Servusamanu.com

My fantasy football teams wins again! That’s two weeks in a row meaning I’m obligated to mention here just as often. You’ll know next week how I do this coming Sunday. Overall feeling pretty happy with my team. Even the RBs that flailed Week 1 did well. I really could write about this all day…

But I shouldn’t. Servusamanu is supposed to be about writing and this is one of the weeks of generally promised to do some sort of writing exercise…let the googling begin.

“Comfort zone – 10 minutes: Come up with a character that represents an aspect of the place you live now (or where you grew up – somewhere you know really well). Try to avoid stereotypes. Spend a bit of time to think about: physical descriptions, where they live, what their values are.” Care of: http://www.lightningbug.com.au/Activity%20page/activity%20page.htm

This could be sort of interesting…

Allow me to introduce, Mr. Newt Pfaltz. He’s a professor by trade, generally meaning by attempted trade. Hasn’t actually worked a day in life, you must understand. He’s much too busy following the latest and greatest in outdated social trends – hats , cornhusking, even the Macarena. Someday he hopes to do just enough social networking to write a book disparaging it. Such are the ways of Mr. Pfaltz, the water-eyed, dough-faced emaciate (vegan on Sundays) ambulator. Don’t forget to put out your unneeded flyers and organic free-range treats. He comes by every Tuesday to pick them up and blog about them.

Don’t get me wrong – he’s not merely an avant-garde trend-setting luddite, he’s also a communist libertarian, pot-smoking social conservative, and free market environmentalist. He spends half his day at the library, the other half Starbucks, and the remaining seven halves of his personality at the various bars and antique hostels scattered about his territory. These are the markings of Mr. N. Pfaltz.

But how, you ask, would I recognize him? To begin, allow me to say that his is short, rumpled, largely unkempt, and smelling of coffee. When it rains, you might wonder if he was fishing in the Wallkill river. When he’s been fishing in the Wallkill river, you wonder if he’s spent too much time in Newburgh. He has a strong visage marked by a clipped nose, thrice chins, and droopy ear-lobes. He’s taken to a cane, likely to be replaced by something motorized, such as perhaps a steamroller, and he stares at everyone until they feel awkward and go somewhere else. That only refers to people, of course. Animals don’t mind being stared at and they all rejoice in the presence of Mr. Newt P. Faltz.

I wouldn’t call him a wealthy man, merely a man of means. Those means are largely unknown but presumed to derive from a wife, an ex-wife, or a harem of would be creditors. He’s been known to charm the local constabulary into ignoring his tendency to not tip. The waitresses pay his parking tickets (for the steamroller, you remember). Also, don’t let me forget to mention his glorious inheritance: he owns no less than 14 bankrupt laundromats. He tried to sell the once. Soon thereafter the Burger King went out of business.

I’m not sure there’s all that much left to say. All in all, Mr. Pfaltz is a wonderful man. It’s just a shame he can’t do anything about the hippies that hang outside his favorite café. That’s really very annoying.

You know what I haven’t written about in quite some time? Fantasy Football. You know what seems more interesting to write about right now? Fantasy Football.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. For the seventh or eighth year running I’ve drafted a team of virtual proxy players who will inevitably fail me halfway through the year, humiliate me toward the end, and then leave me for better teams the following year. Such is my luck in the world of competitive stats-based sporting endeavors.

The team du jour:
Aaron Rodgers: Best QB in the league as far as I’m concerned. Not too shabby when it comes to putting up numbers either.

Wes Welker: Best wide receiver on Tom Brady’s team. He gave me 28 points last week. As long as Ochocinco stays in a slump he might just manage that pretty much every week.

Santana Moss: I can never remember which Moss is which just that they’re all pretty decent. He put up a respectable 7 points last week I’d prefer someone better but I never manage to pick good WRs so nothing new.

Steve Smith: 29 points last week! Most of any guy on my team. I’m pretty sure it was a fluke but not a bad start for the guy I was planning on dropping before the game. He still might get dropped but maybe he’s worth something in a trade…

Rashard Mendenhall: Not Adrian Peterson who I picked up his rookie year in like the 9th round. Still, he’s good. Too bad he wasn’t good last week, but I won so he gets a pass.

Peyton Hillis: According to some, one of the best in the league. According to the number of points he was supposed to get me, but didn’t…just another slacker in the rear. He should round out a decent RB core through. I drafted smart this year.

Dallas Clark: My tight-end from Indy. Everything was going great until Peyton Manning wasn’t the starter. I’m looking for a new TE…

Lastly, Janikowksi as a kicker (good enough), and Dallas/Chicago as my defenses (Chicago did amazing last week. I’ve got Dallas against SF for this week.)

All in all, an acceptable start. I had the most points of any team for Week 1. This week I’m facing the guy who got the fewest points from Week 1. Here’s to hoping for a 2-0 start. If history is any indication, those will be only wins this season.

BREAK IN SUBJECT MATTER

Does this constitute writing practice? I follow sports just enough to know a few names and have an intelligent, or semi-intelligent, or slightly above guttural, conversation. I have almost nothing to say about fantasy sports, fantasy football, football, football fantasies, or sports. I think I can safely consider this a writing exercise on the lines of: write 400 words about a hobby you dabble with but fundamentally misunderstand. I’m sure someone has suggested that to the masses. Next up: growing bamboo! Or maybe not. I’ve still got a list of actual exercises I’d like to get through. First, though let’s see if my team wins…

I don’t edit enough.  A quick perusal of Servusamanu shows that much.  When I have some expectation that someone will actually read the edit product, I spend a bit more time checking things over but I still don’t spend enough time at it nor am I innately talented enough to not need it.   I would argue that I’m decent when it comes to figuring out flow, pacing, broken continuity – content editing.  I’m still left someone bereft when it comes to grammatical changes.  I either lack an eye or the patience, possibly both.

To a great degree, that’s still and always a problem, but I’ve taken to using AT&T’s Text-To-Speech demo on sporadic occasions.  When I have time and space enough to do so, I try to read whatever I happen to have written out-loud.  The idea is to catch where the text doesn’t match the intent.  Problem is, I read too fast and speak just a little slower but still too fast.  I inevitably miss the word spelled just close enough to the word I meant to get past undetected or the subtle homophone.   Since I edit by reading aloud there’s an unintentional consequence that stories are edited to be spoken.  That’s all well and good until you get around to the misplaced pronouns, misspelled words, and mistaken punctuation.

Even so, hearing the robotic AT&T voice actually seems to help.  It does alright with most pronunciations and obviously messes up words that I’ve spelled wrong.  It also pauses on punctuation which comes out being more helpful than one might imagine.  There’s still some ambiguity with dashes, commas, longer dashes, colons, and semi-colons.  I’ve taken to playing with dashes of late in place of complete sentences.  The hope is for a more organic sounding bit of words – AT&T’s speech thing tends to choke when I’ve gone offtrack.

The other trick, a stupid one, is to change the font to something unusual like courier new.  Once the words look different, it’s almost as if someone else wrote them.  Slightly helpful.  Also, there’s something about reading typewriter text as a robot reads it that feels like mission control circa 50 years ago.  Haven’t written any science fiction lately, but I sort of want to.

That more or less concludes today’s descent into irrelevancy.  I have a few short stories still out for maybe publication including a newer one I wrote about libraries.  In lieu of writing on my novel, I really should keep at the shorter works.  I’ve said it before.  I sometimes follow lead.  This last week I did.  This next week I probably won’t.  Such as it is.  There’s always the week after that.  Maybe by then I’ll have something interesting to write here…

“Take a painting and look at it for a while then write a story about it. You can write about the actual painting or take the theme of the painting as the theme of your story. You can do the same with poems or with book and movie titles. Thanks to Sam Lomax for suggesting this.”

Care of: OneOfUs.co.uk

In lieu of a portrait, I’m going with this picture.

It happens to be from Deus Ex: Human Revolution – recent video game, sort of a combination between a Raymond Chandler Noir and something by William Gibson.   I could rave for a quite awhile, but I’ll summarize quickly: interesting story (lots of transhumanism whatnot), incredibly gorgeous, and quite fun.  Officially, this picture is from Heng-Sha Island in China, specifically the alley outside The Hive – a Triad owned nightclub.

–

 I think it’s around 5 in the morning but it’s hard to tell sometimes.  At this level the streets are always dark.  Not dark from lack of light – between the neon signs and neon buildings, there’s no risk of getting lost in the woods.  It’s dark because the buildings rise two miles into the sky, because no one at this level cares to be seen or heard, because there’s just no such thing as sunlight when you’ve been forgotten.

I sweep the streets.  The nightclubs pay me.  I’m supposed to come in at 4 and work till 7.  I come in whenever.  I work till it’s done.  As long as the vomit, beer cans, crinkled newspapers are put away no one minds if I come in at all.  Sometimes I hire local urchins – kids dropped off by the people that live in the skyscrapers.  They do a good job as long I only pay them afterwards.

Usually, though I just do it myself.  Only one street.  Between me and a mop it doesn’t take that long.  Sometimes the shopkeeper next door helps me.  He sells noodles – 4 credits a bowl.  Busiest hour is right after the booze sets in.  A few hours later half-digested noodles line the streets.  That’s why the nightclubs hire me.

It’s not the best job I’ve ever had.  Also not the worst.  Those that live down here don’t usually have jobs at all.  The nightclub might seem shiny and bright but half the people going in haven’t actually seen sunlight in decades.  Vertical trams are too expensive.  Plane rides even more so.  We could all get on a boat and sail away by where, and why?  We’d just wind up in some other tall neon city sweeping up noodles.  Same everywhere – the sea level of poverty.

That’s why the Triads are here.  It’s quiet.  It’s dark.  Because of me it’s clean.  Most of all there’s lots of people who don’t mind any kind of work.  Sounds cliché, but noodles are 4 credits a bowl.  That’s more than 0.  A good shakedown will net you thirty from a small boss.  Plenty of beer, plenty of noodles.  More than enough to find a job somewhere else…

Unless you’re me.  I see how it goes.  30 credit goes to a guy paid 20 credits to rob it.  Anything over 4 credits is worth stealing.  Anything over 4 credits get stolen.  I get a free room, free noodles.  You can’t rob me.  That makes me the richest guy in town.  No one knows it, but I’m sweeping up everything they’ve ever hoped for.  They never ever saw it coming.

–

Bam.  Done.  15 minutes spread out over 3 hours.  See y’all next week.

This previous weekend I took a daytrip to Letchworth State Park which is about an hour from Rochester. Pictures of trip below (also a picture of a Garbage Plate – apparently the local culinary specialty)

Whenever I go on vacation there’s downtime – went to Las Vegas, monitoring server crashed and I was fixing it from the plane.  Montana – remote access went out.  Wisconsin – the power dropped twice.  A day off to go hiking – another power outage and an early morning rescue.  A week in New Orleans – two power drops.  Niagara Falls – something else broken or out.

75% of the time I take off something happens.   I still take the vacations, but I never sleep all that well and I come back just a little more jaded than when I began.  All this for what is really a blessing in disguise – I could be there during the problems.  That’s not exactly better.

As always, or always so far, everything gets resolved and with only limited interaction necessary from me.  I may find my particular organization of employment wildly disorganized and fundamentally inept, but that’s only against a theoretically perfect standard.  When shit hits the fan, they manage to stumble along rather well.  Bravo coworkers.  This one’s for you.

Of course, I’m still left antagonized and queasy.  I am in some ways a rather decent IT administrator – fastidious about documentation, broad knowledge of the field, able to diagnose problems procedurally, able to create and follow procedures, moderately capable at simplifying complex issues.  Alternatively, this is visibly not the field for me – highly impatient, excitable during outages and problems (though not irreparably so), fascist toward coworkers, brusque with problem-reporters, and constitutionally unable to accept vaguely infinite demands of my concern.  I like problems with definite boundaries – server room responsibilities may be infrequently taxed but are perpetually existent.  This is not for me.

And so I probe along other career choices – something obliquely computer related but ultimately outside of direct IT, my own little company now growing large enough to become worth considering, something in writing and probably low paid, something entirely different that I’d flail along at.  Hasn’t gone anywhere.  In fact I’ve started to get calls from various recruiters and companies hoping to hire – occasionally at generous salaries but all far away (Usually Atlanta or Dallas actually) – someone to take on even greater IT responsibilities.  Meh.  I’m just not sure I’m the right guy no matter how flattering the mindless HR recruiter happens to me.

The sad reality is that I’m terribly comfortable with what I’ve got.  I have vacation days, I’m paid just enough to appease my pride, I have access to books, and I’m the de facto expert at 24 years of age – a complete absurdity elsewhere.  All in all, it’s a charmingly surreal dreamland where everything is just wrong enough for me to complain but not wrong enough for me to respond.  That’s a common sort of feeling especially amongst the professional complacent but I’m always had enough to hubris to rise above that.  Maybe I’ve become prematurely old.

One year, less really, that’s when the various interests of work, self-employment, and school collide into a potpourri of fiscal, personal, and geographic concerns.  I do wonder how it will all play out.  My money is on a dramatic server  crash that sends me hurtling into premature unemployment giggling like a fool and hoping to take up sailing.  Continued employment with a token raise is also good.  We shall see I suppose.

In the mean time, I’m off to hike Letchworth State Park,  Next week I’ll be touring a whiskey distillery, teaching a personal client wordpress, fixing a friend’s wireless connectivity, and visiting Westchester to review a genuine server room.  How fun.

In coda:  I read a number of biographies.  Not frequently per se, but enough, usually two or three a year.  Whenever I read these I have some amount of apprehension…all of these biographies seem terribly enthralling compared to my average day.  True enough the routine stuff is stripped out – they only bother mentioning the big meetings and conclusive adventures – but it is such a depressive thought that so much of my day gets lost to fixing library shit – as unglamorous and unhistorical as shit-shoveling in Louisiana.  Then again, shit had to be shoveled and I suppose that biography might be as good as any.  At least no one’s bothered to write that one yet and odds are no one has ever written about maintaining a dinky ass, impoverished, understaffed, geographically disparate server room for an anachronistic cadre of state laborers either.  Such becomes my relief.

It is with triumphant mediocrity that I return to my regularly scheduled vacation – server room up, employment maintained, trail yet untraveled.

Last week was a writing exercise meaning this week is a return to the usual dribble – and true to form I’ve got no particular plan.  On the assumption that only deviations from the norm are worth considering, how has this week been any different from any other?

The summer semester is over.  For the next couple of weeks I do not have class.  This week I did have class, so nothing different there, but this is the first weekend where a week of academic drudgery does not await on the other end.  I have a little more time and a little more time to plan for.  It is less stressful, less laborious but not especially noteworthy.  The only change is that I will finally get to return to my recently neglected novel.  I am still just over half done, but I haven’t done much of anything in five or so weeks.  It is too difficult a task to write following 8 hours of work, 4 of class, and 2 of errands – lack of motivation is still a shoddy excuse.

That said, I will be returning to my petit burden.  There is always a foul taste when I first come back to a half-finished story…sort of like rank mustard but less pungent, still foul.   It becomes a weighty task until I’m back into the routine – of course by then I’ll once again have class.  Four this go round with five remaining just afterwards.  About a year left until I can consider myself qualified for something.

In regards to my general employment, my predictions from January have largely come true.  I remain as I always have – the back pillar of a crumbling department although now with, or soon to be with, a swanky new title – systems administrator.  Of course, that’s been my role for two and a half years now.  That’s apparently how long it takes to get paperwork to reflect reality…

As always projects come and go, many of which are in response to an electrical grid that can’t seem to stay active for more than a few weeks at a time.  The summer is always hectic – too much heat, too much AC, and too many century old copper lines run in too few places.  Our server room is so very precarious sometimes.

What else, what else?   Some cooking, some walking to the railtrail bridge and back.  Nothing worth wasting time on.  Next week a writing exercise.  Until then: here’s some of the Venture Bro’s soundtrack played live.

I’m pressed both for time and patience however this is a writing exercise week.  Conundrum: do I simply ignore writing exercises and babble about something else or do I press on and do as I should.  This week, I’ve decided to stick with it.  I’ve only twenty minutes or so and I’m on the verge of a headache, but today we get something done.

Writing Exercise: “Finish each phrase with whatever metaphor or simile comes immediately to mind.”

I’m not especially keen on simile and metaphor strikes too close to the grandiose…sometimes.  Both have their place and this an exercise in thought anyway, right?  Here goes…

• Blue paint spilled on the road like___________________________. 

dog slobber, red paint spilled on the road, like a thousand tiny cars rolling along the freeway till they hit grass, like noble blood drawn through ignoble means, like dragon fire and frothy vinegar, like an ocean tossed with a pizza…

• Canceled checks in the abandoned subway car seemed___________________________

rather like clutter, like confetti at a horse track, somehow akin to a doomed man’s carpet, like a nice garden of failure, like fraud run rampant, like the first symptom to show itself, indistinct but malignant.

• A spider under the rug is like___________________________. 

two in the bush, a shark in your mailbox, a union mouse setting up a picket line beneath the trap, an awfully dead spider underneath anything else, a sort of irrelevant anything hidden from view, a lost car key I have already replaced, grass underneath an old car

• Graffiti on the abandoned building is like___________________________.

timeless art as written by lunatics, the screams of trapped cubicle workers manifest on the other side of town, an obituary written by a distant acquaintance, a newspaper clipping translated into aubergine

•  Nothing was the same, now that it was___________________________.

different, like an angry wolf on overtime but during the big game, half submerged nonsense of the early morning informercial variety, all tilty and squinty, boozy and dumb

• The dice rolled out of the cup toward Veronica  like___________________________ 

Red paint spilling along the road, two angry jackrabbits suffering from vertigo, all the world’s karmic forces encased in plastic and dimpled with a hot iron, like two knuckleballs wobbling about never quite sure where to go, a lost maniac in the woods off County Route 7

• A child in _________________ is like a _______________ in  _____________________.

What?!  A child in the woods is like a deer in the ocean, but louder.  A child in danger is like a crippled helicopter in the last seconds of flight.  This one is rubbish.

• _________________is like muscles stretched taut over bone.

The canvas, the zeppelin’s outer casing, the storm

• The fog plumed through gunshot holes in the car windows like ___________________________.

fog might have done just as well if the windows were open, smoke through a lego chimney, like hot gas – world war era,

• She held her life in her own hands as if it were___________________________.

so much receipt paper printed at the gas station pump, something moldy or perhaps combustible, recently downgraded from a AAA rating

• Lacey poured coffee down her throat as if ___________________________.

she might wish to drown or at least pretend to for a little while, the coffee were nectar and she a thief broken into Olympus, the coffee was anything worth drinking

• If I should wake before I die,___________________________.

don’t hit me with trivia, like a cocoon half eaten?  It’s hard to even make this one a proper sentence…

• The security guard walks the lobby as if___________________________.

his employers weren’t just renting the place, the floors were lava and the walls hell itself, his ipod was homily and the lobby just another petty world, Pompeii was erupting beneath him

• The library books left in the rain like___________________________.

(were left in the rain?  About.com – not exactly the highest quality sometimes), like newspaper used to line a composting pit, like forgotten galoshes, books to be burned by the even dumber, like an old farmhouse four generations abandoned

• Music in the hallway like___________________________. 

Wagner reborn but with a boombox, like a movie montage, like crickets with auto-tune, like every garage ban striking up a tune all at once, like an electrical storm in radio city music hall, like footprints on drumskin

And enough for today.  This actually got rather long…

I’m apparently falling into a habit of doing writing exercises every other week. That leaves the alternating weeks free for me to complain about something. Fair enough, I suppose.

Recently, I came across this article on the 10 Stupidest Utopias. On one hand, it’s the same sort of opinion dribble I might write. On the other hand, it got me thinking about Utopia…I suppose that means that it wasn’t so bad after all.

Anyway, I started to wonder what actually makes these utopias stupid? Is it because they are unrealistic, or derivative, or misguided? The author makes those arguments and some cases I suppose I would agree, but I think there needs to be a distinction between a political or moral utopia and a literary one.

Take for example, Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The article references this particular Heinlein story and I recently read it so I’m thankfully familiar. As with most of Heinlein’s work, there is a latent militarism present and an almost Ayn Randian set of protagonists. Heinlein’s too good a writer to succumb to his own utopia, but by no means could his worlds be considered genuinely plausible.

Does this make for a stupid or ineffective utopia, or is this instead a literary accomplishment? I would argue that the Heinlein’s world neither is nor should be considered especially probable, nor perhaps was it meant to be. If Moon is a Harsh Mistress does indeed represent a Utopia, the intent is actually more subtle – the characteristics demonstrate traits that are admirable, at least in Heinlein’s view, and the unrealistic world allows for the benefits of these traits to be given heroic importance. I would argue that Heinlein’s utopia is the moral equivalent of a superpower – it stretches basic human characteristics to epic proportion and, for better or worse, sheds light on the human condition through a comparison with the extreme.

The many political fascist utopias are similar equipped. They intend to show successful worlds created on the back of some ideological system. No reasonable person can conclude that these systems actually generate these sorts of worlds. Rather the utopian reality is used to motivate and to demonstrate the benefits of the ideology through exaggeration. If these utopias can be considered stupid, it is little different than arguing superheroes are moronic for flying faster than bullets.

Of course, there are other items that make certain utopias lame – poor writing and shoddy ideas exist in equal measure – but would Plato’s republic really be considered a stupid utopia? This seems somehow unfair and misguided. Of course, Plato was likely an extreme elitist and no, age is not an absolute defense, but his utopia is still reflective of a very different world. Must a utopia be considered timeless to be successful? Surely, utopia itself may be a concept in motion? It certainly would be for me.

Drifting away from the topic, what would my own utopia consist of? As a writer, I want a world that encourages eccentricity. I need problems and people deviating from the norm. I need vagabonds, social misfits, and abnormality. Unless, I’ve decided to toss plausibility complete you the window my utopia still needs problem with which to overcome. As a theorist, I would create utopia by solving those problems and never allowing them to exist in the first place.

So, commenter that I intend to be, what would I consider an intelligent plausible utopia? That’s s profoundly difficult question to answer – perhaps why I take some umbrage at a list of stupidest ones. Given a few minutes to write, and maybe an hour of thought otherwise, I would describe my utopia thusly: small communes separated geographically but with rapid transport between them. Communities would range from a handful to many thousands but never exist at the city size that exists today. Each commune would exist with a large degree of local autonomy – each has the ability to define its own rules and society with a few important restriction: murder and capital crimes remain so, any adult individual has the ability to leave a community at any time, and that all communities must participate in some basic maintenance tasks (maintain the transport system, communication infrastructure etc.) In this utopia, population is likely less than it is now – something environmentally plausible – the means of which this is attained are likely far from the utopian ideal but let’s pretend it was done through education and birth control. Finally, computers, robots, and the like will perform the majority of the labor necessary to maintain this sort of society – however individuals will each be given some basic set of tasks, a few hours a week perhaps, with which to maintain their society. Otherwise, they will be left to their own interests and hobbies, with creative and inventive endeavors highly prized.

Of course, the great hole in all of this is resource scarcity, but ultimately utopia is an escape from lacking. Perhaps it is this fundamental criteria that defines a good from a bad utopia. Smarter utopias react to lack by creating more and distributing fairly. Stupid utopias react to lack by allowing fewer to claim and greater criteria from demanding a claim. Perhaps this is the distinction one must make? If so, the reality is that stupid utopias are closer to reality. Maybe, these are not utopias at all, but rather an oblique sort of escapism. Instead of making the world a better place, make the world seem like a better place. Make all the waste and irrelevancy of society into a virtue. Perhaps that is a different thing entirely.

Or maybe I’m just writing too quickly, or lost my mind completely. Both are acceptable, or will be at least until next week. Adieu.

Writing exercise du jour:  Describe, as completely as possible, some place you haven’t been in a long while.

I believe the intent of this particular assignment is to train up a sense for detail – whenever and wherever you are, what might be worth describing?  What details really capture the essence of the locale?  What’s worth saying? However, before the cull begins, this exercise just wants details…as many as possible.  From that something better can be derived.

Location: my old Arizona apartment.

Second floor.  I was the door on the right opposite a harmless though excruciatingly elderly and half-crazed neighbor.  Beside the stairwell, a rather scraggly tree held its post – not thick enough to climb or hang another, too thick to ignore.

The door opened to a rather modest living room – gray couch, fabric looked like corduroy but felt more like velvet.  Light fell across the folds from vertical window-skylights perched in the apex of gambled ceiling.  Across from the couch, a television.  Rather small, rather ignored.  No other furniture present by a love seat.  Almost never used.  It guarded over the doorway to a pigeon infested balcony.  Almost never safe to go out there.  Really quite foul in practice.  Also the train that the shades were on didn’t work correctly.  Once opened it wasn’t quite hard to close them again.  Sort of broken.

The living room merged with a dining room space.  An absurd, low-hanging insufficient chandelair hung over a hideous unwieldy table.  Painted white with the look of something painted white by an idiot, narrow legs, chairs that weren’t heavy never were impossible to move, the whole just an excuse to place magazines, books and whatnot down.  In two years I never ate there.

Kitchen was compact.  Full height refrigerator across from a single sink and cupboards.  A dishwasher I never used.  A window I should have used more for plants.  I had a spice cabinet across from a closet hiding away the dryer/washing machine stacked.  Convenient though dryer lint was a common accoutrement to the tiled floor.

Between the kitchen and the dining area, a small t-shamed hallway.  The ceiling fell to a normal height.  Entering the living room was always a bit like entering a cathedral – going to bed was climbing into a hobbit whole.  The left t went to the bathroom.  Small, a few rust stains in the sink.  Mirror was always splotched with toothpaste.  A shower was there beside it.

Straight ahead was a walk-in closet, almost the size of a room.  Shirts on the right.  Beneath that blankets where I would sometimes lay down and read.  Assorted office supplies on shelves at the back.  Luggage along the bottom left.  Pants on a shelf on the mid-level right.  Later I stored a potato gun and spare books.  Cluttered but always manageable.

Bedroom was a rectangle.  Dresser along the right.  Computer table against the wall with a window.  Bed in the back left corner against the wall.  White, sometimes dark.  I had a Kachina doll on the dresser – I never really decorated artistically otherwise.

Addendums.  Carpet throughout was brown or mostly.  Took stains well, never much of a problem.  Just outside the hallway, in the cathedral living room, there was a fire alarm.  Too high to reach.  Shower steam would set it off if I didn’t close the door all the way.  Afterwards, I’d take a shoe at toss at it the alarm until the case broke and batteries tumbled out.  Absurd.

The exterior was a brown stucco building – 16 or so units to a building.  Squarish and most symmetrical.  There were small ponds everywhere.  Fountains kept the water moving usually, but when it sat too long there were mosquitoes and brackishness.  Always very hot.

Never insects, bugs, lizards.  Always surprised by how little wildlife got tracked into my apartment.  Benefit of a second story apartment.

Computer desk was worth mentioning.  Black, cheap, but only a single full length narrow drawer and deep.  Plenty of room to assemble things.  It was only barely a desk, almost a table.  Never found a desk like it since.  Never have enough surface space.  Always have everything living underneath.  Computer light used to reflect off the black surface.  Looked a bit like a military establishment.  Eventually just kept computer turned off when I wasn’t using it.  Too loud anyway.

Funny thing is, I barely have any pictures.  A few of my living room.  A few of toy knights assembled on the floor.  A few of me assembling a trebuchet in the living room – a thorough mess.  The rest are pictures I took of myself for whatever reason with the apartment in the background.  There’s very little actually – nothing of the kitchen or bathroom or the walk-in closet.  I recall the apartment so very fondly but have almost no proof I even lived there.  Strange.

Anyways, this meets the definition of the apartment.  If I had to describe it succinctly- quiet second story cathedral with kitchenette cloister and attached reliquary.  Small bathroom and bedroom included.  Pigeons on the porch.  Fire alarm a bit wonky.  Mirror in need of cleaning.  800/month

                Until next week…