aside

I really hate to admit it but I have ben inspired by good writing. Its this comps thing, a bunch of essays clipped together. And it has made me, and this hasn’t happened in a long time, it has made me wangt to write a little something, which is what you (whoever you are) are reading now.

It is a sad time here at the American Can. In the last weeks I’m heard a whole collection of sad stories from people I know here and it makes me think this place is more real than I knew. I mean if you don’t know anybody, the stories of the people who live around you in an apartment complex, its easy to imagine you live alone, that only you’re apartment is occupied and everyone else you see is passing through. Even the people you see leaving the apartments next to yours and locking the doors behind htem were just there for a few minutes. They don’t live there.

Now I am acutely aware of more people, more occupied apartments. One person told me, she stays home all day. It’s depression, she said. Another, an old friend actually, tells me her grandfather, who lives here, was in an accident a few months back and is not recovering well. Just this morning a man said his back, injured years ago, was now hurting so bad he couldn’t get out of bed some days and he has fallen out of the shower twice due to losing feeling inhis legs. He admitted depression too. A just this evening someone told me she was hoping for a new job elsewhere but ended up her in New Orleans. She said she was trying to be happy about it but was sure everyone could see through it.

What to make of this, I don’t know. Lots of sad people here, and there could be many more. This whole place could be under a depression, like a spell. I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve felt it too.