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Heat Rises
All my apartments come in this ebb and flow of temperature. In college, I lived for two years in a brick apartment cut into the side of a low hill. They were officially known by the Soviet-esque name, Garden 29, but we all called them "The Bunkers." That certainly warmed them up! They proved cool enough that walking into them (or down into them) felt like walking into air conditioning. Sixty years ago, someone must have strolled down the stairs to their basement apartment and felt the gradual layered cooling of the air. "Hey," thought this individual, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow bottle this!?" The Bunkers were pleasant, reaffirming that if cliff structures worked for the Anasazi then they would certainly work for the class of 2006 coeds.
When already graduated and gone, I took an apartment on the main street of a village in Central New York. The apartment had the perk of being right next to the office where I worked. A three minute commute! And it came with the miscellaneous bric-a-brac that can only come from a previous tenant that did not care and a landlord that cared even less. Silverware, an electric blenders, carpet samples, and a plastic ship model that hung flush to the wall. I named it the USS Ezekiel Benjamin. The entire apartment felt ship-like, but this would have never made it out of the shipyard. The cherry wood floorboards sagged in the middle of the living room floor and lifted up all four corners. My apartment had a topography! The fall of the first step through the front door and the depression in the middle room before the kitchen linoleum plateau. The heating unit was an electric range sized brown gas boiler that dominated an entire corner of the living room. The front had a little grill in front of it where you could watch the flames. The edges of the heater were swooped in that future-retro way where the Jetsons watch the news on a triangle shaped TV. It added to the ship analogy as I imagined myself shoveling coal into it to meet the captain's order for "Full Speed Ahead!"
My landlord turned off the heater's pilot light during the summer. But the heat still rose to the top of this split A-frame house. Heat came to the apartment like an universal black body. It had an inherent mugginess independent of the dew index outside. A friend once described such heat, the heat unique to old houses in the Northeast, houses built before we had the luxury to worry about summer more than winter, as "Satan's Asshole Hot." The thermometer on my fish tank shot up to the maximum range, but when I first noticed my Mollys and Platys swimming in circle's belly-up, I realized it was hotter than the 86 on the thermometer. I have never noticed an aquarium thermometer that goes beyond 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire industry could have not imagined an actual situation where a tank would boil to a point beyond that. "Inconceivable!" they must have said. "No, Apartment 5," I would retort! I dropped in a bag of peas to cool the water, but the Great Boil only broke when October first chilled the air.
I then moved into a true basement apartment, where the footfalls of the upstairs tenant reminded us that this was an apartment building. But, it looked like a real house, in the city limits and with a backyard where we set up a pen for our pet rabbits and guinea pig. Pity the poor animals in the heat. IF anything could actually melt than it would be the rabbit. Unable to sweat and with a toothy slit of mouth, their heat regulation looks almost reptilian. Of course, imagine anything horrible and it has to have been done to some bunny at some point. But, the heat looks and feels particularly horrible.
But that was all in the old apartment. This basement apartment physically reminded us of why creatures took the ground. The houseplants were not happy, routinely turning angry yellows and dropping leaves in a false internal Autumn.
In my current apartment, we live on the third floor of a brick-shit building. The ground floor is dominated by two bakeries and the smells of sourdough and crisp pie crust little make up for the heat. Oh, the plants are happy, for the sun pours in through the windows, but the animals have taken to spaces behind the bathtub and the aquarium thermometer creeps up to the far limits.
Maybe one day we will have a house with enough rooms to seek solace from the climate and to make all the living things; furry, fishy, leafy, and human, pleasant.
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So, why Part 1? Well there will be a Part 2, of course. I am not getting all post-modern on you readers! I decided to cut back on the stream of consciousness and focus this entry on the apartments. Tomorrow (Yes, tomorrow) I will have a little aside about air-conditioning and cooling.
Peace!
When already graduated and gone, I took an apartment on the main street of a village in Central New York. The apartment had the perk of being right next to the office where I worked. A three minute commute! And it came with the miscellaneous bric-a-brac that can only come from a previous tenant that did not care and a landlord that cared even less. Silverware, an electric blenders, carpet samples, and a plastic ship model that hung flush to the wall. I named it the USS Ezekiel Benjamin. The entire apartment felt ship-like, but this would have never made it out of the shipyard. The cherry wood floorboards sagged in the middle of the living room floor and lifted up all four corners. My apartment had a topography! The fall of the first step through the front door and the depression in the middle room before the kitchen linoleum plateau. The heating unit was an electric range sized brown gas boiler that dominated an entire corner of the living room. The front had a little grill in front of it where you could watch the flames. The edges of the heater were swooped in that future-retro way where the Jetsons watch the news on a triangle shaped TV. It added to the ship analogy as I imagined myself shoveling coal into it to meet the captain's order for "Full Speed Ahead!"
My landlord turned off the heater's pilot light during the summer. But the heat still rose to the top of this split A-frame house. Heat came to the apartment like an universal black body. It had an inherent mugginess independent of the dew index outside. A friend once described such heat, the heat unique to old houses in the Northeast, houses built before we had the luxury to worry about summer more than winter, as "Satan's Asshole Hot." The thermometer on my fish tank shot up to the maximum range, but when I first noticed my Mollys and Platys swimming in circle's belly-up, I realized it was hotter than the 86 on the thermometer. I have never noticed an aquarium thermometer that goes beyond 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The entire industry could have not imagined an actual situation where a tank would boil to a point beyond that. "Inconceivable!" they must have said. "No, Apartment 5," I would retort! I dropped in a bag of peas to cool the water, but the Great Boil only broke when October first chilled the air.
I then moved into a true basement apartment, where the footfalls of the upstairs tenant reminded us that this was an apartment building. But, it looked like a real house, in the city limits and with a backyard where we set up a pen for our pet rabbits and guinea pig. Pity the poor animals in the heat. IF anything could actually melt than it would be the rabbit. Unable to sweat and with a toothy slit of mouth, their heat regulation looks almost reptilian. Of course, imagine anything horrible and it has to have been done to some bunny at some point. But, the heat looks and feels particularly horrible.
But that was all in the old apartment. This basement apartment physically reminded us of why creatures took the ground. The houseplants were not happy, routinely turning angry yellows and dropping leaves in a false internal Autumn.
In my current apartment, we live on the third floor of a brick-shit building. The ground floor is dominated by two bakeries and the smells of sourdough and crisp pie crust little make up for the heat. Oh, the plants are happy, for the sun pours in through the windows, but the animals have taken to spaces behind the bathtub and the aquarium thermometer creeps up to the far limits.
Maybe one day we will have a house with enough rooms to seek solace from the climate and to make all the living things; furry, fishy, leafy, and human, pleasant.
________________________________________________________________
So, why Part 1? Well there will be a Part 2, of course. I am not getting all post-modern on you readers! I decided to cut back on the stream of consciousness and focus this entry on the apartments. Tomorrow (Yes, tomorrow) I will have a little aside about air-conditioning and cooling.
Peace!
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