Talk of style and glory, but you never pictured me

I wrote: I pay rent on this apartment, but I'm not at home. I haven't had a home for years. I think I will die before I have anywhere I can rest.

We celebrated my mother's birthday at Tryst this evening. When we got home, I lit the candles on the cake my father had made with layers of chocolate angelfood, yellow cake and ganache, and a sauce of sour cherries; my niece who loves tearing paper off things helped my mother unwrap her birthday books. Last night I saw Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018) with spatch and rushthatspeaks; it's a beautiful remix of Jeff VanderMeer's novel and I want to write about it, but first I need the free time in my head and I'm realizing that I just don't get any of that between work and other necessary stresses, not for a long time now. I am not managing to write even about movies I really enjoyed. Fiction, forget it. It feels like suffocating inside my own head. I am hoping to do absolutely nothing with my day tomorrow. I would like to do absolutely nothing with my weekend, but I don't think I can afford it. I would like to do absolutely nothing for a month and then our landlord would move to evict.

There is a line in the song I'm listening to: searching for a song about a love that might have been between anxiety and hindsight. The first time I played it, I heard in between anxiety and Einstein and thought it was some kind of relativity metaphor. I am a little disappointed it was not, although I recommend the album in general. It's good personal-political punk with a non-binary singer-songwriter.

I have Autolycus on my lap and that's nice.

Teach me to sing and make it happy, because I'm sick of the sorrows of this world

There is a kind of late gold light on old brick that I love; I saw it a little after five as I came down the hill behind the public library, glowing on the stamped nineteenth-century façade of the Litchfield Block on Pearl Street. There was a window pushed up on the top floor, its glass reflecting like gilding and a flowered curtain blowing out of it. I looked at it for a while, hoping there was someone on the other side looking back at me, for symmetry. Nothing moved except the curtain and I was getting cold without a hat, so I walked down the concrete stairs with their street art of primary-colored cars (I can tell you the blue one is a Volkswagen Beetle and the yellow one is a Volkswagen Vanagon and I have no idea what the red one is, except I don't think it's a Volkswagen anything) and I went home. Sometimes this gold-leaf light looks to me like the nineteenth century, but this afternoon it was definitely Edward Hopper light. Specifically the kind of strong late sunlight you get in Room in Brooklyn (1932), which I make a point of visiting whenever I go to the MFA. Last time I checked, the placard alongside the painting was still considering it in terms of melancholy, but it has always looked peaceful to me: solitary, not lonely. I can't tell if the woman is reading or watching the street, but neither spells desolation to me. Just if it were my room, the sunlight on the carpet would contain a cat.



I've learned only recently that this area is formally known as Gilman Square; that the wheels and whistles I hear in the night belong to Pan Am freight trains, the Amtrak Downeaster, and the commuter trains of the Lowell Line; and that the view I looked out over this evening will vanish with the Green Line Extension. As with all forms of media lately, keeping up on local news is a balancing act. I want to know what will happen to the neighborhood I live in: I don't want to spike a coronary seeing it dismissed as a collection of "underutilized sites" and "gaps" in need of "infill buildings" in order to realize its destiny as a "hub of public life." I know there's nothing to do about it—the station has been going in since before I moved here—but I happen to like the rather open, zigzaggily brick-lined intersection at the end of my street; it's got a bunch of trees and I can even still see the sky over the tops of them, which is increasingly important to me in a city determined to high-rise every block it can. The lion-headed concrete art deco of the former Reid & Murdock warehouse and the green bronze pediment of the Knights of Malta Hall don't cry out to me for reconstruction so much as preservation. All the rhetoric surrounding this project has been commercially nostalgic, returning the square to the hustle and bustle of its days as the site of the Winter Hill station on the Boston & Lowell Railroad. That was in 1835. 1888, if we're being generous to the renovated station. It's picturesque to envision that again, but it sets my teeth on edge in the way that nostalgia does when it wants to be sympathetic magic. The B&L was subsumed into the Boston & Maine Railroad before that postcard station was even built; after the turn of the century, the railways were re-routed and streetcars took the majority of commuter traffic over the (now equally threatened by the GLX) Lechmere Viaduct and the station first went derelict, then was demolished during the Depression, a full half-century before the B&M finally went bankrupt in 1983. I am tremendously starry-eyed about trains and somewhat fanatically in favor of a working rail network in this country rather than wall-to-wall cars and I still know that you can't just shake two centuries off a neighborhood whether you tear out the more recent buildings or not. You can't make one branch of the MBTA substitute for the booming blue-collar industries of more than a hundred years ago. And even if you could strip off time like paint, I rather wonder what it means that you're casting back past two world wars to do it. Who lived here then? Who do you imagine did? I don't say that the GLX will or should fail—although I certainly won't be able to afford to live here when it succeeds—but I wish it weren't trying to paint gentrification as time travel, especially when it's so selective. Assembly Square is not Ford Motors' Somerville Assembly. I feel safe guessing that the "vibrant mix of businesses" to be encouraged by redevelopment will not include either of those nineteenth-century mainstays of Somerville employment, brickyards or meatpacking plants.

tl;dr I get weird when my community planning starts to sound like Miniver Cheevy. But what do I know? Edward Hopper looks restful to me.