I would like to relax in a beat apartment for half what I pay now. Shop
at a rundown market full of Mexicans, and eat at beat restaurants run
down in parking lots full of blowing trash and leaves. To live where they
don't clean up all the time. To live where there's organic trash and
vacant lots and edgy-lookin houses and characters in the shadows, and
danger in the nighttime, and a sort of dark oily sidewalk thing and a
texture to the honey lights of evening, the taste of the honey lights in
the mouth, and the chatter of foreign languages echoing in the courtyards
beyond the thrift stores.

That's perverse, right? Through the gathered smeary picture windows of
the years, the eyes and all the years, but — it's one of my candy
visions now. I like to walk down the wet sidewalks in the silver sun and
groove on the variegated architecture, the overcast architecture from the
60's & 70's, apartments which can be afforded by foreigners, young
mothers, old people, retards and the insane. Small-time con men, petty
thieves, bad salesmen, clueless students, fat slobs, drunks and drug
addicts. Gay pony prostitutes and poxy hookers and slovens and sluts.
Giant broods of screaming children, gangly teens and dim uncles. Huge
blimpic black women and skinny neurotic anorectics. The old lady next
door in the house coat, the coarse-voiced broad in the black bikini who
wants to be a singer, the Philly girl with the watery blue eyes and the
colorless humorless cool, the thick droll male model with the suicide
destiny, the snaggle-toothed army reject in the same shorts with the same
can of Bud, the cute Persian girl in the semi-transparent one-piece
bathing suit, the insane stereo bass warrior beyond the bedroom wall.

And all the other characters! The "literary agent" with a nose of broken
veins. The jolly fat comedienne. The pear-shaped supervisor. Mario in a
coat in the 90+. The smiling black whore at 2 a.m. Someday I will write
about them all.