My Slope

This is my living room and office. I like it in here. I don't sit on the couch or the two chairs, one which I have to get slipcovered but I've been spending a lot of money and I don't have any jobs right now so I've put that off and thrown a brightly-colored quilt over it for now. I'm not a couch sitter anyway (unlike the snoozing poodles). When I'm home I sit at my desk or I move about a lot until the end of the day and then I get into bed and read like all single women apparently do, according to the popular press.



In this front room I keep the blinds pulled all the way up. Between me and the sidewalk is a lovely garden. If passersby happen to pause, they can see part of me at my desk or in the hall or in a slice of the kitchen. I can see part of them depending on whether I'm sitting or standing. Very few people walk on this street. It's a quiet block off a residential avenue. The street ends at Prospect Park but not at an entry into the park. That's two streets over in either direction.

I don't mind the exposure, if you want to call it that. Part of what I love about living in the city is being one among the masses; being an anonymous person surrounded by anonymous people. That's my belief system. I'm a Jew but I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything outside of us humans, but I understand why people want a God to watch them. We're fragile and vulnerable and ephemeral and it's pretty darn scary to think that if you collapse on the street you're at the mercy of other fragile, vulnerable, ephemeral humans. For many people it's more comforting to believe their destiny belongs to something that cares deeply about them despite all their flaws and foibles. But really, people pull through for people, gods don't. Life is wily-nily, random, a matter of luck and chance.

Anyway, I prefer to sit at a table. Just two days ago I found and bought and dragged home a table and four chairs on Craigslist from a hipster in Williamsburg for only $140 that I'm thrilled with. Here's a photo (p.s. that's a candle I was about to bring in the yard, not a Club Med-sized cocktail):
The chairs have big wooden seats so that I can sit with one leg crossed under the other and the table is big enough so I can open the NY Times all the way. Plus I can decide if I want to sit at a seat in which I can be seen by the passersby or I can look out the window toward the garden in back, or I can sit and not be seen and feel insular.

The reason I called this entry "My Slope" is because my apartment slopes. It is at the bottom of a c.1900 four-story single-family brownstone in a row of old and well-kempt brownstones. Park Slope truly is on a slope from the park to the river. The houses have settled so that when I enter my living room, the urge is to run to the couch or run to the hall and into the kitchen. It's funny; like exercise. Walking in the opposite direction, from the bedroom to the front, is an uphill trek.