Vacancy

I'm caretaker for my apartment building, a rather out-of-the-loop caretaker. I vacuum and sweep and change fuses and pick up trash and toss beer cans out of our yard and back into the yard of the partyhouse next door.

Yesterday at dusk I was going about with my vacuum sucking up spiders that had made homes in the nooks and crannies of the hallways and I confirmed something that I had been suspicious about for sometime--my building is virtually empty. The mailboxes are stripped of names and the blinds are drawn and the curbs outside the building are empty of cars.

Its made me sort of nervous--is this place going condo like so many other apartment buildings in my neighborhood? I feel a bit out of the loop.

Sure, I hated my tenants at times--the kid who broke the glass, the couple below whose alarm resounded through the floorboards and woke me up at five am, the woman who moved out and hid boxes of personal letters, bags of garbage, and piles of baby clothes in various places in the basement. But there's something sad about a building full of empty apartments. I feel like I'm less a caretaker and more a custodian, vacuuming up the propeller seeds out of the hallway in anticipation of some future tenant.

There's a lot of space to move into around me these days and some people seem to be moving out before they even settle in.

tilda swinton in the observer; a strange boy i was fascinated with when i visited atlanta; do you have bird flu; the ambiguously gay duo video clips