The house I can see from my window has an endless supply of interesting or depressing residents. A few are constant, like the old man with the messy, scrungy beard and the knit cap, who forages suspiciously around the foundations for trash every once and a while. The placid-looking black man with the sweatshirt is a constant too. He likes to put one foot up on the railing and look at the street for a long time. I'm not sure, actually, though, whether he even lives there -- he also appears across the street.
There's also a weasely, angry-looking white man with sandy hair and a baseball cap who shows up frequently. Once I saw him finger the bicycle that's always on the porch for a very long time, but finally leave it alone and go inside.
The bicycle, I suppose might also be counted a permanent resident. It never moves, anyway.
But added to this are a neverending stream of different people. Yesterday, the bearded old man led in two teenage girls, one probably nineteen, the other younger. A woman with many bags of what looked like old clothes has pulled up once or twice and gone in. Two young black men entered and exited at least five times last weekend. There are at least two mullet-headed tough guys who saunter up the street every now and them. Most of the people who live there seem to be single, but there are some couples too: there's a skinny black man and a blond young woman who seem to be together, and a week ago there was definitely a gay couple, one man quite handsome and well turned-out, the other one much rougher looking.
Earlier today, a desk-job looking man with a lavender shirt and a blond mustache leaned on the doorpost and talked to another mustached man, a thin fellow in a baseball cap, whom I hadn't seen before, for a long time. At one point two thirty-something Hispanic men stopped to greet them both. Eventually, lavender-shirt went away, and a third mustachioed man joined the second one on the porch, kicking at the railing ocassionally with his hands in his pockets.
And now there's a child -- a boy about five years old wearing a red shirt and jeans. He's playing by himself, coming in and out. He's obviously staying there, but how is it I've never seen him before?
The obvious answer, of course, would be that it's a house of some kind of marginality. It's too well-kept up for a crack house. Not that it's desperately neat, but it's no more crack-house-looking than our own house, with its peeling paint and weedy lawn and trashcans in the front. There's also never any rowdiness, and the residents look more suspcious of the world than the other way around. It might be a halfway house, only there's no sign or anything, and I never see anyone official-looking coming or going.
I think, really, it is just an apartment house. It must have an enormous number of places inside. From the outside it's a big house, but to contain so many people, nearly every room must be its own living space. That would make it very cheap.
To me, looking out of the window by my desk, it seems as if it contained all the marginality in the world. As if it somehow literally embodied being on the edge -- of poverty, of madness, of disappearing. Which makes it sound worse than it is. I mean, the people I see are, for the most part clean. And lots of them seem to be going to work, or are coming home with groceries. The child looks happy, if a little bored.
To me, though, there's something about the way there are so many people there, united only by the mysteriously vast interior of this place, and the way in which I can never pinpoint who lives there and who does not, makes it a place of...negative capability, I suppose. It represents for me the possibilty of being one of a mass of people. Not, mind you, an undiferentiated mass -- the entire point is that they are so differentiated, but still they fade in and out, and cannot be kept track of. I suppose, in a way, I have made the house next door for me a symbol of being somehow lost -- a not entirely unpleasant possiblity to me.
Of course, the people there aren't really lost, even if they were, as I wish to be, lost to the whole rest of the world. I see them, you know. Somebody always does.
There's also a weasely, angry-looking white man with sandy hair and a baseball cap who shows up frequently. Once I saw him finger the bicycle that's always on the porch for a very long time, but finally leave it alone and go inside.
The bicycle, I suppose might also be counted a permanent resident. It never moves, anyway.
But added to this are a neverending stream of different people. Yesterday, the bearded old man led in two teenage girls, one probably nineteen, the other younger. A woman with many bags of what looked like old clothes has pulled up once or twice and gone in. Two young black men entered and exited at least five times last weekend. There are at least two mullet-headed tough guys who saunter up the street every now and them. Most of the people who live there seem to be single, but there are some couples too: there's a skinny black man and a blond young woman who seem to be together, and a week ago there was definitely a gay couple, one man quite handsome and well turned-out, the other one much rougher looking.
Earlier today, a desk-job looking man with a lavender shirt and a blond mustache leaned on the doorpost and talked to another mustached man, a thin fellow in a baseball cap, whom I hadn't seen before, for a long time. At one point two thirty-something Hispanic men stopped to greet them both. Eventually, lavender-shirt went away, and a third mustachioed man joined the second one on the porch, kicking at the railing ocassionally with his hands in his pockets.
And now there's a child -- a boy about five years old wearing a red shirt and jeans. He's playing by himself, coming in and out. He's obviously staying there, but how is it I've never seen him before?
The obvious answer, of course, would be that it's a house of some kind of marginality. It's too well-kept up for a crack house. Not that it's desperately neat, but it's no more crack-house-looking than our own house, with its peeling paint and weedy lawn and trashcans in the front. There's also never any rowdiness, and the residents look more suspcious of the world than the other way around. It might be a halfway house, only there's no sign or anything, and I never see anyone official-looking coming or going.
I think, really, it is just an apartment house. It must have an enormous number of places inside. From the outside it's a big house, but to contain so many people, nearly every room must be its own living space. That would make it very cheap.
To me, looking out of the window by my desk, it seems as if it contained all the marginality in the world. As if it somehow literally embodied being on the edge -- of poverty, of madness, of disappearing. Which makes it sound worse than it is. I mean, the people I see are, for the most part clean. And lots of them seem to be going to work, or are coming home with groceries. The child looks happy, if a little bored.
To me, though, there's something about the way there are so many people there, united only by the mysteriously vast interior of this place, and the way in which I can never pinpoint who lives there and who does not, makes it a place of...negative capability, I suppose. It represents for me the possibilty of being one of a mass of people. Not, mind you, an undiferentiated mass -- the entire point is that they are so differentiated, but still they fade in and out, and cannot be kept track of. I suppose, in a way, I have made the house next door for me a symbol of being somehow lost -- a not entirely unpleasant possiblity to me.
Of course, the people there aren't really lost, even if they were, as I wish to be, lost to the whole rest of the world. I see them, you know. Somebody always does.
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