"You need your best players to play their best when their best is needed"
is a perfectly true thing the announcer said last night
Apartment Poem is free, but you can support it (and me) here.
“If you open / Your eyes & see double, you may choose to keep on doing so”
Dorothea Paas - Welcome to my tape
Hello:
Suddenly the evenings were just perfect, like someone flipped a switch. Basketball was good again and everything smelled like lilacs. The sun stayed out forever and turned the sky pink and beige and faded-jean blue when it did start to sink, the clouds doing that thing where they're like a painting but better. The breeze reminded you gently of your body and told you that it was good. The neighbours got a puppy; she was ten weeks old, with black curly fur, and when I watched her rolling around in the bright green grass I got this feeling like oh hey, we’re alive. In the backyard I ran my hands through the oregano, which was very soft, and the lavender, which was also very soft. I planted the tomatoes in pots so we could move them. I watered the basil. I picked the rhubarb, which seemed to magically regenerate overnight, and bundled half of it to give to my mother. I watched the cat sniff around the periphery and then settle into the warm patch right at the back under the raspberry bush, where Lowry used to sit too, in exactly the same way. I had that thought and did not double over from the memory.
What else? I took a day to read a book that I did not like, and weeks to finish one I did enjoy but that was harder to understand. My memory had holes in it. I bought new socks and a white t-shirt, like I was going somewhere. I brought boxes out to the garage and stacked them carefully on top of one another. I kept thinking A few at a time is all you need. I was absolutely blasting through Sex and the City, like six episodes a day. I googled When to transplant peonies. I clicked through all the different shades of white that you could possibly paint a bedroom. Paul sent me a message that said I loved the book and when he did that I felt a tiny, eight-year pressure lift off the back of my skull. At least once per day I asked myself Should I order popcorn from the movie theatre? and sometimes the answer was Obviously.
In most parts of my life I was having a stretch of uncommonly good luck. On the phone I said to my grandmother I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and she, the woman who taught me to think this way, said Don't think that way. Think of it like, this part is balancing out some of what came before. Still, sometimes, late at night or very early in the morning, I would catch myself googling Transplant patient vaccine news or transplant vaccine efficacy. My therapist and Carlo both said the same thing about it, in the same clear, even tone of people who know through experience: that the world is the world, and you still have to live. I liked this idea. Couldn’t always find a way in, but I liked it.
One afternoon I pulled the dull push mower from the backyard and dragged it up the back alley and back and forth over the front lawn, hoping the scowling ancient ghost couple across the street were not watching me from their doorway, which they absolutely were, like always. Whenever someone passed by on the sidewalk I would stop mowing and they would look down really quickly, like my inability to mow was a horrific and pitiable condition they couldn’t bear to acknowledge. By the end I was covered in dirt and sweat and melted sunscreen and the grass looked like a drunk child had given it a haircut. I took a shower and felt better than I had in months, like one whole person. Hours later I could still smell the cut grass in my hair.
&&&:
The city is restarting its push to evict encampment residents. ESN has a toolkit with things you can do to help push back.
TO community fridges are emptying out extra fast lately; make a donation if you can.
Carlo’s basketball corner:
There’s a backlog. “Did you see my Knicks?” / Beau Estes is doing the WNBA top 5 now / This is just objectively the best shit you’ve ever seen in your life / JA MORANT / “Kyle Anderson Is The SLOWEST NBA Player!” (this came up a lot yesterday)