the pasta place is way too expensive but also so good it's messed up
the portions are HUGE though so you can kinda convince yourself it's okay
Apartment Poem is free, but you can support it (and me) here.
“if you do not / Complain of money there is probably something wrong with your life.”
Hello:
Lava lamp, cake stand, record player, skillet. Big stupid mittens, magic socks, working oven. Boots that just pull on and off. Cat, kitchen rug, decaf coffee. Enormous jar of weed. Bright yellow lighter on top. Walking in the park with Deragh in the freezing freezing cold. Weird wet mask sticking to your face. Everyone out with their sleds and their kids and their beautiful dogs, running or sliding down the nearly snowless hill. The greatest pleasure in life is still to just look at the dogs, watch them living their dog lives, thinking their dog thoughts. You know that part in Inherent Vice where he goes to the police station for the first time? All this strange alternative cop history and cop politics, cop dynasties, cop heroes and evildoers, saintly cops and psycho cops, cops too stupid to live and cops too smart for their own good, insulated by secret loyalties and codes of silence from the world they'd all been given to control. I know it is very rude to put dogs next to police in an idea. But I always think of that phrasing when I walk around the park. Dog personalities, dog history, dog politics, dog dynasties, dog heroes and villains, both apart from the world and entirely of it. When I was a kid and my father lived on the edge of this same park we’d take Buddy out and unclip him from the leash and let him run around in the bowl while we circled above occasionally glancing down, one two three times around, call him back up, clip the leash on. Different time! It was kind of like, your relationship with those guys down there is your business, we’ll just chill up here. Now when you look into the bowl it’s like a high-stakes stage for the neighbourhood’s longest and shiniest puppies and their well-dressed owners. Everyone performing in the round. We did the circuit a few times. Dogs in the snow, rolling around with their paws up in that way that just literally kills you, catching frisbees, hunting for the big orange ball, wearing their weird cold-weather pants. Kids on toboggans just fully eating shit on the smoothed-out icy surface of the hill. We walked across the park and passed by the house where I’d lived back then and without really thinking I pointed it out to Deragh. “There’s my house!” Does it ever stop feeling like it belongs to you?
I remembered, for a second, this weird moment from a few weeks ago. I was going to pick up a thing I’d bought on the internet. The address of the person I was picking it up from turned out to be right next to a place I’d lived for a few years, back when I was in high school, after my dad moved out of the place on the edge of the park, maybe two or three houses later. I was walking to this internet person’s house, thinking about proximity like I literally always do, and it occurred to me that there has to be something I actually really like about all the weird uncanny overlap of living in this city. Like, I’m 30 years old and I live in all the same neighbourhoods I grew up in. On purpose! No one is forcing me to do this. And yet I keep acting like I’m surprised at these types of coincidences, when something new is next to something I remember, like these moments have a grand poetic significance, like they are entirely unexpected each time. I was walking to this house and thinking about how at a certain point I might have to admit that having the past and present stacked up on top of each other like this isn’t just a thing that keeps happening to me, it’s a choice I keep actively making. Maybe that’s where the poetry lives. Not outside but inside the body. Once and for all, I thought. That’s the answer.
So ANYWAY As I was walking down the street that lead to the street I used to live on, having this thought, rolling it around on the smooth surface of my brain like a big shiny marble, trying to figure out if it actually mattered, I turned the corner to where there has always been a big old Catholic school, right at the top of my old street. The building was just as it had always been in my memory - same shape, same structure, same exterior, you could have copied and pasted it directly out of my memory – except for some reason there was an enormous sign spread out across the whole front of the building with THE NAME OF MY HIGH SCHOOL ON IT???? A school that is not usually in this neighbourhood like at all. A school that has absolutely no association with this building in any way, shape or form. But there it was, my high school, directly in front of me, superimposed directly on top of this building I remembered and recognized in a completely different way, at the street at the top of what used to be my street. The whole thing was DEEPLY STARTLING but the timing truly cracked me up. After I stared for a while I remembered that they were renovating my old high school building and realized that this must be where they’d relocated to in the meantime. With time the surprise mellowed, edges absorbed into reality, bent into something more plausible. But the whole experience made me revise my thesis, a little. Still no definitive answer. Maybe never.
In the park we just kept walking, around and around, the loops getting wider, even though it was so cold it felt like someone kept cranking down the temperature on purpose. You know when you just literally can’t stop talking? My best friends are my best friends because conversation often feels like you are building something, a long-term project, or maybe untying an enormous knot with many many many different parts. At one point we were getting to the top of the park, past all the unfortunate tobogganing families still giving it their best try, and she said you know there’s a thing that people say that sounds trite but I’ve been worrying is actually deeply true. The idea that things just matter a little bit less to you when you’re in your 30s? Or that you don’t take certain things as hard, or that they don’t impact you as intensely, or whatever. You feel less, or are at least more removed from your feelings. She said she did not want to be removed from her feelings. And I started laughing because honestly a lot of the time the only thing I want on this EARTH is for them to be removed FROM ME, especially in this particular February where doing pretty much anything feels like chewing an enormous piece of cardboard. But also I knew what she meant.
I said okay how about this: what if maybe the first time you experience a strong feeling it’s very important and thrilling in its own way, but also maybe the more times you engage with it, the deeper your relationship becomes? Like you’re not feeling less, or less close to what you feel. It’s just different. Less obvious. You gotta dig a little for the thrill sometimes, but it’s there, getting more complicated and deeper and more interesting the more you revisit it. Every time. She said hmmm maybe but sounded unconvinced and I wondered whether I even thought that or just wanted to think it, and then a beautiful spaniel with big floppy ears ran up to us and started sniffing our legs and I forgot about everything else. On my way back I picked up pasta from the fancy pasta place. Got home, ate dinner, watched the Bachelor, took a really hot bath. Went to sleep, woke up, started again.
Here’s Moberly the cat posing next to a Moberly-themed rug I made:
&&&:
Carlo’s basketball corner:
He’s in a meeting YET AGAIN so you’re going to have to make do with me. Here are two absolutely unhinged / behind-the-back passes from last night that I am equally obsessed with. You really have to dig to find Furkan Korkmaz highlights but I did it for you because I love you. You’re welcome!