Anne Frank Brave Young Kind Great pupil Lots of Friends

Someone stuck this to my computer monitor. Amazing.




... I like that Anne Frank had cleavage.

An attempt to explain

This is the view from my apartment window.

More windows

1 . "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls." - Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper


2.

3. "When Jezebel heard about it, she painted her eyes, arranged her hair and looked out of a window. As Jehu entered the gate, she asked, "Have you come in peace, Zimri, you murderer of your master?" He looked up at the window and called out, "Who is on my side? Who?" Two or three eunuchs looked down at him. "Throw her down!" Jehu said. So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered the wall and the horses as they trampled her underfoot." - 2 Kings 9:30 - 33



It is perhaps a blessing that I work in a windowless office.

Looking in windows on a car ride

Someone else mentioned this habit. At that moment, and only at that moment, did I realize that it's not uniquely my game.

The first windows I remember trying to look into were the windows on third floors. I always wanted a room to myself in an attic. My dutch colonial house didn't even have an attic, so I knew this was impossible unless we moved. If I saw a house with a furnished third floor and a "for sale" sign I would take special notice. Some "normal" attics have normal windows, even curtains. I'd, in the split second I could, look for tell-tale signs: yellowed curtains meant it wasn't a livable place. Otherwise, it was fair game.

I moved down to the lower floors on the way back from Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. The lit-up houses often had other families sitting down, and I got very good at taking a mental snapshot of the dining room tables. If I saw an interesting one I'd look away from the car window and play around with the picture in my mind. Sometimes I'd be a little more mentally agile: I'd try to picture myself as part of each household, to the rhythm of the sound of passing the houses. I felt a physical resistance as I left each household and moved to the next one, like I was being dragged with short tugs by a length of rope tied around my waist.

Last Christmas I saw four houses in a row with Christmas trees lit up in the same lower right side windows, a teenager walking an elderly woman to the table, a man alone watching television, and one house lit only with the blue christmas lights on their banister.

How was your weekend?

Huh? Huh? How was it.
Let me tell you about mine. It involves me not getting raped and murdered, despite the odds:

Somehow, Mr. Jeffrey Paternostro, a friend and fellow former editor of the publication I ran in college, convinced me that we should go to a layout session of said publication, from here on out called The OMEN. Oh wait, I remember how I was convinced: alcohol, which, incidentally, was my motivation for editing the publication for two years. We drove an hour on I-91 up to my old college town. Since we were early, we passed our college and went to the nearby bar, The Moan and Dove, for some delicious beer. This place takes beer seriously, and I had missed being there. This was to be the high point of the evening.

Picking up a 6-pack of Harpoon along the way to campus, we went to the dorm building that housed the publication office, and entered the secure dorm the way we used to as students: find the propped open door, or just wait half a second until someone lets you in.
The current OMEN staff was late, so we opened our beers. Since Jeffery and I both failed to have bottle openers on our keychains (an oversight that I will soon remedy), I opened our beers on a piece of wood attached to the (locked) office door, spilling beer everywhere, but gaining access to delicious delicious alcohol.

The OMEN's two slogans are "We hate so you don't have to" and "the OMEN loves you!" Jeffrey and I put an emphasis on the hate. The current staff, as we already knew, put an emphasis on being straight-edge circus freaks. I mean it: most staffers were also members of the Hampshire College Circus. We were not amused. We did our best to fill the room with vitriol. Once we tired of this futile mission, we met up with another alum for sobering up at a diner, where I filled myself with lots of delicious caffeine. This will be important later.

As we sat in the Whatley Diner, we noticed that it was starting to snow. No problem, right? No. My car doesn't have snow tires on yet. As we drove back to Amherst, each mile became worse. I couldn't see. I was losing control of the car on turns. Jeffrey and I dropped off the third member of our party and headed to the highway.

Jeffrey coached me for about five miles of highway driving (in second gear, going about 20 mph, in and out of control of the car). Every car we saw was either in a ditch or on a tow truck. We saw a sign for lodging and pulled off.

Super 8 motels are essentially for drugs and rape. Holyoke is also essentially for drugs and rape. We had multiplied the odds that this would be our last night alive and rape-free.

When we finally got my car up the steep driveway that led to the motel, we rented the last non-smoking room. The guy who sold us the room conduced all business through a tiny, bullet proof window, like you'd see in a subway station or somewhere else where robbings and stabbings are daily occurrences. As Jeffery was kind enough to point out, he probably thought I was a well-dressed hooker. The sheets in the room had cigarette burns and probably about 8 diseases. the door didn't lock, so we propped an ironing board against it. There was no heat. Even fully dressed, I felt the sheet scum as I tried to get comfortable on the worst bed ever made. I wondered if there were any blood stains on the mattress.

Here's how the night went: I had fever dreams about designing posters for work as I failed to sleep due to a lethal cocktail of adrenaline from imminent death, pain from a terrible bed, and caffeine from the diner. I finally had one dream. It was unspeakably bizarre. Someone kept getting ice from the ice machine near our door. At 10 AM, we got up, and Jeffrey wrote a nasty article promising death to the OMEN staff for all our misfortunes. Seriously, fuck you, OMEN.

"here, have this basket of stuff and come and stay for the weekend"

Thank you, Meghan, for reminding me that I wanted to post this. I heart it so much.

Inexplicably, we latch onto death and murder stories and sites and never ever let go.  At the end of the street where I grew up there is a tree with a barkless patch about two feet high and one foot wide.  The bark was scraped off by a real estate agent: it was still soaked in blood.  Two classmates of mine flipped their Volkswagen convertible over the curb, over a driveway, hitting the tree about three feet in the air.  The front crushed and their mangled bodies covered the tree and yard with property-value-decreasing blood.  I still look for the barkless patch.  

The first dead body I saw was in Puerto Rico, but that's not important because I will never see that spot again.  

I've been documenting another death spot: outside of where I work.  It's one half of a double murder.  Two kids tried to rob a drug dealer, so he chased them down. Both were shot execution-style; one died in a church parking lot and the other on the street.  It is the second spot that is of interest.  

First, both spots were covered in white powder to soak up the blood.  You could see the red for awhile.  Candles, memorials, photographs, balloons, beer cans all created a shrine to the dead.  The street spot became an unofficial no parking zone. Not that you could park: there were often friends of the deceased on the scene, in the street.  I'd slow down on my way in to work at night so that I didn't hit someone.  The memorial faded, but the spot remained wet.  I am not sure if it was a blood stain, constant pouring of libation, or both.  Then, it was the deceased's birthday. It all came back for one last hurrah.  And it faded again.  Soon before the anniversary of the death, I walked by the spot and paused.  There was a car parked over the death spot.  It was the first time since the death that I had ever seen a car there.  I have seen it once more since then.  It gives me butterflies in my stomach.  

Today, the street cleaners came by the death spot with a huge vacuum truck and a tube that could fit a body to suck up all the street dirt and the leaves.  All clean.