Curtains for You

Sweet pumpkin pie, it’s November!

Things that are not Perfect In Every Way (r) about the new apartment:

a) There’s bird poop on my window and how will I get it off when the window opens at the top and the bird poop is in the middle?

b) I can’t get my computer monitor far enough away from me so I will soon be blind. But the nearly blind girl on America’s Next Top Model has not yet been eliminated, so maybe I will move on to a rewarding career as a top model, once I am blind.

c) Hooks can be deceiving: they appear so useful and one gets excited about a plethora of them, however what can you really do with hooks but put things on them that hang? And how many things that hang do YOU have? Because I only have a few and now they’re all hanging and I have other things that don’t hang but rather stack, pile, stick and rest and I cannot properly place any of these items because all I have is hooks.

d) The toilet runs. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it means I know I’m in the west end, which will be helpful when I am blind. All the toilets in the west end run. Don’t argue or tell me about your toilet. I have my theories.

e) Holy crap would you people stop driving like there’s free chocolate cake at the south end of Thurlow street? I went there. There’s no cake but there are a lot of crumpled Honda Civics and SUVs.

Things that are P.I.E.W (r) about the new apartment:

a) 15 minute walk to work. This walk involves no skytrain, bus or spilled cottage cheese. Holla!

b) This view from the kitchen. Today there was an elderly man doing Tai Chi on the grass.

c) What it looks like with flowers on my kitchen table:

d) Th’return of my feathered bead curtain!

e) The new shower curtain, which can be washed in the washing machine and does not smell like Barbies. It can hang to dry over the pole in the middle of the shower. Handy for umbrellas! said the caretaker, of the pole, when she showed us the suite. Our umbrellas are on the floor.

f) The man across the street has a television the size of our whole apartment. Since the day we noticed it, he has had his blinds closed but if he ever opens them again, I could totally read the lips of America’s Next Top Whatever from here.

g) I walked to Capers Community Market yesterday which is where I should have been shopping for my stinky hippy diet food all along but resisted till the bitter end. I bought two loaves of bread; one of sundried tomato spelt sourdough and one of spelt and soda. Neither is leavened with yeast and neither contains wheat. Capers Community Market gets a big stinky hippy round of applause from me.

This afternoon I am making split pea soup. So far it smells like bacon but it’s early yet.

And now, a new feature I call “Poetry from my 20s!” For days like today when I have little to add.

1997, early February. Written in a basement suite that smelled of purple, kittens and mushrooms.

why do we tame the wilderness
and then decry the sameness of society?
the stuffed bear
with the stuffed heart
reads: make me wild.
we kill our spirits, the
spirits around us
then use artificial means
to make
re-make
ourselves wild,
call the ones who are not tame
crazy.

Ah, line breaks, my old foe. We will meet again someday in the Punctuation Stadium.