Living Out Loud

Were this place of close witness deserving of stage or cinema, but it’s not, so much that I can see. No aspiring concert pianist or ballerina has crossed my view, unlike what I saw last night in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film, “Rear Window”, where the main character spends his days in a chair, observing, out the window of his New York apartment, observing while his leg mends from a break suffered in his work as a photographer. Here I’ve seen no newlyweds sleeping on their balcony to escape a confining apartment on a close July night. This is not mid 20th century New York City, where refrigerated air is the exception, where people live on top of people. It is Santa Fe New Mexico, 21st century, where refrigerated air is the exception, and people live on top of people.

We are now officially a community of renters. Along with the pronounced drop in market value of our homes, this troubled economy has changed this place to one of transients, and a transient mentality prevails. The license plates populating the parking areas for these 260 apartment homes tell part of the story—New Mexico, of course, California, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, New York, Wisconsin. The proverbial dog raising his leg on every tree and shrub roams this landscape. That’s another part of the story.

Summer has arrived on the high plateau, and we are paying the price for high-density living. Our windows and patio doors open to catch the fresh air, we are forced to listen to one another. All kinds of human activity that should be private has become public—petulant children wailing in protest, of what, we are left to wonder. They weren’t here last summer. We are privy to phone conversations, lover’s quarrels conducted without the lyricism of Capulet and Montague, cable television and music we don’t choose, and celebrations, minor and otherwise—ordinary human activity captured and displayed for any to witness.

Some of this drama plays out during normal waking hours; some of it at 3:30 in the morning. Even the walls that separate us are not a shield to ringing phones, the closing of kitchen cabinets, the slamming of a front door. Our evaporative coolers draw in the evidence of our neighbor's cigarette addiction. The nighttime restlessness of second-floor residents robs their downstairs neighbors’ sleep, movement across the floor, thundering in the wee hours. I give thanks for imagining this when I bought my apartment home two years ago. I hang my hat on the second floor.

We are living out loud, sadly ignorant that others don’t want to know what we so willingly and willfully flaunt for any and all. We live on top of one another, and we are numbed to discretion. We pass each other on the sidewalk, casting our eyes to the ground, or look at each other squarely and vacantly. We are disaffected. We leave notes outside one another’s doors, apologizing, once again. And we don’t apologize at all because we are blind to our offense. We don’t understand that we are fish in a bowl—loud fish in a bowl.

Living Out Loud—Santa Fe New Mexico (June 29, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis