No. 82: Trash chair thoughts

RIP Roe v. Wade.
Not even 50 years old.

This morning I was rearranging my bookshelves and opened Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind to the “Junkman's Obbligato.”

Let us see the City Dumps for what they are.
My country tears of thee.

I hope we’re in the “painful” stage of the painful progress Tony Kushner wrote about in Angels in America.

Nothing's lost forever. In the world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

I have to think that’s so.
I hope that’s so.

Today at the Capitol, I met a man who rode his bike from Colorado to D.C. The trip took him 40+ days, and he started a hunger strike not soon after arriving, hoping to draw attention to the dire need for immigration reform. Tammy Duckworth and Joe Manchin stopped to talk to him; Ron Johnson and Rob Portman came out for photo ops with school groups and first responders. A woman told me that she had unwittingly sat next to Ted Cruz on a flight (in coach!), during which he had three cocktails and her normally-calm infant cried the entire time. Johnson told a group of middle school kids that he was the only person in Congress with integrity and dismissed the entire legislative branch as “incredibly dysfunctional.”

Compared to the loss of our reproductive autonomy, the fact that my “eclectic and joyful” 450-square-foot apartment of trash and medical horrors didn’t make it into the voting round for Apartment Therapy’s Small/Cool Contest feels trivial. But I’m also genuinely disappointed. I have no idea why they didn’t choose my apartment. I didn’t exceed the character counts and my photos are clear. Maybe it has something to do with the baby heads.

Today, a grown woman audibly gasped in horror when she saw my taxidermy collection; maybe I’m never going to have a broad appeal. What’s the appeal in having your home judged by absolute strangers?

I’m the one that has to live here.
A friend said it’s always harder at night.

William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways begins with the lines: Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.

I have spent most of my life trying to carve out solitude where there was little to go around: I lived with two parents who worked from home, had my schedule bound by roommates or a boyfriend, and tried to find peace amongst 8 million fellow New Yorkers. Now that I work from home and live alone in a reasonably civilized space, I find myself searching for connection in ways that I’ve never had to be intentional about before now.

I moved here in June 2020; since then, there have been long stretches of solitude punctured only by the occasional visitor. “Tell me what’s new,” they usually say, surveying my decreasing wall space. I change things so often that I usually can’t remember what they’ve seen, and it seldom matters. They ask either because they are genuinely interested or they know that I enjoy talking about my latest acquisitions. Either way, I’ve always loved show-and-tell.

Of course I scrolled through all 50 apartments that made the cut this morning as soon as they were posted, searching for clues as to why mine wasn’t chosen. What had I done wrong? I honestly have no idea why my entry wasn’t chosen and that’s ok: I’m the only one here tonight, and I know I did my best.

I have to think that’s so.
I hope that’s so.