|
DWELLING NOT INCLUDEDby Jeffrey Hannan copyright 2006 |
|
|
|
||
Published in: SOMA Literary Review, March 2009
From The Urban Ramblings of Hugo Storm
A pseudo-fictional blog
I like the fact that some of the side streets in my neighborhood are so narrow you can hear the sounds of people eating their meals: silverware clanking against plates, the murmuring of voices at a table, pots being banged around in kitchens.
It's not so much that those sounds gives this area a neighborhood feeling; it's more that they offer reassurance that these houses of flats, old shops and new apartment buildings are inhabited by people who live their lives, go to work, save their spare change in a jar, eat meals they cook themselves, have sex, take showers.
It reminds me that I don't live here in isolation. I'm not a lone figure looking on with disgust at the sites and sounds that occasionally disgust me, nor am I the poverty-bound old wretch I fear becoming, enduring retirement in a run-down SRO on...well, probably just around the corner...who, back when he was young, lived in a fringe neighborhood sytmied in its conversion and was delighted from time to time by stray moments that gave him occasional delight.
I like the view from my place. It's 3rd floor. The front sits high over Folsom Street and overlooks the 5-lane roadway, slick with car lights at night, bouncing with clubbers on the weekends, a veritable refuseway littered with society's lost (and much of their trash) 24x7.
I like that I've learned to accept the outcomes of my choice of where I live. I don't like having garbage swirl at my feet or having to step around used condoms, feces (animal or human), syringes and tossed-away dirty clothes, but I accept that every place has its trade-offs.
|
"DESCRIPTION
|
I like that I have a choice.
Contrast what I like with what I crave: the open space of my childhood and the California of my dreams: long rambling land and an ageless freedom to exist as me — to spend my life constructing, designing and defining whatever that means.
Only problem is: the freedom of creation comes as-is: land only, the dwelling of yourself not included. That, you have to build yourself—day by day, hand over hand.
February 7, 2006