apartment_life magicforest Note: This is the name of an Ivy album. This blathe has nothing to do with it. The funny thing with some children is that if you shelter them enough you can keep from society. I didn’t know a lot of things that the other children did, things like how to answer the phone or how to buy something at the store instead of hugging my mom’s leg and shrinking away from the cashier, who peered down at my sister and I bemusedly and said, “Are they twins?”. But I also (I apologize to my teacher for starting a sentence with “but”, but you are a language Nazi and I hope you suffer for it, sir) didn’t know about money or sex or violence, at least not in the traditional sense of knowing. I know that sometimes when I went into the kitchen my dad would be swearing fuck you you lying bastard and shouting into the phone you dumb bitch and I know it was about money but I didn’t know what poverty was, and I didn’t know that I was wealthy, because we lived in a wealthy neighbourhood so everyone had everything I did, with three staircases and five bathrooms and two kitchens at opposite ends of the house and a big carpeted loft to play in and three new shiny cars to drive in and Sesame Street and soda crackers and quiet time and crafts and a box of paints with little eggs of colours and cherry reds and apple greens and a smell like glue and sparkles and carefully snipping at the construction paper and everything else that makes childhood childhood. When we left my dad I didn’t know we were poor or what debt was. I didn’t know we were poor until I was ten years old and moved to where I am now, ceiling lights and chipped white paint on the walls and stains and old dusty carpet and everything has been fixed, sort of, just hit the monitor really hard and the screen will get back to it’s normal size, and to turn on the television you press power bar, the button for channel five, the power on the VCR, and then you eject a movie, and then push it back in, and then before it starts playing you press stop and then you get the twelve channels with one of them French and Peter Mansbridge and electricity and the groan of the heat furnace and my soft bed and my messy room and my shame. The reason I didn’t know that I was poor was because I didn’t know what money was and I really did not care. I had an allowance of one dollar a week and at the end of the week my mother would take my sister and I to the dollar store in the mall in M-i-s-s-i-s-s-a-u-g-a and we could either buy something for a dollar or we could save the dollar and then get something worth a few dollars. I remember three things we bought there. One was a toy microphone that made funny echo noises when you put your mouth in it. The other was a tiny stuffed thing, smaller than the palm of your hand, and mine was purple and I named it Bubbles and my sister had a blue one and I don’t remember it’s name. I also had a little stuffed dog with plastic googly eyes named Spa. I didn’t know what to name it back then so when we drove home that day I saw a sign out the car window that said BATH AND SPA and I didn’t know what a Spa was but I liked the way it sounded so there you go now. Bubbles and Spa were friends. If I was my age now with all of my knowledge and was back then I would have known how shabby our basement apartment was, dark business carpet on the floor, a sofa you tipped right over if you leaned on it, the big fat wooden television set I watched Animaniacs on every day after school at 4:00pm, and once I forged my mother’s signature and got caught and yelled at because I forgot to get her signature saying that yes I checked the weather report for my homework but that’s another story and not the first time I thought my little world was ending, and all the rooms connected but my mother still let my sister and I have our own rooms as she always believed in it because I think maybe she shared rooms when she was little only maybe if my sister and I had had shared rooms we would have been less picky about privacy today and could be sort of friends, that kind of sisters. Only there’s no point in getting caught up in all that because what is done is done and I am all the better person for it, at least I hope so. If I was my age now with all of my knowledge and been back then, as I was saying, I also would have been ashamed of my house, ashamed of the charity we got, I would have known that the presents I got for Hanukkah were donations from strangers who donated their used things thinking of poor children who couldn’t afford gifts and later on I became that stranger and never realized until know that those little kids are me and my sister and kids like that. I never knew a lot of things, that my mother was ashamed because she was inside of society, I never knew that there was something wrong with our apartments that I should have been ashamed of, gone were those first days when my mother was so happy she had left my dad that she dashed around the living room of the basement apartment jumping on the furniture singing “I Feel Confident” from the Sound Of Music which was unprecedented and she never did anything like it since, now she keeps it all inside as it fitting for someone of her age, God help me I really hate some things about society. I hate that we care so much about money and that charity is shameful and you should work for your money. Society says it’s good to donate charitably but bad to take it, it’s good to look like you can give things away but bad to look like you need it, well we had riches you know, and all the cars and the glory, but my dad still fucked me over at night and what’s funny is that that was so respectable. Because we had a nice home and we looked so well-dressed people trusted us and smiled at us in the street, and we were so accepted by society, and then you get poor and now you realize that you have enemies you didn’t think you could have, and now you can only trust people from the same class as you, lower-middle, because they know and they understand you, they work like you and play like you and suddenly the rich people are snobs and you are more respectable then them anyway…but it makes me so confused how everyone tries to be respectable while being ashamed and how respectable is looking clean and my dad was a clean man but when I have nightmares I still bite my tongue enough to make it bleed, and I don’t know what it means to be respectable anymore. You grow up and you outgrow the magic and the trees whispering to you and the sun being your friend and suddenly you have to worry about the ozone layer and breaking nails and money and sex and violence and greed and corruption and governments, and you think you are getting smarter and becoming less naïve, they associate naivety with children, but do you realize how naïve you are, you people, you society, when you think clean and rich and good job is respectable and dirty and poor and unemployed is not? Or maybe you flip burgers and that’s supposed to be a sad thing the older you get but why? Is that what you want to be judged on? Of course it is, that’s why we make everything look so pretty, so that people see the outside and judge you by that because God knows the inside can be pretty messed up, God knows even the suburbanites have their terrors and the rich people have psychoses and the poor people have their shit to put out every morning too, you know? And more stupid things with society, there are so many more, I would rather have the childhood naivety than the adult naivety because the grown-up one hurts people and casts them out because it’s safer to be with everyone the same as you, we’ve all seen what happens when things get too different from eachother, it doesn’t work, we associate with the people who are like us, it’s healthy, it’s normal, we all are so normal because we are taught to be good liars to eachother and better liars to ourselves, and there’s nothing I can do about, I don’t know why I am writing this, fuck me for my childish indignance at things that don’t make sense, the grown-up world doesn’t make sense to me, I want to go back, I want to climb trees again, I want to sleep at night, safely and softly and sweetly and deeply, and I want to be wild again, I don’t want to be repressed, I want to scream, I’m going to scream, oh now I am screaming, I am screaming right now, and it feels so good, it feels so free, it feels so real… Your car and your two-piece sweater-set and your dignity aren’t real, you sad woman, your porn and your madness and your tuck-me-in-please aren’t real, you sad man, your wounds aren’t real, your life isn’t real, you apartment is who you really are, in reality all of us live in apartments, looking out at the lights of the buildings and the skylines, twinkling as the traffic falls away and the stores close, as darkness appears in the corners and the stars compete with the streetlights, red glowing and green glowing, as things flick on nice and slowly, as the city wakes up to a new day. 031225 ... nomme) . 050704 ... smurfus rex phenomenal. I wish I had read this fifteen years ago instead of tonight. 181128 what's it to you? who go blather from