zero

guess what today's account balance on the student loans i've lived with since i was 17 reads? i'll give you a hint: it's in the title.

who's got the crack?

I almost don't even want to write it down because it might jinx the whole thing, but I believe it is time: we are going to move into a new place.

This is what we decided: a place that is better kept: no rats, no rot, no crumbling and cracking. A place that has more room, preferably a bigger kitchen. A place that is bigger or that stands alone. A place that has windows that can open and close. A place that has an outside area -- porch, balcony, patio, or stoop. We've been quietly looking for about a month now, with our eyes set on some really interesting, almost unbelievable apartments in the area, including 100-year old buildings with tiny little drawers built into the kitchen walls, goofy staircases that lead to triangular sleeping lofts, walls painted black with lots and lots of track lighting . . . We might have said "yes" to any of these well-priced, groovy little gems, but the poor conditions of the walls, chew-holes under the sinks, and leak-stains in the ceilings would just be more of the same, and why spend more for pretty much the same? It was by accident that we drove past a charming, blue, multi-windowed house with a For Rent sign stuck in the front yard, not too far from where we live now. We scribbled down the number and called. When we learned the affordable rent, we wondered what would be wrong with it. Less than a week later, we were standing in the unbearably hot kitchen signing a lease.

Five years ago, when H and I were looking for a place to live and ended up here, we had went through a similar, perhaps more extended, search. One evening, we met with a landlord who let us in to take a look at the top floor of a duplex about a block from where we live now. The woman who was moving out was home when we arrived, and we asked her some questions about living there. As she prattled on about how terrible the landlord was and why she would recommend that we not move in there, I began to notice little -- what are those things called? (my mother calls them "sticky tabs" and it wasn't until later in life that I realized no one else called them this. post-it notes?) -- post-it notes stuck all over the apartment: on the kitchen cabinets, on the fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the door to the bedroom, on the sliding glass door to the balcony, and on the inside of the front door on our way out. These little yellow notes all had the same uncanny message: "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU!!" The tenant never made mention of these notes, and H and I didn't ask, but it made looking at the place an even more surreal experience in which, at every turn, we were reminded that looking for a place to rent is not all about "you", but something larger, more complex that might be at work and that, you have to finally admit, no place will be exactly what "you" want.

It is with this in mind that I return to the heat of the kitchen in which I scribbled my signature at the bottom of a lease a few days ago. After looking under the sinks, opening all the cabinets and drawers, checking out the tops of the closets and base boards along the storage areas, admiring the sheer size of the rooms, finding the tub immaculately caulked and sealed with none of the tiles broken or missing, and inspecting the perimeter of the property for signs of decay and/or varmint habitation and finding none, I said "yes" in my mind and "yes" out loud and "yes" as I moved the pen across the page. Stepping out the back door and onto the tiny little screened in muckroom to once again admire the small back yard area where we will certainly throw parties, I noticed what looked like the long butt-end of a yellowing cigarette. I stepped over it, and then, thinking again, turned around and looked at it more carefully. Cigarette butt, i told myself -- right? Right. Right? I crouched down and picked it up off the ground only to discover that I was, in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, holding a full vial of crack in my now trembling fingers.

An hour later, I was reasoned with. Just because you find a vial of crack in the screened in muckroom of a reasonably priced rental house does not mean that you have signed a lease to move into a former crack den. It doesn't even mean that the neighbors smoke crack, that the former tenants smoked crack, or that crackheads have been smoking crack in the backyard. We met the soon-to-be neighbor in the garage apartment in the back, she is certainly not a crackhead and she had nothing but positive things to say about living there. It is quite possible that someone saw the house was for rent, saw the back porch as a fine place to toss a vial to come get later. Once we move in and there are signs of activity, we should be okay. The street is in a decent neighborhood. Also, I have to remember, I see crackheads and methheads every day in this neighborhood. They're not going anywhere. A person who had most likely been smoking crack was found by our neighbors pleasuring himself in our garage out back not too long ago.

Perhaps I should take the advice of my friend RM, who suggests that this should be seen as a little offering, a premature house-warming gift . . . In any case, we'll be smudging the rooms with a large cut of sage and moving in on the first of the month. Wish us luck!

could cloud (two)

you could pull out everything you've ever saved -- your macrame owls, your peacock statuettes, your blow-up alien dolls, your thousands of pillows, your tapestries and blankets, and use them to throw a party. you could drive through a smoke-filled landscape, up into the mountains, and find ancient rocks that drip boiling hot water into muscle-softening pools in the earth. you could hang out with cowboys, work a corn patch, read books in a rocking chair on the porch of a unkempt building and smell the alfalfa growing in the fields. you could breathe the driest of airs, down in death valley, where the heat is so intense the boulders are bleached white and nothing lives except an eccentric 83 year old woman who runs what she calls her opera house, a space she painted and danced in for the past twenty years -- all by herself, at times danced for no one but herself. you could visit the graves of the unknown buried in the desert, mounds of dirt surrounded by rocks, little wooden crucifixes marking the head. you could freak out under the flash and neon of las vegas lights, a postmodern sublime wavering in the heat, the exorbitant cash flow ringing like a register from every corner. you could decide to move. you could fly to birmingham, quiet, dilapidated birmingham, check into an old hotel, listen to an old man stomp and howl with his orchestra under smoky amber lights. you could, with a crowd of downtrodden thitry-somethings, sing along to songs about the razor blade hidden under the candy surface of every day life. you could fetch a bottle of wine and a six pack of beer from a trading post on a dead end street, sit on the curb with your beloved and watch fireworks explode over the statue of a vulcan that sits at the highest point on the hill above the city, watch the kids run in the streets, and eavesdrop on conversations tipsy adults have about how long the owners of the building kept it in disrepair, and who would own it next.

sometimes a storm is what you need: this afternoon's clouded darkness, its rumble and boom, its downpour.