Pennsylvania, So Far

Brooklyn tried to kill us before we left. I half-woke in an already disgusting apartment at two in morning from dreams of a waterfall to an actual waterfall in our bathroom. A main had broken on the third floor, so every other bathroom in the building was doing the same thing. We salvaged what we could, our neighbor managed to turn off the water to the building, I half-heartedly mopped up the mess and went back to bed. Less than an hour later, the ceiling collapsed. We did not bother getting out of bed for that.

A month later, ink barely dry on the massive checks we’d written to buy a house and escape, another waterfall started in the kitchen. We thought we could wait until morning and cobbled together a plastic-wrap gutter, but it got progressively worse. We lost most of our dry goods, and had to ask the neighbor to turn off the water again when the wall started falling apart.

We spent the next three weeks in a pre-move limbo. We didn’t want to buy anything, so every meal was delivery or dining out. After making the downpayment, we developed a nihilistic apathy in our relationship with money. We already wiped out our savings; who cares what anything costs? It took two months for my credit cards to recover.

The largest non-savings-destroying expense was the movers. Leah and I have both moved a dozen or more times in our lives, and every one of those times we learned to hate it more. Having packed up her last apartment together, we also weren’t sure our still ripe marriage would survive another attempt at the task. So we dropped several thousand dollars on full-service movers.

On every phone call with the moving company, I tried to warn them.

“It’s a six hundred square foot apartment, but—”

“That’s more than manageable, we’ll send—”

“No, please, I need you to understand. Every wall is covered in shelves. There are piles of books everywhere. Sometimes it takes an hour to find the cat. Every closet is full front to back and floor to ceiling. There are piles of blankets and stuffed animals on the shelves. The furniture is also storage and all of it is full. We have enough dishes to run a grade school cafeteria. For every category of possession there is, we measure its amount vertically. You have to realize how. Much. Stuff. Is. Here.”

This was met with polite chuckles and assurances, until the people who actually had to pack everything showed up. Every one of their faces fell when they saw the state and content of our apartment. Two complete lives lived to middle age by unrepentant pack rats had been forced via creative physics into a space only barely acceptable for a pair of college students on good terms.

Somehow, they did it in five and a half hours, once we saved our soon-to-be-needed box of wine from unlabeled burial and got out of their way. It was a cold day, so we sat in the car with a terrified Pineapple mewing what I assume means “what in Bagheera’s name is happening?” in cat.

The man on the phone had said it would probably be a two-day job, but the actual movers weren’t having it. When they packed up the last box they told us to meet them at our new house and drove away. We did a frantic once over for the last of our things and left the keys on a shelf.

Goodbye forever, apartment. You were adequate.

Two hours later I lived in a different state, in, for the first time since 1996, a house. Two hours after that, it was full of boxes. Five months and change after that, I still can’t articulate what it feels like.

Going from sixteen years of living in the dead center of New York City in cramped apartments to a two-story colonial in a quiet suburb half a mile from Philly in twenty-four hours is not an experience I can anchor to anything else I’ve lived through. It’s such a radical lifestyle change I feel like a different person. My habits altered overnight as they tried to adapt to a space that didn’t stop changing for five weeks of unpacking.

Fortunately, we both came down with Omicron three days after we got here, which gave us something else to worry about. Also fortunately quite mild cases, gone in a few days. Unfortunately, those few days were the same few days my parents were going to stay with us, and they were in the last twenty minutes of a twelve-hour drive to our house when Leah’s test came back positive. After some haggling, we had an hour of Christmas on opposite sides of sliding glass doors, making for the weirdest Christmas I’ve had since 1998, the only other non-pandemic-related time I haven’t gone home for the holiday.

After unpacking and a three-hour session of breaking down empty boxes, we realized how much space we had. Roaring caverns of space. Tiny spaces are overwhelmed by need, broken by necessity and time limitations. Large spaces require negotiation: parts of them will remain empty, but which? Our dining room has a table and chairs, arguably everything a dining room requires, but even with the little bar and hutch tossed in, it feels barren and neglected, and we vacillate over what other purposes a dining room should serve.

The revelation of space extends to the outside. We have no idea what to do with our yards. Plural. How do people live like this? Do we mow them? Pay a kid a quarter to do it? Pay a landscaper three grand a month to serenade the clover? Between us, Leah and I have killed countless houseplants; can the trees that we appear to own survive these poison thumbs? Beyond the mass of green we have to figure out how to take care of, the sidewalks are not filled with people on phones rushing to work. Most even say hello. Because of our proximity to the city proper, there’s a spectrum of interaction: in front of our house, most people wave or even chat for a moment, and this stranger-non-danger steadily fades as a walk approaches the border between the county that contains our house and the one that contains Philadelphia.

Philadelphia itself is as hostile and anonymous as NYC on the walkways, while the roadways are infinitely worse. I’ve collected my initial thoughts on the driving situation around Philadelphia elsewhere, and I stand by them, with some additions: I have witnessed a truck go from a dead stop to peeling out straight through a red light light. I’m forced to assume this was the same truck that recently peeled out through a stop sign, and, shortly thereafter, a telephone pole. Until seeing the overturned truck, my evidence of the event was a deafening boom and seeing two blocks worth of poles tremble at the passing of their comrade.

One drunk driver imprisoned and aside, I have sympathy for the natives. My theory is they’re displaying some kind of psychotic enactivism in response to the condition of the roads, which exhibit war-zone level decay: you could lose tires and small children in the pot holes, and the patchwork repairs look like they were done by monkeys under duress. I avoid the 76 expressway into the city because there’s a three-mile stretch of it that has no visible division of lanes. There are at least four. In the suburban areas, there are more signs indicating the resumption of two-way traffic than there indications that one-way traffic started in the first place. Leah pointed out that “NO TURN ON RED” signs indicate the general legality of right turns on red, however this makes the “LEFT TURN YIELD ON GREEN” signs especially worrisome. There are major roadways that are difficult just to walk on, and Church Rd is a deathtrap from beginning to end for all forms of traffic: twisting, rolling hills and blind turns on shoulderless lanes with invisible residential driveways every forty yards. I’m not sure what the speed limit is supposed to be, but it’s probably less than the 50mph everybody has decided it is. The frustration that informs offensive driving is a predictable response to this endemic municipal failure of maintenance.

Fear of vehicular manslaughter aside, as we slowly grasp the concept that we live here now, the physical evidence of stress has begun to recede. I don’t need a pack of Tums and an Advil to get through every day. I certainly never expected my back pain to go away in my early 40s. I barely even need my daily two hours of lying on the couch in the fetal position.

I always expected the city to break my body before it broke my mind. Then again, I did not expect a pandemic to twist said mind into a four-dimensional map of transmission vectors. On this step on my journey away from the baconocalypse, I feel a bit of guilt, but I do arguably less harm to the world here than I did in the city. But something shifted in me when I took the picture at the top of this post. I posted it to twitter with the following caption:

I took this picture and edited it to make it look like a painting because I thought it looked like artwork for a dystopian sci-fi where the monied elite entertain themselves with magic-grade technology while the world is ravaged by plague famine and war then I was like wait

When discussing that thought with friends, we tend to express a mild and apathetic surprise at how smoothly we sailed into actual dystopia. The pursuit and enjoyment of creature comfort consumes attention for those who are able to pursue them at all. Working in technology for twenty years is tantamount to being a historian: I see incredible technology coming out and know that it will immediately be used to distract and oppress¹[1] in equal measure, and our helplessness in the face of the oppression eats up the entertainment for a trickle of escape. The last decade of global system shocks were all things most people saw coming. We were hoping another generation would have to deal with it.

More surprising is the question of which kind of dystopia we would hit as a species has been answered: all of them. Russia doing its best 1984 impression, America is somewhere between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale, China is cribbing off Black Mirror, and we’re all well on our way to Waterworld at worst and Bladerunner at best.

I’ve dealt with isolation and the time freed up by not commuting for two years. Now for the first time in two decades, I don’t have deal with the logistical overhead of living in a city. Leah and I are constantly finding new, little reliefs: No hearing neighbors party or fight through thin walls or open windows at three in the morning. We can do laundry without leaving the house. We have enough space to store food for weeks and don’t have to stop at cut-rate supermarkets every two days. Without all that, every week feels like it has three extra days. There are no good bars within walking distance, so I have three extra evenings on top of that. With all that time, I find I can’t stop trying to fill it, to stave off thoughts of the crumbling world I have surgically escaped, and hoping, nearly praying that some pursuit will stumble across a way to fix it.

1 Or make a new Javascript framework.