Where I Live

Right into the Front Door of the New York State Governor's Mansion from My Apartment (20 February 2012)
From one of the three front windows of my apartment, I can see right into the front door of the Governor's mansion in Albany, New York. On occasion, I can watch guests enter the gate at the bottom of a small hill and make their way up a sloping pathway to that door. Usually, however, guests park in the lot at the south end of the mansion, as I myself have done on a few occasions. If I visit the mansion for another event, I will merely have to cross the street.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the Governor's mansion is situated at the southeast corner of the building where I work, so I can sit on my futon and look at the building where I work (the Cultural Education Center). My own office in this building is the only corner office on the ninth floor that I cannot see from this perch, which fact allows me to live a healthy distance from work. From here I can also see much of the Empire State Plaza (that grand conglomeration of state office buildings), including the Corning Tower and the Egg (a performing arts center). Not to mention the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where, daily, priests are protecting us from the ravages of contraception. I pass the cathedral every day on my five-minute commute to work (from futon to the chair in my office, including elevator ride).

I have lived here now for seven months, and it is a strange and solitary life, one that allows me much time for writing, but one which has increasingly been taken up with watching movies. Still, I write and create an enormous number of things that I call poems. Somehow, nothing decreases my productivity in that realm. Or everything increases it. On weekends, I rarely speak, and more rarely see, anyone I know. For some reason, I've also lost my massive ability to read. Year before last, I read over 365 books. This year, it's been maybe five books, and all of them quite short.

Yet there are entertainments here. I can report that marijuana smoking (not by me, who has never smoked anything) goes on across the street from the Governor's mansion, and I hate the smell of that smoke more than I hate cigarette smoke. The little dog that lives in the apartment below me is left alone for most of the weekend and cries quietly but annoyingly the entire time it is alone, leading me to play music constantly to drown him out and fill the space. (He's doing a little bit of yowling right now.) I am in charge of snow shoveling here, which reduces my rent a little each month, yet the snow has been so slight in Albany this winter that I really could have dispensed with snow shoveling entirely.

More interestingly and sadly, my next-door neighbors had a row today. A few items fell or were pushed to the floor, but there was no physical fighting, and the poor young woman cried from the other side of my bedroom wall. It was a plaintive cry, the worst kind, the most painful. I have heard such crying before, and I can't help but feel for anyone making such a cry, even this poor young woman whom I hardly know.

One day a couple of months ago, the couple came to my door and asked me if I had heard anything in their apartment that afternoon. I said I thought one of them had run down the stairs a few minutes before, but I learned that an intruder had climbed the fire escape up to their open window, entered the apartment, and ransacked the place. The apartment was filled with the things of life (furniture, decorations, knickknacks), but the filling was made more dramatic by the mess the intruder had made. Something covered almost every inch of the floor.

About a month later, the man was carrying a loveseat (I use that term intentionally) up the stairs, and he introduced me to his friend, noting that I was a very nice guy. I think I am, yet I was not at all sure how I had proved that to this man. I wonder about that sometimes. How do we present ourselves to people? How do they make decisions about us so quickly? There are people I have known for years who have recently come to conclusions about me that showed their decisions were made on assumptions and not facts. I concluded that the man had merely assumed I was nice because I was always polite to him and had tried to be helpful that time I had toured his ransacked apartment.

Since this blog on poetry and art (and the works appearing in the intervening space between them) is also a blog about myself and my personal experiences, and since those personal experiences make up the seemingly fictive component of this blog (I am a character here, not a human), I thought it necessary to report, finally, that I am living alone. It is not a piece of information I have told many people, though some have discovered it without my having told them. I told only one of the people I work with every day, believing it difficult to keep this information from the person I was commuting with to work.

(Of course, I would claim that I've already told people I've moved by giving them the information they need to conclude that I have. Most of the photographs I post include GPS data about where they were taken, and I take many, at all times of the day and night, in Albany. And when I post a recording to Audioboo, and I've done 200 of these so far, the recording comes with a map that often pinpoints exactly where I live. Anyone with the wherewithal could use that data to find my apartment building and throw stones at whatever windows they think are mine. Hint: Top three in the front of the building. But please don't do that.)

This change of venue is a change of life, even if it doesn't last forever, even though I will certainly move somewhere else before I die (unless I achieve death sooner than expected). Being here, I have learned that I am given to minimalism in my life. I don't spend much time at all with anyone now. I have nothing on the walls here, but the place is decorated with plenty of books. I have a good work table, and sometimes I actually sit at it to eat. Usually, my apartment is quite spare and neat. When the poet Jim Behrle came here, he told me this was the nicest place he had ever seen. And, sadly, he wasn't joking.

What I like most about living here is this big room I am in right now, the room where I spend most of my time. The floor is a beautiful blond wood, handsanded by the poet Douglas Rothschild, who is the super for this building and a number of others, and who is amazingly handy and helpful. (When the landlord told me I would have to retrieve the key to the apartment from Douglas, I asked him, "The poet Douglas Rothschild?" and the man was honestly surprised people knew who Douglas was and that he was a poet.) This floor is wide, and I keep it bare and open. That allows me space to dance to some of the music I play: "Anarchy in the UK," "California über Alles," "If I Ever Leave This World Alive," "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," "Human."

"Are we human or are we dancers?" As I say, we are both.

And there are other songs.

For now, I am trying to imagine a life as a solitary man, and I'm noting that my skills may lie elsewhere. Fortunately, I was trained to cook when I was a young boy, even making dinners when I was nine and my mother had broken her arm falling while climbing a fence at our house on Lake Erie. For most of my married life, I was the cook, and I learned, eventually, that I enjoy cooking. I know how to clean. The place is neat. And I have no pets or plants to care for or to complicate my life. I will note that I am usually good at taking care of things, but that I want only to take care of people, not inanimate things, animals, or plants. I was raised, as the eldest child of six, to take care of people, which made me good at being a father, though maybe not as skilled at other aspects of my life.

There is something strange about living in Albany, something unexpected, something that even people who know me well might not realize, not even my siblings, I'd guess. I've already lived in Albany. Just not this one. I used to live in the one in Alameda County, the one in California, the one beside Berkeley, the one across the Bay from the place where I was born. And now I live in the Albany in Albany County, the one in New York, the one that is the state's capital, the one where I've worked the vast majority of my working life. I've lived in Albanys at both edges of the continent. It is a strange coincidence.

(And, now, if I could only get Ron Silliman, the only other poet I know of from Albany, California, to move here, then the two of us could share that distinction. Unfortunately, I have a rule that I can never see Ron in this country, so he'd have to live here but make sure we never saw each other. We'd have to call each other all the time to make sure we didn't go to the same movie theater or restaurant at the same time. I've met him a couple of times, but only in England.)

When I was about eleven and attending Presentation College in Barbados (this was before my brother was expelled and we had to change schools and attend Mapps College instead), one of our pop quiz questions (all on things no-one had taught us) was "What is the capital of New York State?" I immediately wrote "New York" on my sheet, only to learn the answer was actually "Albany." How would I know? I'd never lived in New York State. I had never attended school in the United States, except for a few weeks in the second grade. I had left the country when I was six.

And I've just kept leaving one place after another. By my count, the move to this place is the 47th of my life. And my father has moved almost double that many of times. So I have a lot moving to do.

Just as I was finishing this in the dark (as I usually write), I heard steps coming up the stairs, so I craned my head to the right to see how many sets of feet I could see pass through the crack of light under the door. There were two, two sets, two pair. A couple.

(And then, a minute or two later, a set or two left, and I heard the woman's muffled voice in the hallway.)


(everything's always changing)


ecr. l'inf.