On the Inside, Looking Out

All I can hear is the rain draining down the side of the building, with one spot of what must be particularly enormous drops because it’s making the most obscene glopping sound as it hits the concrete deck. All of this is behind me -- I’m on the couch with my back to the wall, because that’s the way the couch faces. It’s a horribly insulated wall; I can just practically feel a slight breeze on my bare arms because there are so many cracks and poorly seamed crevices. The window air conditioner unit behind me, just over my left shoulder, might as well be a fucking fan it’s letting so much air in. And the gaping spaces around the door, especially under it -- a fucking sewer rat could probably walk right in if it was smart enough to come in out of the rain, which lucky for me most sewer rats are not. It sounds as if I’m describing some slum tenement or something. I’m not. It’s just my apartment, and really it’s rather lovely. I mean, it’s a shithole second story walk up in Hoboken, New Jersey, right above my favorite dive bar in the world, but it’s lovely. I’m feeling a little directionless right now and I’m afraid my poor, drafty apartment is taking the brunt of the negativity. I choose to sit here, though, draft be damned, because I love the view. There is a glass-paneled door in front of me that separates the tiny sitting room from the disproportionately oversized kitchen. Just to my right is the damned ill-fitting door out to our back patio, where as I’ve explained it is currently raining. Snowing, actually, but since it’s probably thirty three degrees outside it’s that huge wet snow, loud and cold. The deck door has window panes in it as well, and so I can sit on my couch, facing into the apartment, but stare outside at the same time, because the glass reflects onto itself and it becomes a way for me to look backward, facing forward. It’s not a great view; it’s other people’s balconies cluttered with illegal gas grills and bad plastic furniture and discarded children’s toys. That’s never made sense to me, why people put their trash on their back patios. If it’s trash, and you make the effort to take it outside, why wouldn’t you walk out the front, instead of the back, where your chances of getting rid of the trash increase exponentially? Certainly no one is coming for it or taking it away if it’s on your back patio. No one will even know it’s there, except for me apparently, and I’m certainly not going to get rid of it for you. I wonder what they’re all doing in there. Raising their children, neglecting them, sleeping, eating, living their lives that are probably very different from mine and also probably very, very similar. Flitting back and forth between The Paris Review and TMZ, a lover of literature and intelligence and an equally voracious consumer of popular trash. Reading other people’s blogs and writing my own, a voyeur and an exhibitionist all at once. It’s an interesting life, isn’t it? It certainly, most certainly is. I think so, anyway.