A little prone to melancholy.
Feb. 22nd, 2003 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vulgarweedI made a sad discovery while riding the Grand Ave. bus to the office the other day: My old house is gone! No, not one I owned (I've never) but one I occupied the top two floors of for four years with my former fiance.
I'm not shocked by this, though seeing that gap in the block was jarring, like a very familiar mouth (one's own?) with a tooth suddenly gone. That neighborhood, an out-of-the-way and neglected old vestige of the once-huge Italian enclave to the south, bordered by industrial whatsits all around and very convenient to downtown, had been being encroached upon by the cheap-quality "luxury" condo-and-SUV set for years. The house itself probably dated to the 1880s or '90s - it used to have a sibling just like it next door that was torn down while we watched from our deck, keeping an eye on the encroaching backhoes nervously. (It did once take a chunk out of our foundation). Built on the lot quickly was the uglist grey five-unit monstrosity I've seen in a city noted for them. Very pretentious and imposing in its crass simplicity: very bargain-basement-Bauhaus, with a strange watchtower thing on top that looked like it should have a guard with a machine gun in it. Who the fuck buys these things?
So anyway, the house is gone--to my knowledge, it's the only house/apartment building I've ever lived in (and there have been dozens) that isn't still standing. This house was kind of a dump, but it was a dump we grew to love. Not a single 90-degree angle anywhere in the interior - during the four years we lived there our refrigerator slowly migrated two feet to the south. Blessed by some landlord with carpet in a soul-crushingly ugly dark pink. My fiance-at-the-time, (who I'll call Bugs, as I often did) tried to pass it off to me as "dusky rose" or some shit, but I know a twat-colored carpet when I see one! It had a completely raw, uninsulated attic space the same size as the apartment, the whole upper floor, with rotted wood boards and a century's worth of coal dust. I loved it, and I moved all my instruments, amplifiers, 4-track, altar, and guest bed up there as soon as it was made at all habitable (and I have pretty flexible standards of "habitable.") Bugs found, among other fascinating detritus up there, a huge box full of scratch-off lottery tickets (already scratched, no winners) and a very ancient wooden carving of a woman far too voluptuous to be a saint; from this and from the deeply weird placing of doors on the second floor, we deduced it might at some point have been a house of ill repute. We immediately made the Lady the Matron Goddess of the place.
I miss the house, and I miss the memories it represents, although it wasn't overall a thoroughly happy time in my life. Bugs and I never did make it to the altar (we were handfasted for a year and a day early on, but never renewed it and never made it "legal"). Yeah, I'm damn sick of the notion that "commitment anxiety" is only a male malady (if in fact it's a malady at all). We were great lovers, fantastic friends, deeply dubious as any semblance of spouses - and that does NOT make our relationship a failure or a waste of time. Goal-oriented courtship is vastly overrated. I'm glad we had the time we had.
When we broke up, I was the one to move out, because he could afford that place on his own and I couldn't. Some people thought that was awful, that I should be dumped AND lose my house at once, but frankly I was glad to live alone for a while. Bugs lives in NYC now. He was the first person I called on Sept. 11.
Kitty-Boy's not home tonight; he and his band went to Indiana for the weekend to finish up mixing on their EP. I like being able to sleep diagonally across the bed once in a while. But having a year and a half of it back then was, frankly, enough. I like to share.
I'm not shocked by this, though seeing that gap in the block was jarring, like a very familiar mouth (one's own?) with a tooth suddenly gone. That neighborhood, an out-of-the-way and neglected old vestige of the once-huge Italian enclave to the south, bordered by industrial whatsits all around and very convenient to downtown, had been being encroached upon by the cheap-quality "luxury" condo-and-SUV set for years. The house itself probably dated to the 1880s or '90s - it used to have a sibling just like it next door that was torn down while we watched from our deck, keeping an eye on the encroaching backhoes nervously. (It did once take a chunk out of our foundation). Built on the lot quickly was the uglist grey five-unit monstrosity I've seen in a city noted for them. Very pretentious and imposing in its crass simplicity: very bargain-basement-Bauhaus, with a strange watchtower thing on top that looked like it should have a guard with a machine gun in it. Who the fuck buys these things?
So anyway, the house is gone--to my knowledge, it's the only house/apartment building I've ever lived in (and there have been dozens) that isn't still standing. This house was kind of a dump, but it was a dump we grew to love. Not a single 90-degree angle anywhere in the interior - during the four years we lived there our refrigerator slowly migrated two feet to the south. Blessed by some landlord with carpet in a soul-crushingly ugly dark pink. My fiance-at-the-time, (who I'll call Bugs, as I often did) tried to pass it off to me as "dusky rose" or some shit, but I know a twat-colored carpet when I see one! It had a completely raw, uninsulated attic space the same size as the apartment, the whole upper floor, with rotted wood boards and a century's worth of coal dust. I loved it, and I moved all my instruments, amplifiers, 4-track, altar, and guest bed up there as soon as it was made at all habitable (and I have pretty flexible standards of "habitable.") Bugs found, among other fascinating detritus up there, a huge box full of scratch-off lottery tickets (already scratched, no winners) and a very ancient wooden carving of a woman far too voluptuous to be a saint; from this and from the deeply weird placing of doors on the second floor, we deduced it might at some point have been a house of ill repute. We immediately made the Lady the Matron Goddess of the place.
I miss the house, and I miss the memories it represents, although it wasn't overall a thoroughly happy time in my life. Bugs and I never did make it to the altar (we were handfasted for a year and a day early on, but never renewed it and never made it "legal"). Yeah, I'm damn sick of the notion that "commitment anxiety" is only a male malady (if in fact it's a malady at all). We were great lovers, fantastic friends, deeply dubious as any semblance of spouses - and that does NOT make our relationship a failure or a waste of time. Goal-oriented courtship is vastly overrated. I'm glad we had the time we had.
When we broke up, I was the one to move out, because he could afford that place on his own and I couldn't. Some people thought that was awful, that I should be dumped AND lose my house at once, but frankly I was glad to live alone for a while. Bugs lives in NYC now. He was the first person I called on Sept. 11.
Kitty-Boy's not home tonight; he and his band went to Indiana for the weekend to finish up mixing on their EP. I like being able to sleep diagonally across the bed once in a while. But having a year and a half of it back then was, frankly, enough. I like to share.
