It is a single-story, beige, stucco place with four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a "San Francisco" bathroom for common living (comprised of one room for the shower and sink, and one room for the toilet). It's a cheerful place that always feels a bit gritty, where the rooms are airy and cheerful, yet separate enough so that its denizens can coexist peacefully and independently. City living at its most pleasant, yet most potentially passive-aggressive.

For the past couple of nights I've heard a chirping in the wall closest to my bedroom door, a sound that is both mechanical and animal, and I can't figure out what it is.

I’m a little worried that my roommate Sal, who lives in the room next to mine and whom I haven't seen in a while, has suffered a crippling accident and is desperately morse coding a cry for help.

Far as Sal is concerned, a cry for help seems overdue. He's a manic middle-aged man, originally from the Bronx, who can't get through a sentence without asserting his undying passion for life and his pride in the "energy" which surrounds him. He expends so much effort ascertaining his wonderfulness that I haven't believed it for a long time. He likes to say he's enlightened and on top of it all, but I can smell the misery on him, and I think he's one of the most unhappy people I've ever met. He plays that 1975 anthem of denial and unresolved sorrow, "I'm Not In Love," on his stereo at least five times a day, and claims it as his theme song. Before he goes to bed, I can hear him slapping absently at his bongo drums and talking to himself.

I think the wall-chirping is new. It's probably just the old house being washed by World Cup Madness or summer wind, so that it has to resettle anew into its ancient foundation. If this house had rings, like the cross-section of a tree trunk, I wonder on which ring I'd find the development of the chirp. It's rather ghostly, when you think about it like that.

The house isn't really quite so old. Unlike New England farm houses, built hundreds of years ago and filled with nooks once useful for storing canned goods and countless worker bee offspring, my house was built in the 1930s, and has a cubicle, utilitarian feel to it.

Every room is a perfect square which funnels into another perfectly square room. The house wasn't originally built to be the four-bedroom it has since become, and my room, which was probably once a playroom or a living room, has entrances into the now-bedroom to my right, and the kitchen to my left. The entrances have been crudely barricaded by shelving and makeshift curtains to insure the privacy of the tenant renting each bedroom.

It's a little sad, when you think about it. This house was built for easy flow of home and community; time and modern humanity has shaped it into a place where people erect barricades to enforce their independence. So it goes.

It's a happy place, though. Sunlight fills spaces you didn’t realize used to be dark until the light crashes the party; it's like an oozing and a spilling of dusty natural light. The hallway is narrow and wooden, flanked by well-meaning floral wallpaper that wonders why everyone can't just get along. The house is airy and sturdy and trustworthy. I have only one window in my bedroom, and it's sealed shut, but it's huge enough that now, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I don't need to write this by lamplight.

My roommates and I see one another and get along, but we each lead quite separate lives. We intercept each other in the living room sometimes, where we watch late night television and tell stories related to what is brought up by David Letterman or John Stewart. You'd be surprised by the free-associative inspiration that arises from the post-midnight talking heads.

A couple of weeks ago, I walked into the living room where my roommates Mike and Joe were watching TV. Upon my entrance, they stared at each other like cats feasting on a canary, then looked expectantly at me.

"Just so you know," said Mike, "I'm not smoking crack."

I looked, and saw that Mike was holding what was definitely a crack pipe, which in turn was holding a black, grainy substance.

"You're about to see someone smoke opium," said Mike.

"You’re not going to call the cops, are you?" said Joe.

"One of the first things you told me when I moved in," I said, "was that Mike was growing opium in the backyard. So, don't worry about it."

I was then promised that in the upcoming weeks, I would be introduced to the high that comes from smoking poppy seeds. I guess I'm game. It'll make me feel younger, since at 27, I thought I was too old to start experimenting with drugs.

Mike got high, which he described as being not like an orgasm, but like the feeling that comes after an orgasm. The afterglow.

Turns out that harvesting opium is so labor intensive that I won't be encountering such a scene very often. A whole season of Mike's opium plants might churn out three crack pipes of the stuff, so I'm pretty touched that he offered to share.

After that, I was subjected to a 30 minute diatribe about the history of opium. Mike specializes in 30 minute diatribes. I got a kick out of it.

Mike and Joe are in their late-thirties/early-forties, both artists held by our cheap and happy house, managing to squinch together their bill payments between gigs and shows. I honestly don't know what they do from day to day, but they seem content, if not "happy".

That kind of contentment frightens me.

Anyway. This house, in smell and beach side sandiness, reminds me of my grandma's Connecticut cottage where I spent summers climbing rocks, smashing snails, and hunting crabs. I've started jogging recently, and when I run to the beach, I am greeted by a wind that leaves my lips salty and my skin young, like the way I remember from my east coast childhood.

The nostalgia doesn't quite fit with what I have in mind for my forever, but I like it now. My bedroom walls are yellow, and every morning I wake up in sunshine.

Nonetheless, I can't wait for the day that I'm no longer someone else's random roommate.

~ Last Five Entries ~

I Met Courtney Love and Can't Think Of a Good Title - 11.08.06

Metacrap - 10.20.06

7 - 09.12.06

Ragamuffin Chic - 08.11.06

CAMEL NOISES OF DEEP LONGING.
PROBABLY SOUNDS LIKE, "GRAAAAWWWW! GRAAAWWWWW!" THANKS. - 07.11.06

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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