the way I feel when the sun is out reminds me I have very little control over my own brain
Tyvek - Say Yeah
"Don't gloat if you were wonderful, for you have a hangover, ass,"
Hello:
I spent most of my afternoon on the porch. I had tried to go for a bike ride but was not feeling particularly aerobic. I looped instead around the neighbourhood just staring at all the front lawns. I tried to imagine what they will look like when the flowers come out. I tried to remember the names of the big poofy ones that change colour depending on what kind of pH you have going on in your soil. I have always liked that idea but felt no desire to investigate its potential for metaphor any further though I'm sure it's there. I got back home and did not want to go inside. I grabbed a bag instead and started to pick up all the garbage off our lawn. I took a lot longer to do this than I originally thought I would. I would feel like I'd gotten everything and then when I stood back to admire my work I would easily see there was a whole other layer of hidden plastic I had somehow missed. I liked the way it shimmered in the dirt. I finished eventually. I laid across the steps in the sun and felt my thighs getting warm. I saw Emma and Priam walking their dog across the street and spoke to them from a distance. I saw Layne coming up the street on her bike to deliver me a thing of clorox wipes and spoke to her from a distance. I went down the front steps and picked the thing of clorox wipes up as she rode away. I waved to the child next door whose mother was pushing him to the store in a bundle buggy and he waved back at me laughing. I saw the truly fucked up car parked in front of the neighbours' house again. I realized I had never actually seen its owner. I was in the middle of having that thought and then a thousand-year-old man in a cherry-red 3 FOR 1 PIZZA AND WINGS t-shirt came out of the SOLD house across the street carrying an enormous clear plastic bin full of objects. I tried to see inside the bin but it was mostly just tools and weird metal. I could make out one other distinct thing though which was a bumblebee yellow-and-black walkman. I recognized the walkman from my childhood; it was my mother's, the one she would take to go running. I thought wait isn't it 2 for 1? Just yesterday Carlo and I were talking about the lost technologies while I laid on the floor with my legs up the wall: Where are my old gameboys? Where is the walkman? I had asked, as he tried to make progress on the impossible puzzle. I wondered whether there was a name for the skill of being able to recognize which objects from the present might have some kind of value to you in the future. I think probably I do not have it. I watched the million-year-old man lower his bin tenderly into the backseat of his very extremely jacked up car the way you would lower a baby or a beautiful loaf of bread. A butterfly cut between us. It looked like a miniature hang glider. There are better kinds of scaffolding than time.
Something longer to listen to:
Bridget Moser at Trampoline Hall: "Da Vinci's Inquest"
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)
This morning I said "have you seen the roll of paper" and my roommate said "you left it over there yesterday". Like why not just say "it's over there" Do you always have to point out who may have left something in the wrong place? This happens so many times per day, and we both do it to each other.
Dreams:
(submit dreams anonymously to apartmentpoem@gmail.com)
My niece and nephew were missing overnight and we found them sleeping by the train tracks (they are 2 and 3 years old). They had tickets to a play, and they had figured out how to go to the play, and stopped on the way home and slept by the train tracks. We were out looking for them and they saw my brother and started running towards each other, I tried to take my phone out to capture this video of them being reunited but it kept not working and I was frustrated. Then I went and yelled at the usher who seated a 2 and 3 year old at a play and didn't alert anyone.
I find myself in a bar that's pretty generic except that instead of tables and chairs there are double beds, one bed per person. A woman announces that everyone in the bar must perform a Joni Mitchell song before the night is over (a cappella, no repeats). The ones I know are all quickly snapped up. The woman comes to my bed and hands me a slip of paper with an unfamiliar song title written on it. Something about rocks. I'm eventually called up to the little stage and the lyrics somehow materialize as I sing. No one is really paying attention so I feel I've emerged relatively unscathed. Afterwards, I escape to the bathroom and discover I've started my period. I ask if anyone has a pad or tampon and a hand reaches under my stall to pass me a fistful of business cards, all for the same private realtor.
Over the past 2 weeks I've had like 3 dreams in familiar contexts I can't remember any details from but in all of them there is something that needs to be done but no one in the dream can figure out who is responsible for taking action and I wake up frustrated that no one knew what to do.
The last few nights I have been having stress dreams about housing: a few nights ago I was in a house – I think my elderly mother had decided to move back into a house instead of the apartment she is in now – and I was helping her move back in and when I got her settled I went to put my things into a bedroom to sleep for the night and suddenly there were rooms after rooms, but all of them were occupied with relatives I didn’t know, people who were settled in and I kept having to move on down this long hallway to
another one.
I forgot that dream, until this morning when I woke up and realized that I had spent last night checking into a strange hotel in Manhattan with four other people – family? Friends? – it wasn’t exactly clear. And there were many many bedrooms in this weird hotel suite, and I was trying to put people into the bedrooms before I realized there was no room for me. The final bedroom was a sort of sunroom, looking out over the Hudson River, and when I looked down I could see a beach below, the hotel’s private beach on the Hudson. Except I knew I was looking east. I kept saying I couldn’t sleep in that room, the sunrise would wake me up.
And then the cat decided it was time for me to get up for real. Thank you, cat.I woke up and told [my boyfriend] I dreamt that we were having an argument last night. He said me too. I trusted it might have been the same dream so i asked him and it could be. I dreamt he got a new job at a big bar that was brightly lit and quite stagey. he was doing drag and waitressing and so happy. I went to visit the first night. he was working the crowd and it was busy. in the lobby(?) of this cool restaurant bar thing there was this screen on the wall quite hugely projecting images from an internal photo booth in the event somewhere and he was projected onto it fully making out with a few people all comfy and entwined and i was quite miffed!!!! also he looked really beautiful and kind of like a young britney spears/baby spice combination but when i told him this he said i’ve been watching too much drag race and i was so offended.
Gentle reminder:
You don’t have to go on Twitter. It's not bad if you do, but you don't have to.
&&&:
Glad Day's emergency fund for LGBTQ2S artists and tip-based workers
TwoSeven, a more reliable but slightly more finicky alternative to Netflix Party
Carlo's basketball corner:
"Pistol" Pete Maravich's top 20 career assists