A Corner Lot In Albuquerque
It is 8:19pm. I am sitting at my desk
beneath the west-facing window.
There is not enough sunlight in this house,
so I take advantage of afternoons now that,
after six years in a cave,
I cut my standing desk —
made of 12x8s in Bodo’s workshop
four years before a blood clot cut him down —
into a place to people-watch as
passersby toss their trash into my rocks:
Little vodka shots (the plastic ones at the Total Wine checkout aisles),
Sonic 44oz Strawberry Limeade cups (the styrofoam ones),
and the empty packaging for a giant adult’s toy, about the same size
(the contents of which our neighbor’s daughter — five years old —
discovered in the corner lot while walking to school the following day:
”Mommy, what’s that pink stick in the dirt?”)
I picked up needles, cotton balls and one of those blue rubber strips
(the ones As Seen On TV! markets as a jar-lid opener)
from the grass at the park across the street —
where my wife walks the dog too late at night —
zipped them back up inside the polka-dotted toiletry bag
emptied out next to four months’ worth of unopened bills
for a woman whose name I can’t remember,
and threw them in the trash can.
A week later, the police sectioned off a pickup truck
containing the breathless presence of a death by shotgun
(this, opposite the corner where,
a few month’s before,
an angry boyfriend
pushed our other neighbor’s mother out the door
of his moving car, and
drove back and forth over her body,
as if she was the problem.)
They built up their property walls after that,
guarded from the votive candles blown out
across the street.
To my left, our other other neighbor
is on his back again, oil-stained.
He fixes up old cars in the times between
his clients’ temper tantrums
(every window in his house is rock-broken),
or stripping off their dresses
next to the pink stick on the corner
by the elementary school.
The last time a woman — uh — entertained a dog-walker,
I ran outside to see if the man was alright. He replied,
”Yeah, I’m fine. I mean, you know this guy sells crystal meth, don’t you?
What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know your neighbors?”
Not intimately enough, I guess.
But one day, while shoveling rocks into something
called a yard for people to throw their trash into,
she stopped by with all her clothes on and asked if
my family had been to church that morning.
“Good,” she said, when we nodded.
”No,” she said, when we asked her the same,
and walked away.
And our other other other neighbor
came running when he saw thieves
loading my garage into their pickup last spring.
I lost my bike — the gift my wife gave me
before we were married,
The one with the teal fork
that she didn’t have the money for —
but gained an electric scooter that
someone gift-wrapped into my neighbor’s tree.
They gave it to me out of kindness (maybe pity),
but also because their dog, Bruce,
hates the sound of my voice, and absolutely
nothing will quiet his barking
so long as I so much as breathe
in my own backyard.
I am sitting at my desk.
The one Bodo helped me make.
Cut short, a little, like him.
It’s not exactly a story, but
there’s quite a bit to see,
staring out the window of
a corner lot in Albuquerque.
👆 Day No. 03 of Austin Kleon's 30 Day "Practice and Suck Less" Challenge.
This morning’s exercise was inspired by exactly what it says about itself. I realized that quite a bit has happened outside of my house, big xeriscaped garbage dump of a lawn that it seems to be.
If you decide you’d like to see something beyond practice-pieces, check out The Fraction Club — a patron-based community of folks who support my creative work in exchange for exclusive writing, performance, commentary, interaction and more — or my book, It’s All Worth Living For.