Voices in My Head

Martha was out of town for three days last week and within less than 24 hours I seamlessly reverted back to the stay up very late, sleep for three hours and then nap midday, routine. Fascinating to watch. I bet over time, I could be one of those fucking insane people that actually does gardening at night.

Speaking of gardening, a few new things this season are in store for us. First thing, Martha bought a mower and she will now be mowing the lawn. I say she because I’ll be dealing with the rest of it. Weeding, planting, digging, mulching, fertilizing and general garden/yard clean up. It’s all a big job and we have way more yard then either one of us want but we just can’t ignore it. We still plan to have Homeland Dan come once a month just to keep the yard from killing itself, but the rest is all up to us.

The second thing is that I am going to try to grow some tomatoes. Everything is getting so crazy expensive and I am so crazy unemployed that perks like yardmen and store bought tomatoes are things we are going to try and not have. We’ll see.

So here is something weird. I was in the yard building a path, (that is right I said path) when a silver Buick pulled into the driveway. An older woman got out and introduced herself as someone who used to live in our house. She and her husband lived here for ten years on the second floor in what is now my studio.

We talked for a few minutes, she marveled at all the work we have done on the outside and I stood there trying to remember what the state of the inside was. I wanted to invite her in but I couldn’t remember if the litter box needed changing, the kitchen status and if there were any, you know, ‘things’ out in the open.

Feeling good about the possibility of bringing her in, away we went. I figured it would be fun for her because not much has changed on the inside. All we’ve done in three years is paint and rip up rooms and rooms of hideous carpet.

Her story of the house seemed to be a little twisted and hard to follow, but then again, when stuff like that is happening to me I have a hard time staying focused on what is actually being said. Instead I end up focusing on thoughts like ‘oh my god is this really happening???!!!’

I mean the combination of an elderly woman’s story and me is not a good combination for fine details. Usually I’m pretty good, but not when there are strange people in the house. There are only two places on the planet where I feel totally at ease. One is on the streets of Manhattan and the other is in the house alone, or with Martha.

From what I remember I got this; her husbands’ grandparents lived here in the main house when it was a single family home. After they had to move away, her husbands parents moved in and they ‘did an enormous amount of work’. They ended up either building the second floor apartment or converting the second floor into an apartment. She came into the picture when she married their son and they lived in the second floor apartment while her in-laws’ lived on the first floor.

Complicating things even more, a neighbor told me weeks ago that there used to be a second house on the property. It was way in the back and burned down in the 80’s. But that is a totally different story that I know nothing about.

Moving on, they all lived together in the house and when the woman had her daughter, her in-laws built the room off of the kitchen that we now use as Martha’s office.

The main part of the second floor apartment was their old living room. This is now my computer/stereo/where the magic happens room.

The photo room, where I have a small light table and another table to cut mattes on that doubles as Martha’s upstairs desk, use to be their bedroom.

In the darkroom, (their old kitchen) she and her husband hung the 1950’s metal cabinets and put down the blue vinyl tile piece by piece.

As time went on she and her husband ended up taking care of the in-laws until they had to move out. She and her husband moved up the street and soon after is when Martha and I appeared on the scene and proceeded to rip the shit out of the outside of the house.

It is weird to have someone standing in your house, pointing to things and declaring them as theirs and asking you questions that on the surface are easy but deep down are complicated.

“Those are my cabinets and this is my floor. Don’t you just love this floor?”

That floor is something Martha bitches about on a pretty consistent basis.

Stuff like that gets me thinking about how all of us have a nasty habit of defining ourselves by the junk we own. Once we are dead, our crap is just crap left behind for other people to either enjoy or chuck in a landfill. Very too quickly in my head, I get all existential.

“Oh my, what happened to the stove? And where is the microwave? Did you get rid of it?!”

The thing was so big that if you wanted to, you could microwave a baby in it. I had to show her the new stove that has the microwave built in.

“You’ve taken very good care of the house. Do you like living here?”

Yes, no, I don’t know. It’s a weird question. How can I explain that I don’t like living anywhere longer than two years and now here we are closing in on year three, and I’m a little freaked out about it all. How can I explain that I never want to leave my 18th floor two-bedroom, two bath jaw dropping view of Manhattan apartment with it’s seven minute subway ride into the city. How can I explain that sometimes everything is just so complicated, strange, and unsettled in its sameness? You know that whole, Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying*.  How can I explain that for her sake, she should probably go now.

“Yes, we do.  We like living here” I replied.

* —Simone de Beauvoir