Friday, February 23, 2007
water sign
Apartment inspection today. I got the easy-going inspector. At last minute I pulled the a/c out of the window, it wasn't in any danger of falling but it wasn't exactly installed by the manual. Slow bathtub drain, bathroom windowsill needs painting, bathroom overhead light has to be fixed, a ceiling tile replaced where the bathroom upstairs leaked a few months ago. Rules seem to require glass covers over the ceiling light fixtures in the hallway & I can't make the inspectors understand why I take them off. I don't have a tall stepladder & don't want one, & when a light burns out I put a milk crate on a chair & climb up & stretch up with one hand & replace it right away & don't ask the lady who serves as super to ask the guy who does the handyman work to come up the day after tomorrow or whenever with a ladder just to screw in a new one & put the glass cover over it which I'm convinced shortens the life of the bulb anyway. I keep the hallway light burning while I'm up after dark, turn it off as a bedtime ritual when I check the door lock, it's wasteful but it pushes the lonely shadows out of the corners behind me & it's worth a few extra cents each day on an electric bill that's high only during July & August.
Did move me to toss out some old paperwork, souvenirs of a legal problem now settled & which embarassed me & resulted in my moving to a place that feels like an exile. Of course, everywhere I've ever lived my entire adult life from the time the old family house was sold & all its accumulated treasures discarded has felt a bit like exile, but oddly not because I've ever wanted to return there. That I live only about 2 miles from that street just reminds me that I ought to be farther away from it by now. An old friend returns from California every year or so to visit his mother in the house where he grew up, & there must be something comforting in the continuity even though he got away from there as soon as he was old enough.
I think I deserve a one bedroom apt with a balcony in a high rise building in downtown Rahway next to the river estuary, a very short stroll from the library & across the street from a church I'd be likely to attend on occasion. It's not luxury digs; the place is actually a kind of microcosm of Rahway. For 12 years in Linden & another 10 in Rahway I lived next to flowing bodies of water. The creek in Linden was hardly more than a ditch I would rarely have thought about except that it attracted a lot of birds. But the river in Rahway has tides in it in, & although it's far from Somers Point & North Wildwood & even Keyport or one of the other Jersey towns I've fancied over the years, I was always aware of the tide. Every time I left or came home to the apt there I habitually looked into river to see where the tide was. I knew only a handful of other people who did that, a weird little fraternity who might greet each other by saying, "River is oily today" or "A lot of eels came upstream." Not much to get excited about, but in a sense I knew there was a connection to my step-brother checking out the Manasquan behind his house in Herbertsville, except he had the better view & fleet of genuine commercial fishing boats ten minutes down the road. My sister lives near the Black River, beautiful, filled with boulders, & claustrophobic for long stretches, & there's a creek down the hill you can hear literally babbling at 2 am. But that's not my kind of water, I mean it's the kind where I feel like an outsider. The crawling things that live around it in the crevices & under the rocks freak me out. I can't sit there for more than five minutes without thinking something got under my clothes. I never felt that way as a kid - I actively searched for ugly bugs. So it's something else I draw from water now, & I want it to come from the ocean.
Did move me to toss out some old paperwork, souvenirs of a legal problem now settled & which embarassed me & resulted in my moving to a place that feels like an exile. Of course, everywhere I've ever lived my entire adult life from the time the old family house was sold & all its accumulated treasures discarded has felt a bit like exile, but oddly not because I've ever wanted to return there. That I live only about 2 miles from that street just reminds me that I ought to be farther away from it by now. An old friend returns from California every year or so to visit his mother in the house where he grew up, & there must be something comforting in the continuity even though he got away from there as soon as he was old enough.
I think I deserve a one bedroom apt with a balcony in a high rise building in downtown Rahway next to the river estuary, a very short stroll from the library & across the street from a church I'd be likely to attend on occasion. It's not luxury digs; the place is actually a kind of microcosm of Rahway. For 12 years in Linden & another 10 in Rahway I lived next to flowing bodies of water. The creek in Linden was hardly more than a ditch I would rarely have thought about except that it attracted a lot of birds. But the river in Rahway has tides in it in, & although it's far from Somers Point & North Wildwood & even Keyport or one of the other Jersey towns I've fancied over the years, I was always aware of the tide. Every time I left or came home to the apt there I habitually looked into river to see where the tide was. I knew only a handful of other people who did that, a weird little fraternity who might greet each other by saying, "River is oily today" or "A lot of eels came upstream." Not much to get excited about, but in a sense I knew there was a connection to my step-brother checking out the Manasquan behind his house in Herbertsville, except he had the better view & fleet of genuine commercial fishing boats ten minutes down the road. My sister lives near the Black River, beautiful, filled with boulders, & claustrophobic for long stretches, & there's a creek down the hill you can hear literally babbling at 2 am. But that's not my kind of water, I mean it's the kind where I feel like an outsider. The crawling things that live around it in the crevices & under the rocks freak me out. I can't sit there for more than five minutes without thinking something got under my clothes. I never felt that way as a kid - I actively searched for ugly bugs. So it's something else I draw from water now, & I want it to come from the ocean.
Labels: astrology, home furnishings
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
"anadromous fish live in the sea mostly, breed in fresh water" Had to look it up 'cause I forgot which was that & which was catadromous. Sometimes tide gets to Veterans field, sometimes it ends around the Hamilton St. Bridge, wherever the river just ceases to flow at all, depending on time of month. I really enjoyed those moments when the river literally stopped, turned & flowed upsteam, just luck catching that.
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