Peerless Life in Allston Rock City

[Allston Rock City: Corner Harvard/Brighton, circa 2005]

Allston is a thickly settled multi-generational, multi-cultural Boston neighborhood off the Mass Pike. It's a student ghetto, situated on the 57 and 66 bus routes, and the B train from Boston College to Boston University to Kenmore (Red Sox territory), and onward into Park Street, where you can change trains and get pretty much anywhere you want to go. Lower Allston, or "LA" so dubbed by its genial citizenry, is a comparatively quiet residential sprawl of vintage double and triple deckers. Upper Allston is the busy ramshackle Mah Jong board of brownstones and walk-ups and restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo boutiques and thrift stores and churches and a thousand other urban services and delicacies. Stand in the middle of Upper Allston any time of day and you're in the perfect spot to take the pulse of Rock City. It's a hopping hive of students and rockers and immigrants from everywhere, and when you stand on the corner at night, you think, "Excellent city."

The Peerless: Allston MA

In 2003 I somehow found myself moving from Somerville to Upper Allston, when I moved in with Joe. The apartment was a small one-bedroom on the second floor of The Peerless, a tired but noble old dame of a building situated just one T stop from the corner of Harvard and Comm. I love that building to this day, though the 1300 block is completely different now. What isn't?

The Peerless

She's a right proper old dame of a building that dates from the 1930s when Allston roads were "carriage lanes," a quaint sounding term. Officially that term is outdated, but when directing friends to Commonwealth Avenue, you must differentiate the main drag from these narrow one-way access roads that flank the avenue and the train tracks, and that's why we still say "carriage lane." The Peerless isn't noteworthy, just another apartment complex among many. If anything, people might know the 1300 block because of a rather drab walk-up a few doors down whose legacy is jack-hammered into the stone surplices just because it's where Aerosmith used to live in the 70s when they were a local Allston band.

Ours was the tiny unit over the entryway–a plus because there were no downstairs neighbors! But a minus because it only had one window overlooking the street and the train tracks. To be specific, one large picture window that didn't open, flanked by two small windows that you could pry partway open. Those windows did jack squat to stir the stuffy air. No cross breezes, no sunlight. Summers were rough when the place became a 98,000 degree sauna. Going outside for some relief meant sitting on the front stoop at car bumper level. Somehow we cohabited harmoniously right on top of each other for seven years. That's love, baby. I wouldn't recommend trying it for as long as we did, unless you marry your best friend.

The Peerless from across Comm Ave.

Despite the small space and large rent, I loved the place. I looked up the history and I found evidence suggesting that today's one-bedroom Peerless units are the result of breaking up larger two-and-three bedroom apartments many years ago, like the Bramford in Rosemary's Baby. They must have been gorgeous apartments. It seems that, originally, all the Peerless units had front or back porches, which must have been amazing. I could tell because if you were to open the front closet doors, the interior is all old brick that was the original outer wall of the porch. A porch! Imagine! I figure it must have been around the 1970s when they started divvying up the units, and did so along the living room and kitchen wall, so that these days, the corner units got a larger kitchen and bathroom, while the middle units got a larger living room with a big picture window, but a tiny kitchen.

I met "Mo" online, she used to live in the Peerless
and actually had a photo of her place when it still had a porch!

Ours was one of those "tiny kitchen" units. Seriously, I'd tell people how small it was, but nobody got it until they came over. That kitchen was the size of a restroom stall. It was so small that you couldn't open the fridge and the oven at the same time. Half the linoleum floor tiles, glued down during the Roosevelt administration, were missing, the remaining tiles stained and so brittle with age that they'd crunch and break apart if trod upon. Meal prep happened on an 8-inch span of crackled 1940s formica counter space, mind you that's where the dish rack lived so...really, zero counter space. The small stove had one medium-sized coil-style electric burner and three teeny little burners, so you might be able to fit four pots or pans but only if toy ones from a play kitchen. And the creaky old oven mocked me and my cookie sheet, which was too big to fit inside it. Though it hardly mattered if my cookie sheet fit, that oven couldn't outbake a lightbulb in a shoe box. Where's my EZ Bake Oven?

Space

When I moved in with Joe, I still had my baker's rack and my kitchen island from my much larger Somerville apartment, and I managed to cheat more kitchen area by configuring those two items outside the kitchen proper. Sure, that set-up occupied some of the living room, but I had to weigh that against how much I needed to augment that scant 8 inches of cracked formica counter space. It meant that you could sit on the couch and chop garlic on the kitchen island, but we made it work. Storage. Space savers. I became a space saving sorcerer in that apartment. I mounted metal grids on the walls and hung every utensil that was capable of hanging from a hook. I got shelves, shelf-expanders, under-counter gadgets, over-cabinet doodads, stacking wizards, you name it. My nested bowls were a work of art. Not a SET of nested bowls, no, man. I'm talking rag-tag bargain-bin hodge podge old school BOWLS, baby. No ordinary person can stack bowls like that.

Space is like money. You don't think about it at all if you have enough, but when you have none, Christmas is a drag. First off, where do you stash Christmas decorations for eleven months a year? Secondly, family wants to gift you appliances when you're Dinks (Dual Income, No Kids) who never had a bridal registry. So every Christmas, there I am, I'm under Joe's mother's tree saying sincere thank-yous. What's in the box? Inwardly I'm seeing my kitchen in my mind's eye, like the Terminator, as a mathematical grid. I flunked every math class they stuck me in, but when I'm hefting a wrapped Williams Sonoma box, I'm planning how I'm gonna fit whatever-it-is into my postage-stamp of a kitchen. My face is saying "oooh!" but mentally I was defining the variable of whatever's inside,  multiplying by the coffee maker conjugate so as not to have a complex number of sauce pans go undefined. (Bowls. She got us a nice set of glass nested bowls. I stored them under the couch).

Dust

When I'd tell people that I live "on the green line," I'd specify, "I mean ON the green line."  Joe stepped out the door, crossed the carriage lane and waited at the T stop. But I found a new enemy at the Peerless. Dust.

Comm Ave dust is not your ordinary, floaty mote-like variety of dust that retreats from a human hand inside an old sock. This was next-level dust. It was black. It was greasy. And it was everywhere. This was an insidious, heavy devil dust from the constant trains and exhaust from Comm Ave traffic. It was even coating all the stuff I had stashed under the bed. Every space saving Ninja's first go-to is that area under the bed, and mine was like a coal mine. So I bought a dust ruffle. When the Amazon box arrived, I wasn't ready to do the whole project (strip the bed, haul off the mattress etc) so I didn't open that dust ruffle. I, um, stashed it...under the bed. I never did open that box.

I Love Our Home

Sooooo much better...note the glass nested bowls.

Seven years later when we finally moved to Lower Allston, my space saving skills really came to light, because when I packed that Comm Ave kitchen, the stuff filled about ten boxes. "Where WAS it all?" marveled Joe. How could I have fit that much kitchen stuff into that dinky little kitchenette? Then when I unpacked at the new place, everything spread out into kitchen drawers and cabinets and what seemed like miles of counter space. I was SO HAPPY I'd kept my baker's rack and kitchen island, even though it was a tight squeeze back at the Peerless. My new kitchen is tricked out, baby!

Sure, the Peerless was cool and all, but Lower Allston is the best place I have ever lived. When I tell people how much I love where we live now, they nod and smile. I say no really, you guys don't understand. This house is heaven. Twenty-four windows sending breezes everywhere. There's even a window in the bathroom. Clean white tile floor in the kitchen. Going outside means sitting out on the front stoop...or on our very own glorious private porch, whaaaat? Yet we are still within walking distance of all those Upper Allston restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo boutiques and thrift stores and churches and a thousand other urban services and delicacies. That's why I am always amazed when I hear people dunking on Allston, and funnily enough, it's usually some tacky, over-processed bitch who lives...like...I dunno, in Billerica or something. Dude, you either "get" Allston or you don't. We love it here, and we love all our neighbors who love it here. Our people.

I would love to tell you that I totally returned that dust ruffle to Amazon but...um I was very busy. Does anyone need a dust ruffle? Still in the package! 👷

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Ode To Star Market (2002)

This was a poem that I wrote in 2002 about the insanity that is the Porter Square shopping center parking lot. It's chaos all the time. The poem, such as it is (I'm no poet) had an original title of Ode to Star Market (How I Did Not Get Sushi Last Night And Made This Up In The Car On The Way Home).

Ode To Porter Square Star Market

Star sells sushi a la carte, that's why I'm bound to go there

Otherwise I stay away from Supermarket Nightmare 

Homeward bound this dusk from GiantSuckingSound.com

A big enormous yen for sushi hit me like a bomb

"Do I dare?" I asked myself, approaching Porter Square

This time of night, without a doubt, a monster lurks in there

Writhing, ugly, slow and crass, a teeming steel and rubber clot

Evil, angry...what, you ask? The friggin' Porter parking lot!

Dreams of maki and wasabi danced around my hungry head

I steeled my nerve and gripped the wheel and gunned it straight ahead

"I am going to park this car," with all the grit that I could muster

(Note to self: Never heed your inner Colonel Custer)

I took a breath; I'm all alone and no one had my back

Angry lady almost rammed me with her giant Cadillac

I should have bailed then and there, but damn! I wanted sticky rice!

If not for that I'd not have risked my sanity to sacrifice

I chanced another round in hopes a space would open up

Saw Soccer Mom in Minivan flip off Dude in Pick-up Truck

Chick in Audi terror-stricken, Man in Beemer idled

Warning signals from myself, "You're getting homicidal"

Abort! Abandon Porter Square! Forget about the snapper!"

Oaf in Camry! Taurus Loser! Subaru Brake-Tapper!

I finally made it out and home, to contemplate my foolishness

How much did I want that fish, and how much did I need that stress?

You may also like: Boston. Because F**k You.

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Straddling the Great Digital Divide

What I love most about being a true blue Gen X'er is our passage from analog to digital. There's something comforting in the shared experience of taking a flying leap together across a great technological chasm. From Etch-A-Sketch to iPad, from wall-tethered telephones to iPhones. Technology moved fast during our lifetime. We climbed the mountain, we surfed the wave, we sped along the information superhighway with all the windows open. We optimized for mobile like champs. Ours was a triumphant, graceful grand jete across the great digital divide.

So imagine my horror when I presented as a fumble-fingered old lady at CVS in front of the young pharmacy clerk. Mortified. The girl could hardly hide her snicker as I attempted to pay (for my old lady blood pressure medicine no less) with my debit card. Seems I don't quite have the hang of the new "chip card" yet. First I tried to swipe my card, then I stuck it into the slot backwards, then I took it out of the slot too soon. I found myself in defense mode, babbling about Gen X and straddling the great digital divide. Finally I managed to pay the girl. Used my iPhone to summon an Uber ride home just to reassure myself about my friendly, fearless relationship with modern tech.

Did you get your chip card yet? If not, allow me to explain why your magnetic stripe cards have become quite obsolete. I looked it up.

We don't "swipe" at the register anymore. We "dip." You have to insert (you know what, I am never going to say "dip," I'm sorry) the chip-end of the card into the base of the payment device, keep it in there for about a week (it isn't fast like swiping) and then you can enter your PIN and proceed as before. 

The chip card is the rare tech that was not designed for consumer convenience, hence its slowness. What you've got there, chief, is a tiny little microprocessor for security. Unlike our old magnetic stripes, which use the same digital cardholder ID for every transaction, the chip generates a new number every time you use it. The stripes were easier prey for card fraudsters who could easily copy the stripe once and use it until you caught on and cancelled your card. The chip is secure like the vault codes in a Vegas casino. They keep changing. It's the same microprocessor built into the new "mobile wallet" on smart phones.

And so basically, the reason for the new dippy chip thing is because of rampant card fraud thievery. Damn criminals. This is why we can't have nice things.

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Any Other Sunday (re-dux)

  Saturday, June 16, 2012

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Father's Day. My day to reflect upon the fact that I've never turned any man into a father. Certainly not a daddy.

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Music Makers and Dreamers of Dreams

When I was 24 years old, I found it necessary to retract and re-submit my *theory about musicians and just what the hell is their deal anyway. This happened all in my head, in the high seats at Foxboro Stadium at approximately 8 o’clock on May 20, 1994. My theory? Please note, I was a wee bit baked, and Pink Floyd, on the Boston stop of the Division Bell tour, had just opened with Astronomy Domine, from their tragically underrated 1966 album Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
[*sex bots]

Aliens. Musicians are descendants of an enlightened alien race that landed an unknowable number of millennia ago and integrated (kinda) with early mankind. When expertly applied, especially at night, the mambo, the wang dang doodle, the rock and roll, the boogie woogie, are all syno for the same wordless body & soul communication: Sex! Music, singing and dancing all lead to sex. Maybe it's the other way around. Either way, inter-species hanky panky, moving and grooving with each other, resulting in mixed alien-human babies, means here we all are now: we are the incomprehensibly complex descendants of a rock & soul interplanetary bop and we have retained this cosmic knowledge. To compress massive volumes into one nearly indefinable word, we named that "talent." Some extraordinary talents just walk around earth, saying stuff, acting like everything they can do is normal. Granted, the reviews have been mixed.

I assume what these randy galactic travelers were trying to do was bring to earth a universal language so that mankind could communicate irrespective of spoken word. At first with just voice, sticks and rocks. Then animal hides, bones and gourds. Then wood, ebony and ivory and Mozart. Then electricity and steel and Jimi Hendrix. It gets quite complicated after that, because technology and Bob Moog and those guys we don't think of as "rock stars" but nevertheless changed the world. [See also Chapter 5, "Cosmik Debris," search term "giraffe filled with whipped cream," Chapter 7, "Movers and Shakers" search term "Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy," Chapter 10, "Gods and Monsters," search term "Tonto," all of Chapters (Prince symbol) through 😭 and in fact most of the rest of the book.]

Musicians manipulate the air, causing particles to collide and vibrate into what they call "notes." They control the rate of these vibrations by shaping time into specific pulses they call "beats." It gets more complicated after that, I'll do a diagram or something later. But this talent is as close to magic as you can get, is it not? Within and between the notes and beats is a mysterious kind of unteachable "something." Music can bring people together, convey wisdom and trigger memory. Music grants courage, provides comfort and nurtures love and laughter. Music can define, amplify and connect ideas. This is a force so powerful that it frames time and space, defines entire regions and speaks for generations.

In theory, any of us likely have some degree of talent somewhere in the bloodline. Think of your worst cousin who can somehow play the spoons for some reason. But in reality, it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you'll get the musical talent without the proper gift of expression. We call those "teachers" or "sound guys" and they're great. But sometimes it's the other way around, and we call those "writers" or "comedians" and they should not be picking up the guitar but they do so don't leave one around when you invite them over. Sometimes there's no obvious explanation, which is when you get a Michael McKean and have to sort that out for yourself. All of these talents are all terribly important and should be thanked and appreciated often. Pay them. Bring them food. Tip them. Offer coffee. PAY THEM. Share your weed. Get Cheez-its. You wanna watch out for that horn section. Don't go to sleep on them drummers. Pay. Them.

Attempt to live without music for one hour. Don't even hum for that hour. Tell someone about that hour. Then consider buying music from one of these independent sex aliens from another planet.

We idolize our rock stars. But generally speaking, oddly enough, we've endured roughly a century of disrespect for future rock stars. Stop making that noise, cut your hair, go work in a bank, you're a bum unless you're getting paid for your time, and conveniently, through an unexplained series of events, nobody wants to pay for music anymore. Like it ain't no big thing. Dare to dream the dreams, future rock stars. As though anyone could stop you.∎

Paypal

Do you like this so far? I really hope so.
Paypal $1 or $10 would help a lot and I'll make sure you get the book! I promise I'll write it. Trust me, I'm a writer. I'm also making some little gifts for $50 and up...

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Trigger Warning: Fucking Guns

In the wake of yet another senseless mass shooting, social media has erupted in the expected din, self-righteous advocates on both sides of a hot button issue feverishly posting their little hearts out. It's a futile loudness war fought online with Tweets and memes and platitudes flying high, nobody winning and nobody backing down. Candlelight vigils, thoughts and prayers.

Fuck the candles. Ban the guns.

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Taco Monday

Make your fresh guacamole and salsa while your tortilla dough rests.

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This time it's Joey who's got jury duty

♯

Joey was already gone when I woke up. Jury duty -- that shit starts early. He brought a book. It's Mel Torme's tell-all, The Other Side of the Rainbow: Behind the Scenes on the Judy Garland Television Series. Because of course it is. I got him that book from someone online. It's actually an old library book, so at first he thought we had to return it to the library.

"You mean I get to keep this?" Yeah, baby! It's yours! He loves Mel Torme, if that's not clear.

I love him so much. 🎔

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