Finding My Den of Intrigue

For the last couple months since my triumphant return to Boston, I've stayed in the comfort and warmth of the houses of friends who were good enough to put me up (and put up with me)until this point. During the course of a conversation with my friend Tiernan about my expectations for finding a permanent living situation, it occurred to me that I was holding out for something unreasonable, irrational and sometime in the future, who knows when. This kind of mania was an unfair burden to place atop the shoulders of the brave souls who took me into their homes. So I've decided to find a place, possibly a sublet, something to get me settled until I know more about what my life back in Boston will entail. In the course of my perousing, meeting, and exploring I've found cute French grad students, musty houses that have their own names, reluctant roommates all due respect, and recently enough an older gentleman who sounded like Richard Nixon on my voicemail and turned out to be some creepy disbarred lawyer/ sex offender. How can one even begin to figure out where the right place for them to live would be? How can we, in the desperation of impermanent dwelling and flux in the face of unstable financial markets find what we are looking for at a reasonable price. Well, I'll tell you. In the course of a conversation with friends I was staying with, I decided it would be really fun to live with two international spies who were constantly trying to kill each other and subsequently cleaning up after themselves, it would add a dimension of weight to the atmosphere in the house and never would there be a dull moment. So I decided to post an ad on Craigslist, actually two ads, because one is in Cambridge and one is in Jamaica Plain. Each ad expressing specifically what I was looking for in a living dynamic. The ad is as follows:

Den of Intrigue Sought (Jamaica Plain)
Reply to: hous-1052346906@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-02-26, 11:23PM EST


Ideally I'm looking for a room in a house with James Bond and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, possibly Inspector Clouseau and Kato or failing both of those Spy vs. Spy, the everyman living amongst international spies, subtly and cleverly attempting to do each other in, and promptly cleaning up after their rubble. The perfect morning routine would entail my exiting the bathroom and nearly tripping over a lit cluster of dynamite that I would promptly douse under the spigot in the bathtub, diffusing the situation before I leave for work. Then I would have my morning coffee entertained by all the subtleties of a knife fight and promptly make my exit as a shootout begins in the common area. If your household fits any of this criteria, is a den of international intrigue or simply cycles through roommates as the information they have been put in charge of carrying becomes obsolete I want to live there. Or if you appreciate a wry, sarcastic, non sequitur-laden, fatalistic sense of humor I want to live there. I am a fun, considerate, respectful roommate and I would love to live in an atmosphere constantly laden with non-soiled-dish-related crises. By all means send me an email, be sure to mention which breakfast cereal has the odorless poison powder, and please don't kidnap me in a van with no windows, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

So far, I haven't received many responses, but alternatively, the responses I have received have all been positive, interesting, educated, fun people with great personalities and great houses, not to mention that I have not been contacted by any government agencies. Though it troubles me slightly that two separate people have replied with the sentence; follow the clues, and attached their ad or a synopsis of their property. Yet I still believe in the effectiveness of personal exploration bourne out of necessity, a notion born in my mind, appreciated mostly by people who know and understand me, it's natural that like-minded people would respond, and in some cases be excited to live with such a person, not to toot my own horn, but bizarre non sequiturs are a part of my regular routine.

That said, if you're a financial planner dying to fill their life with some good old fashioned death metal kids, post the ad. If you're a maitre'd at a swanky restaurant and all you want to come home to is a bottle of bourbon and the Swedish bikini team, post the ad. And most importantly, if you're an out-of-work neerdowell looking to be entertained by the subtle drama of clandestine operations carried out exclusively in your common areas, post the ad, some people are as starved for an audience as you are a venue.

Ear Waxed

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know much about science or anatomy but I do know a fair amount about the ear, or to be more specific, my ear. I don’t much care for loud noises, heavy metal, hardcore punk rock, vacuum cleaners, cuisinarts, when growing up in Southern California, the favorite pastime of teenage ne’erdowells was driving around in a small car with big speakers and driving the passengers to the brink of decibel threshold. I was the backseat driver, yelling for the volume to be turned down. I was the guy who called shotgun and upon planting myself in the front seat, carefully turned the knob down a few clicks to the dismay of the rest of the car.

But I like what I like, the rhythmic hum of drum beats, the careful drone of the voice of urban youth poetically bounding off the walls of selectively cropped samples, the din of a grainy guitar keeping pace with the bounding wooden sticks on animal hides. I even enjoy plugging my ears from the sounds of everyday life, closing out traffic noise, the chatter of strangers, the calculating beeps of checkout stands at the supermarket and creating my own personal soundtrack with the aid of musical mastery reworked over the landscape of my travels.

But too much volume and I’m soured, too much reality to snap me out of my musical trance and I’d rather hear the sounds of car tires bounding over the same pothole in a seamless rhythm, the repeated siren of emergency vehicles urgently rushing someone off into the night.

I share a room with a bird, a love bird specifically, who’s attitudinal chirps are often endearing, and though she and I do not speak the same language we can have an exchange of demeanor and temperament. But at times, even her volume can seem like talons on a chalkboard, the shrill cry of dismay accompanied with crashes, bells and booms from within her cage.

Often times, my mind feels like a caged bird, flooded with sounds and sights that I cannot interpret, that my brain does not understand. Daily I’m bombarded with things that seem to be of the interest of the populous, but do not appeal to me. Specifically the way pop music has evolved over time. In my own teenage evolution, I can remember tuning the radio to a specific point on the dial, waiting anxiously for the DJ to play my ‘jam’. More and more frequently I find myself out of touch with popular culture, being unable to understand the appeal of the music that has become the product of digital culture but without the influence of a wealth of symphonic calculations readily available via the internet.

In it’s ultimate irony the pop music of yesteryear and the bygone practice of instrumental mastery is its missing connection to the sounds of today, whilst commercial products, clothing and textile patterns remain nostalgic, cyclically borrowing from ideas, color combinations and shapes from a past still within reach.

An ear is the way I determine, balance. An ear is the tool I use to understand. An ear is how I set my own mood, the way in which I understand sound. It seems so simple, it’s become part of who we are as people, but does our ability to understand sound evolve as we grow older, or does it become less able to interpret what it hears. Does our preferential differentiation of sounds or music make us more evolved and tell us what we enjoy, or does it simply serve to make us miss the golden days of us waiting with bated breath for our ‘jam’ that may never travel radio waves again?

It’s confusing that I cannot palate the loud drone of the vacuum cleaner, yet, the steady grind of garage bands from the 60s never cease to gratify me. Is it my preference to hear one over the other, or does my mind simply not appropriately interpret the sound of the vacuum. I don’t know much about science or anatomy, but I know what my ears tell me and more often than not, they tell me what I like.