I have one alarm set to sound on my phone every morning, and one on a separate clock located on the opposite side of my bedroom. The idea is that my phone will sound its little guitar-riff-noise three separate times to stir me from R.E.M., while the alarm across the room — set for five minutes later — is strategically placed so as to force me from my bed to turn it off.

On paper the system seems to be without fault, but because I’ve employed it for upwards of seven years now, it hardly ever works.  Usually I’ll either lay for an hour with alarm sounding [it becomes unnoticeable after 5 minutes of the pattern] or I’ll rise to turn it off and immediately return to beneath my mintgreen quilt.

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This morning after the my phone sounded its guitar jingle, I rolled over to the wall and split open my eyelids.  Some sunorange was breaking in through the gridscreen across my open window, and the air was markedlhy more gelid than it has been any other morning this Fall.  I could hear single leaves scratching rhythms across the ashpalt, performing some serious gymnastics before ultimately meeting their fate in the pile at my apartment’s backdoor.

Since moving to Vickery I’d not heard the wind fill the trees as loudly as it did this morning, though I suppose that’s because I’ve not lived here when the leaves have been so crisp. And though I know this quick weather change to not be the latest installment by that elusive phenomenon El Niño, the Chris Farley quote would not leave my mind.  I shifted my focus to breakfast, hoping a task would keep the line clear from my thoughts.

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Walking into the kitchen, I took to the task I always do first upon waking: Turn on the stove to ‘5′ beneath my treasured Bialetti™, and prepare a demitasse with a little steamed milk before adding the brewed beverage moments later.

The rate at which the espresso brews depends heavily on how frequently I deep-clean my Bialetti™.  I’ve had a few servings since I last gave it a vigorous scrub, so this morning it was taking especially long to bubble up and through the valve.

I pretend multitasking is a forté of mine, so as I waited for the brew I split open and dropped two eggs into a skillet on the neighboring burner.  The number of omelettes I’ve made in my lifetime is larger than the population of Arkansas, so the task of timing and concocting the dish seems something not too difficult.

Finishing the omelette, I flipped it, inserted some sautéed vegetables from a few mornings ago, folded it, and slid it onto a lime-green chinaplate I inherited from my uncle Mark.  Still a bit asleep but now very focused on consuming my breakfast, I tread the cold cedar floor into my living room, and decided to start up a small project promoting the sale of my iMac™.

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The window bordering the right side of my desk stays open the majority of the time I sit here [which is actually the majority of my Time], unless it is above 95º [one must have some boundaries].  As a result, I have an opportunity to catch most of the conversations of my neighbors – the self-proclaimed Mexican Mafia – who often sip Coronas in their backyard just north of my apartment.

Setting down the omelette on the desk in front of my computer, I felt the chilly breeze on my bare shoulders. I flipped on the space heater that remains in my desk-depths, available to heat my shins during the few days when it actually grows cold in Texas.  The current through the open window brought with it a smell of cigarette from outside, which I found peculiar since it was 7:15 am, and, well, none of my neighbors smoke.

Focused on my project and almost ready to place it before the public eye, I noticed the cigarette smell becoming stronger and more pungent, as if the unidentified morning tobaccoist was approaching my window.  A bit curious, I looked around down the side of the building and saw nothing.  Suddenly, I heard some screeching noise from my kitchen immediately thereafter, and then some ferocious banging and clanging.  Violent, violent sounds!

I rushed into the kitchen to find my Bialetti™ laying down on the open flame of my stove, espresso spewing everywhere, and some of it aflame below.   I rushed to turn off the stove before anything else, trying to install some prioritization or hierarchy to my thoughts in the midst of the madness.

Having neither a fire blanket handy nor a pair of oven mitts or, well, anything that would have been helpful in this situation, I instinctively I reached down for the rug below my refrigerator door and threw it on the fire, across the side-spun espresso maker and the coffee spewing from its spout.

When the flame finally died, I took the rug into the bathroom, left it strung out arcross the side of the bathtub and returned to the kitchen and filled the Bialetti with another batch of Peruvian single-origin, determined to have my demitasse full.

Tara is awake, I think
as often as me
[I've found in the fawn
hue hallway ending
at the parcelroom, or the
place I parse the nous, cutting
consciousness throat-ropes];
Nightly heard blares of some talk
show host, spitting a rhetoric
in agoran tongue; the voice
of the television her rialtic
ritual in sleeplessness, when I
slip past her place — a cheshire
cat to sit about the stoopsteps.
[Meringue pie moon hung
against a wild blueberry sky!]
It’s too true I have desire
for a tele like Tara’s on tonight-nights.
We could trade! She’d sit in my Place
here on the concretecold, piddling with
exegeses of some pre-past penchants.
Then I could get alone with my own
talkshow host, if at least to gain gusto to go,
“I AM
AWAKE AND I
JUST CAN’T HELP IT!”

Dropped some drinking ginger
[ale – which is a not-naught –
it certainly isn't!] into a pint
with a Heinzelmännchen white
on its side-curve — compound paths to
an analysand beach whose palm trees
are pines a hundred years high, where these
dwarven men careen ’round, stirring up
some cesspool full of plankton from
the Deep. See, I didn’t – ceasing, I
thought; staring at this cheval-glass steeping
sips of gingerroot, an image of my unbelief!
When one won’t trust a Thing’s throbbing
ferociously below, boiling to burst forth
from the greyer folds of Reality, it’s
tough to toy with it, to let it touch to the point
of spending only an iota of space
during Vigils to type it out.

Neighbors will always be a central theme to the Narrative, and I always try [I do fail] to think of the Place I live as opportunity to be this unto those in close proximity.

I’ve lived in a small variety of building-types and social settlings, which has brought under the Lamp to the vast assortment of Context, and, which ways specifically this tends to affect persons-in-community [though it's perhaps equally the converse] — all the Hows and the Whys and the Whens. Outside of Spanish Harlem, a house named Ellsworth was one of the most interesting permutations in the line of life-settings.

Home to a strew of upper middle-class Dallas property owners, Lakewood Heights is the broader setting of Ellsworth, actually a house on the street Ellsworth Avenue. Heights is the less successful little brother to Lakewood, a famous neighborhood in Dallas where Old Money lines the streets in the form of Mercedes and brass lion statues.¹

The demographic of Ellsworth Avenue was the most curious to me perhaps because I had no connection to the Situation of most of its people – family-growing by the throb of city-center. I hadn’t grown up in a family outside of the suburbs, and as a 23-year-old single guy there, I was definitely of the minority. Most of those families were wealthy homeowners, whereas Taylor and I moved in as a pair of twenty-something lessees, struggling each month to trust that Art would buy some bread.

Ellsworth’s make-up was largely outdoor dwellers, and for this one should blame the grand canopy of oaks above the street, and the neighborhood’s likeness to somesmall cottage in Northern England. When night’d fall, the firepits would be lit all along the street, and, insulated by St. Augustine’s thick grass, the rich laughter in all nuance from these little gatherings was preserved in a cloud of good-tidings, which traveled all the way down to the frontsteps where I silently sat.

I made a effort very often to find in these small moments of observation a thesis to their Story as a neighborhood and as individual families [and with some, as individuals]. The exercise was with purpose of ascertaining which ways people need and fit with one another, and the Shalom that makes the togetherness possible. Even when I didn’t imagine their situations realistically [surely I often didn't], it was productive to the point that I was able to Hope with them:

1. 6252: ποιmήν & ποίηmα

2. 6246

3. 6254

4. 6259

5. 6253

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When I moved into this space called Vickery – which is a wholly different beast from Ellsworth; a bit more bustling and urban – I anticipated at least the same of neighbors here. I was looking forward to coming to know them more than I did with the ones at Ellsworth, especially considering the proximity we’d share and our similarities in lifestage. I live in an antiquated, giant house that only in recent years has been converted into eight separate one-bedroom units.

Quickly into my stay, I realized [to my Idealist's surprise] that the reason the other seven units of this old house are occupied by solo-dwellers is that they want to be solo. I’ve met a number of them, and have become fairly close to a few of them. But even to this day – five months after my move-in – I’ve still not seen two of them, knowing nothing of their presence besides the nametags above their mailboxes, and their cars, coming and going, mumbling of Michealangelo.

Marisa was one of my closest friends here. She’s since moved out, having met a man at a bar and looking back not at all since. Steven, the kickboxer, actually goes under the name Richard now, I’m assuming because it seems more suitable for one seeking lawyerhood, as he is. ²

Another guy named Buck lives in apartment 6, directly across the hall from where I’m sitting. I haven’t the opportunity to talk with Buck much, but I do like his name, and I do imagine it to embody a great wealth of Story. The central basis of our relationship is a competition over whose electricity bill will be lower by the end of the month.³ I am glad to say this last month I had the cheapest bill of the three of all the competitors.⁴

There’s also girl named Tara who lives in the first apartment of whom we all see very little, but Buck and Marisa have filled me in on some of the details of her Vickerian sojourn. She is well-tenured here, apparently senior to us all, though no one can gather what she does during daytimes or where she is when she isn’t Here. It only took a few days into my stay back in May to find that Tara was supreme over this property, when one afternoon I chose to park Derrick alongside the building in one of the two prized parking spots there. ⁵

New to the house and thus ignorant to this and similar habits of the tenants already living here, I took the spot. When I returned outside hours later to drive to dinner with a friend, I found a huge posterboard under my left windshield wiper that read “DO NOT PARK IN MY SPOT, EVER! -APT 2″ Tara – APT 2 in person – had blocked in my car from behind, and I was forced to drive over some of the lawn and the curb onto Matilda just to leave.

Since that day, I’ve only seen Tara once. We were both unlocking our apartment doors, and before I could get a good look at her, she’d slipped stealthily inside. It seems that Vickery is hermitage to her same as it is to so many of the others here. It made me all the more curious of Tara, though, and so I’d hoped we could share space sometime before one of us’d moved away.

Only four nights ago, I’d gone outside to read a bit under the streetlamp, sitting on the frontsteps where I often do to Think or to return phone calls. I’d my back against the front door, as it’s a very low-traffic exit for Vickerians and thus low-risk for being slammed in the spine.

After a few moments, I heard some pounding footsteps from down the hall, growing more intense and furious as they neared. I intended to get up and move, assuming they were leading right to the other side of the door upon which I leaned, but before I could, I felt the sharp impact of the cold metal door, and it thrust me forward into the front yard into a stumble.

Tara came storming through in tears over something, and, after regaining my balance, I quickly apologized for my poor choice of Seat. She too apologized, adding “So, so, so, so…” to her I am Sorry, and it was then that I knew our Concern for one another. She hurried off, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand, opened the driver’s side door of her chartreuse Acura [which was parked in The Spot! on the side], and left.

With the transience of city-life, people are constantly in and out of these sorts of buildings. Just last weekend, four new tenants replaced four of the original dwellers from when I moved in. Way I see it: more potential for Storywriting, and for Storytelling, and for elaborating on one another’s by Sharing. After all the larger Narrative is concerned with that, isn’t it?

Perhaps Marisa’s old idea of a frontlawn vegetarian barbecue will really catch on with Richard and Tara and Buck, and we’ll be able to show our new resident-aliens some Home.