Palmetto bugs. From 1975 to 1979 I lived alone in a big one bedroom apartment on East Park Avenue in Tallahassee. I wouldn't live alone again until 2021. It was the lower left apartment in an older fourplex. It felt old fashioned and shabby genteel in the modern 1970s. The floor and woodwork were stained black coffee brown. It had great built-ins, shelves in the living room and bedroom and a glassed breakfront in the dining room, which gave onto the roomy kitchen. Unlike the tiny duplex I moved out of, it had room for me to entertain, and so I did. I hosted potlucks for my fellow new age ministers, a guest seminar or two when I was keen on isa, and a couple of planning meetings when I was, briefly, a member of SDS. I even entertained in the street. I met a few neighbors and was feeling chummy with the world so I created The East Park Avenue Citizens Association, made flyers and put on a block party. It was OK as block parties go, but I didn't pursue that. That apartment was also home to an indeterminate but large number of palmetto bugs. Floridians and their geographic kin are well aware of these giant roaches, but for the rest of you, not only are they huge and nasty but they can fly. Plus they will bite you if provoked or cornered, a painful if insignificant pinch. I made a game of it: walk quietly into my darkened kitchen and suddenly turn on the light. Somewhere between one and three dozen of them would be scurrying furiously for cover across my counters, table and floor. They lived and bred in the basement and walls that were hollow, predictably free of insulation in Florida. As far as I knew none of the tenants complained. Exterminators could come spray of course, but then you'd be living with 1970s pesticides wafting through your home. Palmetto bugs were preferable. Plus you couldn't beat the rent: $130 for a spacious, well appointed one bedroom on that lovely forgotten divided parkway, now long gone.
Radiant heat. My apartment had radiant heat, with old fashioned radiators in my living room and bedroom. There was a boiler in the basement that the landlord often had to fiddle with during the chilly season. Radiant heat is glorious, the best kind of heating I've ever lived with. I would love to try the underfloor version, but that seems fairly out of reach, given my modest means. I now have radiant heat once again in my new home. Bigger radiators topped with faux marble slabs to hold and radiate heat. Radiant heat dries the air out, as welcome in Seattle as it was in Tallahassee. In this old building you don't regulate heat using the radiator valve, the resident manager explained. The valves wear out, with nasty consequences. The plaster walls in my studio bear mute testimony to some kind of past flood. I used to think a waterbed had burst upstairs, but now I suspect a failed valve. Instead you regulate heat by opening windows. That's perfect for me. I can't sleep without a window open for a trickle of fresh air to wash my face at night no matter how cold it gets.
Reading novels. I never cared much for watching TV, and I was an introverted dud at dating until Sally came along and took charge, so I entertained myself by reading novels. Friends at work were raving about Tolkien's Rings trilogy, so I found cheap used paperback editions and dove in. I ended up reading The Hobbit and even dabbling in The Silmarillion briefly. It all felt strangely lacking. Why bother making up a fantasy world? I understand the value of fiction. But world building? No one could ever get close to building a fantasy world even a billionth as deep and interesting as this one. Leela's a better storyteller than any writer could ever be, to put it mildly. Why not write a book with a well-developed backstory, like, say, the history of the world? It's already here, free for the taking. My first foray into so called adult fiction had come earlier. As an adolescent in Asheville I read Ayn Rand. First The Fountainhead, then Atlas Shrugged. I outgrew that while still adolescing. In my solitary Tallahassee digs I got swept away by Anne Rice's novels, which I'll charitably call entry level adult fiction. I did go on, e.g. to John Irving, Pat Conroy, Louis de Berniers. Middlebrow, compared to the truly respectable literary crushes of late high school and college: Faulkner, Conrad, Durrell, Tolstoy. I couldn't put War and Peace down. I was up to dawn two nights in a row reading that. I got back into contemporary literary fiction when I moved to Seattle. Duncan, Doig, blah blah Stegner. I read northwestern authors to help me soak into my new home.