The Vaguely

The vaguely Hawthornish house on the next corner down from me on the slope which is Steelton, which the owners painted peach in some godawful, resale-suicide, kamikaze gesture, has twenty foot icicles on the rear of it. Well, they're not true icicles--they're attached to the structure and run down almost the entire length. So they're what? Ice pilasters? Their rolling, steeply-pitched backyard is nineteenth century too, and has a large brambly bush set in the middle of the upper end of it like an allegory to frighten children. I think it's just what grew up around a bole left there a century ago. They'll do that. Animals live under its shade in summer (rabbits I believe) and presumably under its all-natural dome home in winter. They have an old swingset whose children are probably in nursing homes or dead and buried. It's just to spook people now. Ghost landscaping. Steelton has a lot of that. The hip roof attracts me. I wonder if the residents live in a Currier and Ives world and everybody puts valerian in their stews and valerian sachets in their drawers of clothing. No--their trousseaux and wooden chests which are surely at the foot of each bed. That accounting box one kept with the Lord. I wonder if they perish of consumption. Where they keep their horses. Who is that madwoman in the attic? How do they find a neverending supply of whale oil? Its light, I am told, has never really been equaled. No, stop moralizing. It was surely wonderful. It sits among a handful of venerable old homes with Victorian attitudes. And yet one block east is a house with a square cedar campanile-like architectural element beveled at the top with modern glass. I assume the glass top creates a natural light well. There's a balustraded deck up there wrapped around it. It's a belvedere, presumably. Yes, in Steelton. Somebody beautiful sunbathes up there. Again, presumably. Well, I guess they would have a good view. We're atop a hill here. The Susquehanna is lovely from my third floor window. I don't have to leave this room to enjoy the fireworks Harrisburg loves putting off so often, like most provincial capital cities. So the campanile folks probably have a pretty view of the uninhabited little river islands south of the city. What else? Well there are planes headed into HIA so you can lie on your back and stare at them and feel the sonic pressure wave vibrating your oiled ribs, I suppose. And there is a small airport across the river which I can half-see from ground level, so they probably have a good view of that. That belvedere. It looks like something out of pretentious, vintage Californian porn. Something shot around Venice Beach. I'm thinking Suze Randall. Suze, we all know you had a penis. You're not fooling anyone. I had to go out and walk around the block to get to my car because I thought I saw an interior light on. I thought the junkies or FBI or CIA guys had broken into my car again. I couldn't tell from my upstairs window whether I was just seeing a reflection in the window of the car. It was like the tiny starpoint in a sapphire. In the morning, it was still there and seemed as bright to me, so I figured it was the light from the glove box and they had somehow gotten in and had been rooting again. But I was wrong. I cleaned my car off a little but it's stuck in three or four feet of snow from the plow. I'm not fucking with it. Lee, damp gloves go on top of a radiator, not under them. The last thing I need is gloves that smell like some cat's frustrated sexual desire. Although a dab behind the ears might work wonders. I worry about the wild cats of Steelton, which are almost as plentiful as the wild cats of Athens. Probably they have taken shelter down in some of the Mill buildings fallen into desuetude. They're not stupid and they can get in anywhere, like the snow, unlike dogs. The Mill guys tend to identify with them and keep them alive, since they're usually freezing their asses off down there all winter too, and nobody gives a shit about them either. Dru goes to the window and tries to bond with some of them, but I pull him away. He doesn't realize they're bruiser cats. It's like the Galapagos. What needs to emerge will emerge. Dru would just end up with a broken heart from some feline gang banger. And all the cats around here are gang bangers. In every sense of the word. Dru has enough to keep him occupied inside. Although, to be honest, I have no idea what he does all day. Besides fuck the stuffed animals, I mean. If you wandered through my house, you would probably ask why Babar is sitting up so high, surveying the room. Why that Bear is up there on that support for that bed canopy? And so on. "It's so he doesn't fuck it," would be the embarrassing, honest answer.