)
Pets, interiors:
Visit @apartment_poem on instagram for more, or to submit your own.
Roommates:
(No roommates this week! Keep up the team-building, but if you ever need to complain anonymously about the people you share space with: apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
Dreams:
(This was our only submission this time around and I am not sure if it's a dream or just true observations from life but because we didn't have anything else I will let you see it and judge for yourself. Submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
From what feels like months ago at the beginning of maybe isolation:
There was a couple eating in a window high up and i was admiring them because 1 put their hand on the other and then saw me looking and waved
A little kid sneezed as we passed and we all started laughing, his mum sighing and berating him
An old lady on the mountain asking whether it was morning or afternoon, being pulled by this little dog, and me saying I don’t know and my friend saying you're charming
There is a rope at my favourite bakery to show where to queue up and a guy thought it was to put distance between the staff and customer, so was ordering his cakes like 2 metres from the counter
and they were showing how they would throw him his little champignon brioche
In the same bakery a tiny tiny kid came in with two 5 dollar bills and asked for a champignon for him and his friend
and they gave him 3 to be sweet and everyone made eye contact and the crowd went wild
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:
Milos Teodosic - crazy assists
(they are crazy!)