Bermuda Triangles of the Home 

Two days ago, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I just barely missed stepping into a safety pin on the floor, needle open, aimed right at me (like a jungle booby trap) (like a hungry one-toothed shark). I saw it in time, picked it up, and thought, "Whew. That was a close one."

Yesterday, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I stepped on something hard and stopped down to look. It was a thick shard of glass, and if I'd come at it from a different angle, it would have cut me for sure. "Whew," I thought. "That was a close one."

The glass was in the same spot the safety pin had been.

You might think I should stop walking through my kitchen barefoot; but rather, I'm going to stop walking through my kitchen barefoot on that spot. It's a locus of danger and I need to be careful.

*     *     *

Last week I lost my keys. "Where were they when you lost them?" people always ask, even though those same people get upset if you ask them the exact same question when they lose their things. "If I knew the answer to that, then I'd know where they were!"

But this time, I knew where they were when I lost them, and they just weren't there. Weird. I couldn't go out without my keys, so I took a shower, made lunch, stayed at home, and later that afternoon, found the keys exactly where I thought they'd been, exactly where I'd been when I lost them.

*     *     *

There's a dent in my pillow where your head used to lay. I fluff the pillow so it's round and plump, a perfect egg shape. But I return later and the dent is there again.

Maybe I shouldn't have bought "memory foam."

*     *     *

I wonder now if time and space aren't exactly the way we imagine them to be. Sometimes causes seem to succeed effects. Sometimes time seems stuck in a loop, or I mean that I'm stuck in a loop and time seems to disappear altogether. Sometimes I wonder if I'll make the same mistakes over and over and over, and if that's what Purgatory is, and if so, then how is it different from anything else?

The rooms of my apartment have more than four corners, and in some of them, things disappear, reappear, behave unexpectedly, according to a set of rules I can't seem to and never will understand. But I see now, that's just the way the world is. It makes sense, just not in the ways we were led to believe.

You Are What You Eat 

I'm in my parents' home. We're cooking a holiday dinner made up of some version of the foods I ate growing up, which no longer have anything to do with the foods I eat today. "You are what you eat," they say, and I wonder if that means I have nothing in common with the boy I once was, who grew up here eating pasta and roast chicken and canned vegetables. "You are what you eat," and now I eat self-righteous, prissy foods, and I don't know how to talk to the people from my home town, except about the weird things I eat.

For instance, right now I'm drinking a gluten-free beer. There's some school of nutritious thinking that says people, and in particular people of European descent, aren't all that well equipped to digest the proteins in wheat. For 100,000 years, we didn't eat wheat, and then for 3,000 years we did, and now we put wheat in everything. But our bodies are still essentially the bodies of the foraging cavemen from 100,000 years ago, so eating all of this wheat causes ... problems. To get around these problems, I've stopped eating wheat—a primary ingredient in beer. So, if I want to "grab a beer," it now has to be a gluten-free one.

"What are you drinking?"

"Ah, it's a.... It's called a 'Redbridge'...." (I'd just as soon not admit I'm drinking a special-needs beverage, so I refer to it by name—but answering like that feels disingenuous, like telling someone you went to school in "Boston" to avoid saying "Harvard.")

"Never heard of it. Any good?"

"It's alright...."

This is why my conversations never seem to go anywhere.

"Never heard of it."

"Yeah, well.... It's alright."

"You're not from around here."

That was quick. Every conversation I ever have arrives at this point sooner or later, but this was faster than usual.

The confusing thing is, I actually am from around here.

"No, I'm not from around here."

It's nice, around here. It's very pleasant—trees and rivers and rolling hills and deer. I like visiting. But it's never quite been for me.

"So, where you from?"

He's hit on the crux of it now. Nowhere's ever quite been for me.

I tell him the name of some city where I used to live, and we talk about it for a while. Yes, it's nice there. Yes, I'm a bit of a fan of that sports team. No, I missed that game.

"Take care," he says as I leave.

"I'll see you," I answer in reply. But I won't see him. Even in the incidental conversation, I get it wrong.

Houseplants (pt. 2) 

The plants don't seem to want to grow. I water them and give them sunlight, and every now and then, I re-pot them in fresh soil, but in the way that one changes the tablecloth and the place mats—for seasonal variety, and out of habit rather than out of need.

The plants, for their part, do not wither, and they do not complain. But they do not grow.

What is required to make a plant grow?

Like pets, do plants come to resemble their masters?

Aspirin for Gangrene 

You're new. You show up in town with a few things you stuffed into a bag. They're not essential or valuable or even all that well-planned; they're just the things you happened to bring. You arrive for no particular reason: everyone has to live somewhere; and maybe it doesn't matter where, as much as people think.

This place will do.

You walk a lot, somewhat relentlessly. You could take busses or trains, but you don't, because you don't want to miss anything. You want to see everything. You want to learn to distinguish that corner from that corner from that corner; and you do. You've only been in town a few days and already you see the sense of it.

You learn your way around. You learn the bus routes and the ways people talk, and why it's better to buy your coffee from here and your lunch from over there. You find an apartment and a way to make a living, so you go back and forth, carving out a new routine, slowly, like a river carves a canyon. There are people you begin to see regularly, co-workers, neighbors; and you see some of them regularly enough that you call them friends.

You learn some shortcuts, some efficiencies. Direct routes. The routine cuts a little deeper.

But unrest is a whisper in your ear, or maybe that's ambition, and you find another, better job; and like two points plotted on a graph, you can now connect your two jobs and call the line a "career path." You find yourself out at restaurants and bars for the second or third time, remembering the first time nostalgically. People sometimes ask you for directions on the street, and you're happy to oblige.

You meet still more people, and some of them become new friends, till you've accumulated more than a few, enough that you actually sometimes lose track. You wonder, sometimes, whatever happened to that one, that old friend? You haven't talked to them in a while.

The freshness wears off. The grocery store, the pharmacy, once sources of small pleasurable novelties—cereals and toothpastes you'd never seen, medicines with unfamiliar labels—these things are the new normal. You cease to notice the quirks on your walks—the gaslights and the cobblestone streets, the woman who hawks newspapers a little too aggressively, the fountains and sculptures and scenery, the man who needs one dollar to ride the bus.

You're discontent; you're not clear why. You think maybe it's because the color of the light in your apartment is wrong, tinged with too much yellow. You find another job, but you're not certain that it's a better one. It offers you a fresh commute in the morning, and new people with whom to small-talk. You wonder if it's like aspirin for gangrene. You sigh deeply. You take longer walks home, if home is the word you mean. The routine cuts deeper, a habitual insulation that it's easy to confuse for continuity, direction, meaning. Nothing is actually bad, but still, you find yourself packing a bag, a small one, filled with arbitrary things, and thinking of other places. It doesn't matter where. Any place will do. Somewhere new.

Packing 

I'm packing for that trip I'm about to take. I want to be prepared. I put everything I can imagine needing into a suitcase: I bring extra socks and floss and shampoo, even though I know they'll have it where I'm going. I bring long pants and short pants and a few pair of shoes, and two books and three magazines, and then I sit on my suitcase while I try to zip it closed. It's bursting at the seams. And I realize that everything in it, every single item, is there to insulate me from experiencing anything new why I'm on my trip.

Houseplants 

I bought houseplants.

I've never been especially good at decorating (though I prefer to say "I'm minimalist"), so I take comfort in the easy style and color choices that come from buying plants—the green leaves, the terra cotta pots. Plants require a kind of mindless nurturing and I appreciate that.

I bought a small tree that it turns out is called a "money tree," and it supposedly brings financial good fortune, but so far, I'm not sure. It sits in my bedroom window, where it seems slightly conflicted, leaning toward the sunlight, leaning away from the cold, though they come from the same direction. It thrives quietly: it doesn't grow much in height but gets more robust in volume—as if it's getting richer.

Encouraged by this success, I bought a palm tree, which stands in the opposite corner of the room. It fills out that entire part of the room, and in return, it asks for little: it seems happy with its small share of light and its too occasional watering, and I worry about it only because it seems to collect such thick layers of dust that I actually dust off its leaves every now and then, so it won't suffocate.

Struck by the easy passivity of my two trees, I invested in a new set of plants—practical edible herbs: basil, sage, thyme, oregano. They are smaller than the trees, and more rambunctious. They are children. They always want something: they want to be told stories, they want me to play games. Sometimes they tell me I've given them too much water, sometimes not enough. They are inconsistent.

I went traveling for a few days, and, as if to punish me for leaving, some of the plants died. A plant dying is not like an animal dying, because when an animal dies, it is markedly different than it was when it was alive: a fish floats; a rabbit gets cold and stiff; a dog's tail stops wagging, and it stops greeting you at the door when you come home.

A plant is more private in death: it might appear to be dead but still contain life hidden somewhere under the soil, so that through water and penitence, it might be revived. Or alternately, you might continue to pour water into its barren pot for weeks before finally conceding that the plant has left you forever.

Lately I've noticed that some of my plants have taken on new character—a white sort of fuzz on the underside of some leaves—and when I touch them, the fuzz comes to life, scampering and then taking to the air: a small swarm of tiny white flies is eating more of the basil than I am. I spray at them with soapy water, as I'm instructed to do, because the aphids (as they're called) can't stand the taste of soap; and it drives them airborne.

Now they're flying around my room, homeless and confused, so the air is filled with skittish white flecks of half-brained dust—and I realize that, having desired to decorate my life with other life, and having brought it into my home, I've gotten more than I bargained for...

Koan of the Colander 

I have a blue sponge in one hand and a bright yellow colander in the other, and hot water pours from the faucet. I'm trying to rinse the colander free of soap bubbles. I try and try, but I can't rinse the colander, because the colander is designed to let the water pour through. The soap bubbles persist.

Then I realize: life is like that.

I pause for a moment to contemplate this, but the water keeps pouring out of the faucet, so eventually I return to scrubbing.

Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow 

Un-homecoming on Mass Ave.

Yea, and though it is at once as beautiful and isolating as ever it was; though I am haunted by the same ghosts I thought I'd left behind, and by others I have yet to discover by name—still I am nostalgic. (Is it possible to be nostalgic for a place I never liked?) The place is austere and comforting, like the leafless trees of fall. The place is filling, like butterless bread. The place is peaceful, like a hard bed that's too small to share.

(Thou, who art never with me, art never far away.)

I will fear no evil. Yesterday's antipathy is today's nostalgia, and it comforts me.

Flotsam 

Yesterday without much planning I got on a train headed north and wound up at the point where Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey meet: there's a river and depending on which way you cross it, you wind up in one state, two states, three.

Now I'm somewhere else.

There's a farmhouse. There's a white farmhouse with peeling paint and a patio that wraps around. There's a farmhouse with two dozen twin beds, a French bathtub, two toilets that shouldn't be flushed ("If it's yellow, let it mellow"...), a garden full of dill and wildflowers, and bats living inside the walls. This farmhouse is half full of people I know (or knew, once upon a time) and half full of strangers, who help alleviate the feeling of distance between me and my old friends.

In the next room, a woman is cutting cabbage. In the next room, some people are laughing. In the next room, a baby is crying. In the next room, a woman is also writing, like me, writing something about this house, about the people in it, about who she is and who she isn't and wondering where she belongs.

"Dear diary," maybe she writes. Or, "I'm having an amazing weekend," maybe she writes. Or maybe she writes, "There is no loneliness like being with the ones you love, and still feeling lost..."

These journals are the father confessors we never had (but fall short of granting absolution).

My bag is packed. I don't know when, but soon, somehow, I'll find my way back south—maybe with my new friends or maybe with my old ones, or maybe alone. The miles that ticked off on the train yesterday (the unfurling of railroad ties, like a ruler measuring my life: how far I've come—or not...)—those miles today must untick. The tide that carried me out here, to this town I can't even name, will turn, and carry me back, too. Will carry me somewhere. And there, I will wonder all these same things.

The difference between flotsam and jetsam: only one ever finds its way ashore.

Relocating 

Relocating is
reinventing yourself,
discovering backroads,
new groceries,
a wardrobe change,
patching up leaks,
invigorating,
for a few days;

as the grocery stores and shortcuts
become the fresh cliche,
the clothes get worn in, and
you start shooting holes into
your new roof:

the rain and old ways come pouring through.

---

Little House in the Big Woods 

Perhaps it's a pitfall of big city living (or perhaps living of any sort) that our directed motivations are replaced by momentum, and our good intentions replaced by mere inertia: we get up, get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, and the next thing we know, we're a well-fed sixty, asleep in our contentment and creaky in the knees, still wearing the same clothes and dreams and disappointments we wore when we were twenty.

So I'm taking some days away from the city, as many as it takes to recover a hope or an aspiration.

"Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egoism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."

De-Construction 

"Help! Help!" It's not a fine day at all. The sky is falling, and we're running to tell the king!" - Chicken Little

This morning in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a crane fell—the second in three months—crashing through and demolishing an apartment building, killing two people and injuring and displacing others.

In the grand scheme of disasters (even recent ones), this one is relatively trivial—at least, as trivial as this sort of thing can ever be: a natural consequence of modern Icharian living. What makes the collapse of this crane remarkable is the sense of deja vu, and the gradually-growing belief that this is the kind of thing that happens. When the similar incident happened in March, it seemed such an oddball fluke that it gave credence to the insurance industry phrase, "Act of God."1

People on the streets are now casting understandably-wary eyes to the sky, suddenly questioning a certain kind of safety that they've, till now, taken for granted:

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling..."

I remember hearing, a few years back, that when a plane crashes into someone's house, if that person survives, then the trauma of this experience can be so great that the phenomenon has its own name, a sub-category of post-traumatic stress disorder.2 This particular kind of trauma is nearly untreatable: once the sanctuary of one's home is invaded by soaring, flaming, crashing steel, then what comfort is left in the idea of "home"? If one must admit the possibility that the sky really is falling, then what sanctuary remains? Where can one hide from falling cranes and planes? When houses are no longer "safe as houses," then where is safe?

Where does one hide from an act of God?

---

1. If falling cranes are an act of God, then God clearly has some grudge against the Upper East Side.

2. I can find only scant evidence of this on the Internet, and it's possible I learned it from a source no more authoritative than Donnie Darko.

This Old House 

"I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls." - Henry David Thoreau

A friend and I were recently talking about Walden, the book by Henry David Thoreau where he goes into the woods because he "wants to live deliberately"—the book that we were all required to read in high school, and didn't, but only skimmed it, which we've all been talking about periodically ever since. That book.

We talk about Walden not because it's such a great book (we wouldn't know...), but because we too want to go to the woods and live deliberately.

Every now and then, I throw up my hands and say, "I'm moving to a cabin in the woods."

This morning it dawned on me: I already live in a cabin in the woods.

Not literally, no. Literally, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn. But it's on a sleepy, tree-lined street, with an enormous garden for a back yard, and though there's no mountain-fresh air or scent of pine needles, there is peace and quiet here. Or would be , if I'd ever get around to listening.

(To say that I am a seeker is also to say I'm a malcontent, or that I am not a finder. )

So, when I say I want a cabin in the woods, I must mean something else. Maybe it really is all about the pine needles.

My Bad Taste 

Part One: Trooper

I grew up in a town called Trooper, served by the post office of a larger, neighboring town called Norristown. But these are both ugly names, so as I was growing up, whenever I wrote out my address, I listed the small town next to us in the other direction, Audubon, because I found it more aesthetically pleasing. I don't know if my edit frustrated the postman, or if it ever caused me to lose mail—and I never cared, because it still seemed better to lose mail than to have to write words like "Trooper" or "Norristown" on an envelope.

That is the kind of person you're dealing with.

I never wanted to be associated with a place that had such bad sense to name towns Trooper or Norristown, or a place whose idea of a good painter was John James Audubon. Such a place is not a place with good taste, and I've always hated that about it. You could say that by making this little edit on my outgoing envelopes, I was trying to leave my home town long before I actually packed my bags and actually left.

But you can't change where you're from.

This weekend I'm on my way back to Norristown. I'm looking at a SEPTA train full of people with bad taste, and maybe for the first time in my life, I'm realizing I'm one of them. I'm realizing part of me never actually left.

Part Two: Music History

The first record I ever bought, at age ten, was "I Love Rock'n'Roll", by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. It was a single, and I also had to buy a yellow plastic "spider" to put in the center of the record, so it would play on my dad's stereo.

The first album I ever bought was a mix cassette of 80s singles, the kind they advertise on TV as being "Not available in stores," though somehow I bought it at K-Mart. The album opened with "Don't You Want Me Baby" by The Human League, and included tracks by Foreigner and Huey Lewis and News. ¹

The first important album I ever bought was Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil, important because I bought it on account of our seventh grade class president liking it: I bought it to feel cool. The album looked Satanic and I felt I should listen to it in secret, without my parents learning of it—so in a sense, this was the beginning of my adolescence. ²

By the end of eighth grade, in some (very small) circles I was considered an arbiter of good taste, because of my extensive knowledge of the classic and pop rock canons. Within the first few notes, I could reliably "Name That Tune" from among a vast set of music by Bad Company, Bryan Adams, and Bon Jovi. ³ From this mostly useless skill I took great pride, and used every chance I had to show off, in public, just what a geek I was.

This is the kind of person you're dealing with.

Part Three: Snobbish Monsters

At some point in the midst of overpriced private education, I realized that what I was buying was a chance at better taste. ⁴ I surrounded myself with aesthetes and snobs, and to help fit in, I made the required changes to my music collection (and everything else).

Only in retrospect did I notice we are all in the midst of the same transition, trying to emulate one another while trying to change ourselves: none of us realized that the benchmark was moving.

Only in retrospect did I see that our parents had wanted us to have more opportunities than they did, and better ones—and in offering us those opportunities they wound up creating snobbish monsters in place of their children, snobbish monsters who would go on to make them feel bad about their own taste, and then try and parse the entire experience into an essay or a blog entry while playing the music of their childhood in a playlist that might or might not be ironic, might or might not be "good"—and the snobbish monster can't even tell anymore what is good, and what isn't...

1. I still like many of the songs from this album and I still listen to some of them.

2. I still like the title song from this album and I still listen to it.

3. I can honestly say I don't like most of these songs now, and with very rare exception, i.e., "Living on a Prayer," I do not listen to them. But I'm listening to "Living on a Prayer" right now.

4. Since I went to college to study aesthetics, I have to assume I was aware of all of this even at time.

Clutter and Kindness 

Or, Home / Away From Home, pt. 3

After all anybody is as their land and air is.
Anybody is as the sky is low or high,
the air heavy or clear,
and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there.
It is that which makes them and the arts they make,
and the work they do and the way they eat
and the way they drink
and the way they learn and everything.
- Gertrude Stein

The clutter at my parents' house is fantastic; there's not a single bit of surface area that hasn't been piled twice over. I find it overwhelming beyond comprehension: it creates a kind of spatial white noise that shuts down my brain. I wish for an archeologist to uncover everything, to catalog each item and reveal a kind of understanding of the whole based on the parts: just this one room where I sleep is stratified with needlepoint, scented candles, framed family photos stacked on top of one another, mystery novels, sewing magazines, antique dolls, half-hearted religious icons, sewing magazines, a South American death mask, VHS tapes, Rubbermaid storage containers, reams of polyester, Kokopelli, unused semi-disposable cookbooks, three-inch-thick photo albums, a case of printer toner, prescription medication, souvenir keychains, last year's still-wrapped Christmas tree ornaments, packets of salad dressing mix, clipped coupons, mail order catalogs, the cardboard boxes of year-old appliances, and miraculously, no dust. It's a palimpsest I'll never be able to read; potsherds beyond systematizing: all I find here is clutter. Clutter and kindness.

The opposite of unfettered is "home."

Inverse Spring Cleaning 

My parents came up this weekend. A three-hour drive up, a ninety-minute brunch, and then a three-hour drive back.

They're the sweetest people in the world.

I don't know for sure, but I think their biggest reason for coming up was because they had my winter coat. They knew winter was coming, and they didn't want me to get cold. That's right: I use them as a storage depot, and in return, they treat me like an object of affection and care. (They didn't even think I'd be here—they thought I was still in Paris—but wanted to make sure I had my winter coat when I got back.)

Have I mentioned they're the sweetest people in the world?

The coat came in the biggest duffel bag ever made, Hagrid's duffel bag, and it was full to bursting with all my winter things—sweaters, wool socks, flannel sheets, the aforementioned coat. From the look of the contents of this bag, you'd think I lived in a cabin in Saskatoon.

There was no way that such an influx of cotton and wool was not going to affect the status quo of my closet. So, since their visit, I've been engaged in inverse spring cleaning—the removal, washing, re-folding, re-sorting, and replacing of every single thing I own. Bushels of laundry. I've found a tee-shirt from high school, a camisole that belonged to my college girlfriend (before I knew the word "camisole"), clothes that have shrunken irreparably (or maybe it's not that the clothes have gotten smaller...)

Spring cleaning: it's not just for spring anymore. Going through one's entire wardrobe has to be the most clarifying feeling in the world: the enema of the closet. There should be a word for that. There probably is.

Sunset in Boston, pt. 2 

or, Location Location Location

It's not too early, I think, for me to start trying to puzzle out what went wrong here: I want to try and find some answers during this "liminal" time, before I start whatever the next thing is, so when I pack my things here, I have a better idea what I should leave behind. ¹

I'm in Harvard Square, sitting halfway between a busker playing classical guitar and another on bagpipes. ("Why can't we all just get along?") I remember a couple different occasions, thinking I'd be happier if I lived over here in this neighborhood, instead of where I do live. When I re-upped my lease there (slightly under duress...), I remember a friend here told me I'd "shot myself in the foot," that I'd ruined my chance to enjoy Boston by staying in that stodgy part of town.

Now, a year later, the bagpipes bleating in my left ear and the guitar twanging in my right, and surrounded by all of the beautiful smart optimistic people strolling (shopping) in Harvard Square, it's easy to imagine how things might have been better. But in the end, I don't know if it would have made a difference where I was, if I'd had this same temperament: I would have had better places to be alone. It all would have been more tolerable but I think in the end just as wrong. For whatever reason, blame it on me or the town, almost nothing here affects me, influences me, alters me, or inspires me to grow. ² A change of neighborhood might have helped, but only if I'd let it, and I don't have any reason to think I would have, since I'd decided all that time ago that I wasn't going to let it.

Then, I wonder at the things I'll miss when I'm gone. I'd try to make the list now—the barrista I like but never got to know, the long walks through the Fens, this classical guitarist on my right—but the most poignant items on the list, I'm sure I won't even be able to predict. So like me to claim to loathe a thing for the entire time I have it, and to pine for it the day it's gone.

1. That means this blog will become even more shapeless and self-indulgent than usual—though my intent to keep it from getting too shapeless and self-indulgent is exactly what's made it "usual" for me not to post at all...

2. I have the image here that a good, middle-class consumer is like a well-pruned shrub, alive and well-enough but not at all growing or only in the ways it's allowed by the "gardener."

---

Housekeeping 

or, Furniture, pt. 5

"They haven't seen enough to worry like we do." - Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Metaphors are everywhere. Today I engaged in the apparently linguistically-simple task of housekeeping: I removed six months worth of accumulated dust; I rearranged a closet that, till now, has been been organized mostly by the forces of gravity (i.e., when I toss things inside). I mopped. I scrubbed. I made soup.

To the outside eye, my housekeeping was exactly that. In my mind, though, I was simultaneously engaged in "housekeeping"—a metaphoric act of cleaning, evaluating, and reorganizing any and all conditions in my life that (because of day-to-day exposure) I might otherwise take for granted. Do I need that shirt I haven't worn in a year? Do I need to store my spices in that cabinet instead of that cabinet? Do I need to live in Boston working as a web producer?

Et cetera.

Sometimes while I'm mopping or chopping I'm hit with a glimpse into a future I've never imagined, a moment of such pure epiphanic clarity, a moment during which anything seems possible—a moment so pure that I'm almost immediately sure that this feeling will have no bearing whatsoever on my day-to-day world, where nothing is ever quite so simple (because I won't allow it?).

At the end of it all, things have been rearranged, slightly. Non-essentials have been eliminated, and some forgotten things have been re-introduced. Dust has been cleared away. Gradually, inevitably, over time, confusion will be reintroduced: the closet will fall into disorder, dust will gather, the desk—and my head—will become less clear.

But for now, everything seems squeaky clean. So clean I can see myself in the reflection.

Furniture, pt. 4 

Having realized that changing apartments is not an easy, sure-fire path to happiness , I set down the harder road of changing my life from the inside. Altering my external circumstances—my grocery store, my subway stop, my neighbors—can't really affect who I am, how I feel, or the ways in which I choose to move through the world. True change starts from within.

So I decide to redecorate my apartment. It doesn't get any more internal than that.

I take a quick introspective inventory, and it doesn't take me long to realize what is missing from my life. It's no wonder I often feel so frustrated and empty. I need a chair.

In retrospect, it's obvious: how could I expect to feel anything but empty, if my apartment is empty? "Home is where the heart is," they say, so ... empty home, empty heart. The side effect of a minimalist aesthetic is emotional minimalism.

I need to buy a chair.¹

The metaphor is blunt and I hate using blunt metaphors²: I'm feeling unsettled; I need a place to set, to sit, to situate. More practically, I need a place to situate that is not in front of my computer screen, so I stand at least some small chance of spending a few waking minutes each day offline.

Having a place for guests that is not my bed also has some practical merit.

So I begin the quest for the chair.

* * *

It's a very short time before I realize I have absolutely no idea what I want. On the one hand, there are reasons I don't have furniture—I tend to move pretty often, I tend to be broke—and these make semi-disposable Ikea particle board very tempting: it's safer for me to have things that I can leave on the curbside with a relatively-clear conscience. On the other hand, my need for a chair is, in the first place, emblematic of my my need to stop moving and to stop acquiring things I intend to leave by the curbside. Won't I be better served by a hundred-plus pound overpriced leather throne that, come trash day, I couldn't even carry downstairs?

"It explains," said a man I know earlier this week, "how you can be as sharp as you are, and still so ineffectual." Um, thanks. "You're so quick with the pros and cons, with sorting into either/or.

"Ambivalence isn't the same as not caring. Ambivalence is getting caught between two valences, pulled in two directions. Stuck." We weren't talking about furniture.

Ambivalence is my new favorite word.

* * *

By the end of the second day, it's possible I've sat in every chair in Boston, and back in my apartment, I sit on the hardwood floor, a welcome change from all the varieties of plush. I'm mostly through a bottle of wine and talking to a friend on the phone, thinking maybe I don't need a chair, after all, to make this place feel like home. "Home," I slur, "is where the hope is."

"That's bullshit," says my more pragmatic friend. "Home is where the bills come. That's it. That's all. You should get out more. Take a trip."

1. If you think I would enter into the purchase of furniture lightly, you may have missed parts one, two and three in this thread. My relationship with furniture (et al) is complicated...

2. Isn't it my responsibility as a blogger to complicate and convolute my life, to make the decoding of it more interesting?

Apartment of the Damned 

or, Triskaidekaphobia, pt. 2

In a rapid succession of demoralizing news, for reasons I won't go into, I learned that I won't be moving into a sweet new dream apartment I'd found, that I probably won't be moving at all, and that it's nearly impossible for me to move, ever.

Maybe I'm being hyperbolic.

(Maybe I'm not.)

Moving is a pain in the ass. Even finding an apartment is a pain in the ass. The fact that I'd found an apartment means I'd already contributed a fair amount of pain to my ass. I was committed to this move. I wanted this move. More to the point, I'd staked a lot of hope on this move: the new neighborhood has a higher-than-usual ratio of interesting, engaging, like-minded people; a higher density of bookstores, yoga studios, and fun bars; a higher density of useful subway stops; and most of all, has halfway decent pad thai, which, despite the fact that I currently live in an "emerging" neighborhood, is something I haven't had since I left New York.

In short, this apartment was a chance for a fresh start, an opportunity to put this last, hit-or-miss-and-mostly-miss year behind me. A chance to be happy.

And now that chance is gone. And I'm stuck here, in this beige, boxy malaise-soaked studio. Forever. The apartment of the damned.

Maybe I'm being hyperbolic.

(Maybe I'm not.)

Either way, I've learned a valuable life lesson, which is: never ever ever make any important decisions or sign any documents on the thirteenth of the month. How could I have been so stupid?

Anyway, ... moving is a pain in the ass...

What color should I paint my walls?

(What a difference a year makes...)

A Better Mousetrap 

The first time it was the sound.

It was just after I'd moved into the apartment, and the place was piled with broken-down cardboard, crumpled newspaper, a few old take-out containers, and a giant ball of used packing tape, which I kicked around the apartment like a soccer ball until I almost put it through a window, and decided shattered glass would make a bad first impression on the landlord.

It was getting dark (I still didn't have any lights in the place) and it had been a long day, so I decided I'd gather all of the loose trash into a big garbage bag, and call it a night.

But I had trouble sleeping, and every little sound seemed enormous—the squeak of my Aerobed, the rustling of the plastic as my tape ball settled in the trash bag.

Wait a minute. That squeak didn't come from the Aerobed. And the trash isn't "settling."

When I clicked on the flashlight, my suspicions were confirmed. I wasn't alone. I had a mouse.

* * *

My lease specifically refers to me as the "sole tenant", and states that I shall not have pets without the lessor's written consent, which I didn't have. By any definition, then, this mouse was an intruder. A stow-away. An interloper. And this is America. What do we do with intruders in America?

We shoot them.

* * *

Maybe because I'm some crunchy granola hippy or maybe because I'm a big wuss, I couldn't bring myself to set a mousetrap. Instead, I did what any geek would do: I threw technology at the problem. The Pest-a-cator sends ultrasonic pulses through the electrical wires of the apartment, and the sound is so painful to mice, it drives them away—which might be bad for my neighbors, but was exactly what I needed.

Apart from that reassuring red flashing light, it's impossible to tell if the Pest-a-cator is doing anything. It's really a philosophical quandary: the presence of mouse proves the Pest-a-cator is not working. The absence of mouse proves nothing, except that you aren't seeing a mouse.

Not seeing a mouse was exactly what I wanted, so, ontology aside, I was happy with the results of the Pest-a-cator. That is, until the night I got that itch on my foot.

Wait a minute. That's not an itch. That's a mouse crawling over me.

This is war.

* * *

I saw the mouse again a few days later. I'd just picked up some vegetables from the store and I left the bag on the floor of my kitchen. I think I was trying to draw the little guy out.

And draw him out I did.

"HEY!," I roared in my biggest voice. I was a jittery elephant, hoping that my nearly two-hundred pounds of (faux) confidence might scare him off forever. Just to make my point, I hurled a pot at him. I missed—dented the pot and smashed my vegetables—but I think I got his attention.

Then I tried to reason with him: "There's nothing for you here. The food is locked away in plastic. The apartment is pristine. You won't even find any cheese here: I'm allergic.

"And what about that horrible ultrasonic screeching noise? Isn't it driving you crazy?" The red light was still flashing reassuringly.

"I don't want to kill you," I pleaded. "I really don't."

I really didn't. I really didn't want to wake up in the middle of the night to the CRACK of a sprung mousetrap. I didn't want to find his dismembered or writhing body. I also didn't want to lay down a glue trap, and hear him squealing through the night, trying to decide whether or not to rip off his own foot. I didn't want to lay down poison and have the smell of mouse rot coming out of my walls.

"So why don't you just go bother someone else, OK?"

OK?

That was three days ago, and I haven't seen him. I know, logically, this doesn't mean that my little chat with the mouse did any good. But I do know I haven't seen the mouse. And not seeing the mouse is exactly what I want.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny 

I get the impression—having just seen my parents and my sister, and having visited Los Angeles and then New York (the two places I've spent the most time, the two places that have left the strongest impressions upon me), and having spent more time in old haunts, with old friends, than I have in months—I get the impression that I've been retracing the steps of my personal evolution, and reliving them. I get the impression that my ontogeny is recapitulating my phylogeny.

Furniture, pt. 3 

or, Coming Back From Vacation

This happens every time:

1. I achieve some reasonable amount of stability and contentment. I look at the sum of my life and find it adequate.
2. To celebrate, to relax, I go away. I take a trip. I have new experiences.
3. I come home, and the life that I'd found adequate now feels somehow lacking, small, empty in ways that I hadn't noticed. Dissatisfying.
4. I buy furniture, thinking it will fill the void, and for a while, it seems to do the trick. The new furniture gives me feelings of stability and contentment.

I bought a bed today.

---

Furniture, pt. 2 

If, as I claimed earlier, the abandoning of furniture over the course of our lives is symbolic of all of the other things we leave behind, then the opposite is also true: the collecting of it acts as a kind of ballast, anchoring us to otherwise arbitrary places.

In other words, I might move again someday, except for this new bed, and this new chair, and this desk, and this TV, and this pot rack.

As if the path of settling into a place always goes straight through the shopping mall...

Pot Rack 

It may not seem like much to you when I tell you that I just got a pot rack. Its significance might not be immediately clear.

The pot rack, you see, is my first piece of optional furniture here in Boston. It's 35" x 8 ^1/2" of commitment. It's a consciously-crafted ploy to force myself to feel more settled. Nothing says "settled" like a pot rack.

But ... it requires installation—more commitment than I had in mind....

I wonder how long it's going to sit in its box, over there in the corner of the kitchen...

* * *

"Refer to Figure 2. Attach the two vertical support arms to the shelf with the buttonhead screws. Tools required: drill; hex wrench; level; pencil; pliers; screwdriver; tape measure."

I think I've got a pencil around here, at least. Somewhere. If I can remember where I put it.

Maybe commitment is overrated.

* * *

Five days. Less than I would have guessed. Welcome to Boston.

---

You Know You've Made It When 

You know you've made it when you get yourself a $179 trash can.

I hate speaking in generalizations (I'm lying), but something I've noticed over the last few weeks about my fellow Bostonians: they seem prone—maybe over-prone?—to what Chuck Palahniuk calls the "Ikea nesting instinct." They seem to be home-owning, child-bearing ilk. They seem inclined to pair up for the long haul, marry, acquire domestic goods. They want a stable job, a stylish, reliable car, and furniture.

It is in honor of them (and in a mood to try to be just a little more like them) that I take a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond this weekend.

My goal: a trash can.

You see, the story goes like this: a few years ago, in Brooklyn, a roommate moved out under somewhat hostile circumstances, and she took with her a steel kitchen trash can that wasn't rightfully hers. We, the remaining roommates, could have taken issue with this, but in the end, it was just a trash can, and I think any of us would have felt petty to quibble over it. We replaced it with a much less stylish, but much more practical, plastic trash can, for a fraction of the price. To spend more, we reasoned, would literally be throwing money away.

We got by just fine with that loyal plastic waste bin. But secretly, in our hearts, we knew we'd been taken down a few pegs on the "Haute-O-Meter." We kept Crate and Barrel catalogs stashed under our beds like Playboys, and we dreamt of the day we might reclaim our birthright—a steel trash can, signet of the bohemian bourgeois.

Yesterday was that day. I strode into BB&B (that's what we bohos call it) as if there were a cape and a dozen attendants trailing behind me. I spied myself a fine steel bin, and walked toward it in quick strong steps.

"$179?!?"

Literally throwing money away.

I'm sure this $20 plastic jobby will do just fine. Actually, I got it on sale, $14.99. So far, it's holding the trash just fine.

$1.84 

A small duffel bag of dirty laundry and a dollar and eighty-four cents in my pocket. Dirty jeans and a cheap, ratty sweater that I picked up ... was it really that many years ago? Haven't shaved, haven't washed my hair. I am the caricature of a college student, but ten years too old.

In a word, pathetic.

"Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Great to see you!" I hug them, then, without missing a beat, "Can I borrow money for the train ride home?"

If there's a flicker of disappointment in their eyes, or sadness, or resentment, I don't see it. If they share my feeling that I am ridiculous, that I'm getting just a little too old for this, well, they don't show it. Either they are the most generous people in the world, or its finest actors. Or maybe both.

* * *

A long-lost friend, one of my favorite people in the world, calls and leaves a voicemail, the first time I've heard from her in years. "Hey, I miss you. I moved to [this city]. I quit [that job]. I'm starting work on [this thing]." Then, having worked through the requisite small talk: "Can you build a website for me?"

These calls aren't uncommon. Sometimes I wonder, if I were a plumber, would my friends want me to unclog their toilet for them? If I were a housekeeper, would they ask me to come over and vacuum their home, gratis? Maybe they would. The fact is, it's not a fair question for me to ask, because I like building websites. I really do. And I also like helping my friends.

But what I try to explain, when I phone-tag her back, is that I've just started a new job that will keep me quite busy building a whole lot of websites, for forty-five or fifty hours a week; and meanwhile, I don't really have anything else going on in my life. I try to explain that what I really need right now, most of all, is to spend the free time I have doing anything but building websites: exploring my new city, getting to know some people, starting this new chapter of my life. I give her the names of a few people who might be better able to help her, and tell her I'm looking forward to catching up with her.

When she calls back—again, a voicemail—she says she understands: "I'll call those other people, since it sounds like now you're focused on just making money."

Among the many reasons I find this message so upsetting: does she really think, if I were so purely focused on making money, I'd be this terribly bad at it?

* * *

"Sure, the market's soft right now. Sure, there are thirty other places on the market in your price range. But at that price, the people who would actually be interested in your place will never even look at it. They'll assume it's a hovel; they'll never even walk through the door. What you need to do is raise the price by ten or twenty grand."

I find myself in the ironic position of giving financial advice. Because I know so much about real estate.

"Raise it by twenty just to get them to take the place seriously. Just to get them to walk through the door. Then, if they decide it's too high, you can lower your asking price by ten without even thinking about it. And if they want to haggle and take you down by fifteen grand, it's still more than you're even asking now. You'll walk with half a million dollars, and they'll feel like they're getting a bargain."

"Wow, maybe you should hawk my place. Maybe I should give you the ten percent broker fee, instead of my useless real estate agent."

For the quickest second, I indulge the fantasy of what it would be like to have that $50,000. My fantasy doesn't include yachts, big screen TVs, or luxurious vacations—just the peace and quiet of a financial security I've never known. Just confidence, and a good night's sleep. "That's nice of you," I say. And then: "Can I borrow $10 for lunch?"

Furniture 

Think about your furniture.

Your first coffee table was made from a pair of milk crates you found laying on the curbside one trash night. You brought them home, dusted them off, and propped them in front of a mangy easy chair, and they were good for holding coffee, unread mail, tired feet, the TV remote control.

Later, you made a bookshelf out of those same milk crates.

You had a bureau of drawers made out of plastic, made by a company better known for its trash cans and dust pans. At some point you upgraded to Ikeaware, semi-disposable pinewood furniture. This was adequate and more, too: it offered, if not permanence, at least substance.

Gradually, pine gave way to ash and birch, the furniture took on more mass, became weightier, harder to move, harder to throw away. After the passage of no small amount of time, you saved up a little money and, eventually, spent some of it on a "piece"—when furniture is nice enough it's called a "piece." You like this piece; you feel an affinity for it that is almost fetishistic. You know in your heart there is nothing categorically different between the piece, the hand-carved antique oak coffee table, and those milk crates: they're equally good at holding coffee, mail, tired feet. But the point is, over time, you managed to acquire some things that speak to you, things that make your life just a little bit better, things that appropriately express who you think you are.

Then you move to another city and leave all of your furniture behind.

Then you realize that furniture is a metaphor for everything else in your life—restaurants you like, parks, grocery stores, radio stations, friends, lovers. Unexpectedly, you find yourself combing the streets on a trash night, looking for milk crates and thinking about time, and thinking about time...

Home / Sweet Home 

I moved today, and I'm not sure how to make an entertaining story out of two dozen trips up and down the stairs. What I do know is that I'm here now, in my new apartment, feeling settled like I haven't felt in months. I'm sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor, eating steamed dumplings out of the delivery tin, I'm listening to bossa nova music, I'm admiring the blood-orange sunset sky, and I'm feeling so wonderfully sublime.

Or maybe I'm just tired, from those trips up and down the stairs...

* * *

Is it possible to have a sublime experience, and not be alone while having it? What I mean is that these moments are some of the richest of my life, but they pass without almost any discernable trace. Think about the slugline:

INT. STUDIO APARTMENT - SUNSET.

Jangly, lo-fidelity music comes from a small laptop. A MAN, tired and disheveled, sits on the floor, uncomfortable, and eats his meal.

End of scene.

* * *

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word sublime as "majestic" or "inspiring awe", but that doesn't really describe how I feel, sitting in my new apartment. There's something more under-the-skin about it—more sub-liminal, maybe, than sublime.

I find a dictionary definition I prefer in a chemistry book: "To cause to pass from the solid to the vapor state by heating." That's a little more like it; that's how I feel.

---

Home / Away From Home, pt. 2 

(or, "What's On Your iPod?")

The Fung Wah bus lurches through traffic, somewhere in interminable Connecticut, on another leg of its Sisyphian circuit between Boston and New York. [The drivers, I'm told, finish off each four-hour leg with a short cigarette break, then turn the bus around and drive back to where they started, back and forth, who-know-how-many iterations before they get to rest for the day.] As we finally cross into the no-man's land of bridges outside New York City, the song on my iPod is Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" (now featured in the trailer to some movie or another, can't remember which):

I am the passenger,
and I ride and I ride...

I step off the bus like I did two weeks ago, in Chinatown, in New York City, in the place I still think of as my home though my mailing address would indicate otherwise; only this time, it's a little different. "Can you tell the way to Reade Street," asks a passerby. But I can't. I can't remember the way to Reade Street. I duck straight into a favorite bar because I really need to see a familiar face; the place is crowded, but not with anyone I know. Rather than stay, I grab my bag and head back out into the street, where it's started with a gentle rain. My iPod, as if to mock me, starts in with Whiskeytown's "Sit and Listen to the Rain," and for a little while, I do.

Used to feel so much,
Now I feel so numb
Could go out tonight
But I ain't sure what for
Call a friend or two
I don't know anymore

The weekend passes. I swap books and DVDs with friends, go to a party, go to a brunch. There's one person I want to see and I don't manage to see her; we can't get our schedules together. I confess to her, "In a weird way, I'm already looking forward to getting back to my lonely simple life in Boston." In the background, while we talk, is The Devlins' "Drift":

You say what you want to say,
In my arms, I know you're home
You go where you want to go
and leave me on my own
to drift alone

By the time I head back north, I'm feeling vaguely Sisyphian myself: I'm not sure why I bothered to come. I stand under the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplate the crisscross of cables; I feel a stone of disappointment in my stomach. I'm not sure what comes next. I decide to take the train back. The song iPod plays PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea:

One day
I know
there'll be a place
called
home.

"Last call. All aboard. We're going to Boston. All aboard."

---

Home / Away From Home 

I had an apartment in Hollywood a while back and I lived there for many happy years. Though it wasn't gigantic, or overly luxurious, and though it was in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood, still, in many ways, it was a dream apartment for me: two rooms with hardwood floors and exposed brick, decorated with minimalist care. Sometimes, to this day, I get confused and think I still live there. I imagine I'll park my car around back, key in, water a few plants, and slide right back in to my old life.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that when I got off the bus in New York City this weekend, after a few short weeks in Boston, the experience felt less like the weekend getaway it was, and more like a homecoming from a long, tiring business trip. I walked down these streets with more familiarity even than I had a month ago. I took advantage of every shortcut. I stood by the third door of the third car of the 2 train to arrive exactly at my exit. I chatted with my hair stylist and said I'd see her in six weeks, though it was a bald-faced lie. I walked a mile out of my way just to shop at "my" drug store.

But really, I wasn't even there. I floated down the street and peered into café windows, but the people inside couldn't see me. I drifted through walls, blew gently in the wind, passed over the East River, invisible. I was a ghost, looking on at a city that no longer was, a city that existed only in the purgatory of my memory, and I haunted its streets, not yet ready to move on. I wanted to go home but I had none. I wanted to rest. I wanted to rest in peace.

---

Biennial Minimalism 

One advantage of moving every couple of years is the purging of so much accumulated crap: I arrive in a new city with only my wits and a few meager bags of essentials. I'm a new man, all purity and essence, not distracted by the doilies, knick-knacks, or clutter that muck up workaday life.

Then I go shopping. Have to settle in, after all...

P.S. A shout-out to my Mom and Dad, who, every couple of years, seem to inherit boxes and boxes of doilies, knick-knacks and clutter of all sorts. Where'd that stuff come from, I wonder?

The Physics of Dirty Dishes 

"You're the cleanest person I know," she says, as I wipe down the counter and wash the last of the dishes, and it's impossible for me not to wonder—How skanky and stinky are her other friends? If I'm so neat, how come I spend every single Saturday morning digging out from a week's worth of accumulated laundry, crusted cereal bowls, coffee cups, and used chopsticks?

Simple answer: entropy. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is commonly understood as "disorder," the idea that things fall apart—an idea almost too commonsensical to pass for science, easy to understand while dirty dishes piles up and nearly every gadget I own gives up its ghost over a single week. (Damn lithium-ion batteries!) After three months of doctor visits for a chronic respiratory infection, I finally suggest to my physician, "Maybe I'm not sick; maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe it's entropy."

Things certainly do fall apart, don't they?

As science terms go, "disorder" is a bit vague. More strictly, the second law of thermodynamics states that "Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from a concentrated place to a diffused place." The "concentrated" heat of a cast-iron skillet will tend to diffuse off the hot skillet into the air, until everything settles at room temperature. (In fact, that's why there is such a thing as room temperature—because all of the concentrated heats have tended to diffuse.)

In case the connection between this and my pile of dirty dishes is not clear, suffice to say the energy it takes to wash the skillet tends to diffuse as the week goes on, so the skillet tends to sit in my sink, unwashed. And it's not just me and my skillet, either. My toilet is running, my iPod battery won't hold a charge; the only thing that seems to hold its concentrated energy is the infection in my chest, and I can chalk that up to entropy in my immune system...

Despite all these previous paragraphs, I don't really care much about entropy as it applies to my dirty dishes; but I do wonder about it in relation to some of the other "concentrations" in my life that seem to be getting more diffused, i.e., life ambitions. In place of romantic passions and dreams, I'm surprisingly content with a job that's adequate, a girlfriend I adore, family and friends, and a blog; I've traded skillet-hot youth for a room-temperature adulthood.

My science friends hate it when I dabble in their field and misrepresent what they do for the sake of a metaphor. I say misrepresent, because current thinking on "entropy" tries to explain how nature tends toward orderly systems, not away from them. But in relation to my metaphor, that seems right: my "youth," for all of its energy, was erratic, diffused and over-romanticized; my "adulthood," tepid, is less effortful, more focused, more "concentrated." Thank God for the adequate job, the beloved girlfriend, the family and friends. Thank God I've been able to exorcise the Maxwell's demon that made me so unstable. Thank God for dirty dishes.

---