the great tea kettle mystery of 2023
the news today is sometimes something can not matter and also matter though
somebody left a tea kettle on the ground in the hallway of my apartment building. it was just sitting on the ground like a guy who had no idea where he was. and i was like, hello, what are you doing there? are you trash?
i stared at it. did someone leave it here by accident? perhaps they had been throwing away other trash, and then put it down and forgot about it?
the next morning, it was still there, but had moved slightly. it was now further away from the trash—a noticeable amount, not just like, "oh somebody bonked it.” no, it was actually now more weirdly in the middle of the hallway.
here, i drew it for you.
there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the tea kettle. it was very clean and shiny. and i don’t know why it mattered so much to me but i wanted to know what it was doing. i wanted to figure out what was with it. and as a gift to myself, i decided to just let it matter and not care why.
i went over more questions in my head like a detective who didn’t know what a case was.
did someone put it there to be like hey, if anyone wants this, here it is but like not articulate that? and then later move it to more in the middle of the hallway as if to be like, did you not see this? it’s here.
maybe they felt bad about throwing it away? maybe they didn’t want to deal with letting it flop down the trash chute and probably break while making the loudest fucking sound possible? so they just thought it’d be better to put it on the ground and walk away?
when i got back to my apartment, i wrote the following in my journal:
the next time i walked by it, it had moved again—it was now closer to the wall AND it had traveled a little more down the hallway. it sort of seemed like it was trying to get away from the trash room? which, like, sure, that makes sense, i thought. it wants to get away from the trash because it doesn’t want to be trash.
that makes sense.
i decided that the next time i walked by it, i needed to do something. and the thing i chose to do was simply put a question mark on a post-it and place it on the tea kettle.
the answer isn’t going to change my life; it’s not going to be a prize for me! i just want someone to explain why they put a tea kettle on the ground of a hallway SORT OF by the trash and left it there. the next thing i was going to do was write another note. it was going to say the following:
hello. what’s going on with this?
i never got the chance, however, because the next time i walked by, the kettle—and my note—were gone. apparently my note was the last straw! because, look, something can sit on the ground for days, but when someone puts a note on it? THAT’S it, get that thing OUT of here!
historically, nobody lets my notes around the apartment building stick around for too long. take my last one for example:
it wasn’t even up long enough to get any signatures! however, do you know what it DID do? IT MADE THEM FIX THE WHALE SOUND.
what this has led me to believe is that if i don’t leave a comment on a note about something around my building, nothing will ever get done about it. that tea kettle was there for several days. note goes up? gone immediately. the whale sound was around for, like, a MONTH. the day after my note? magically gone!
me. i did that. i fixed it! please clap, thank you!
look, i’m not saying that the answer to everything is to leave passive aggressive joke notes everywhere. but what i AM saying is that i, personally, can comically get shit taken care of in my building by being a little asshole who is giggling alone. and now that i think about it, that’s kind of always been my whole thing. that’s a big part of my friendship with myself!
i wasn’t always a good friend to myself (was pretty mean, actually). but, now, instead of kicking myself for being a human person with emotions, i allow myself to feel it all and sit in a swamp for however long i need. later, though, whether i like it or not but only when i am ready, i will be my own little clown and make me laugh again, despite whatever struggle of reality is happening. and that will remind me why the world is still good, because no matter what, i will make it so. this is one of the ways i hold my own hand.
learning to hold your own hand is very important. a thing i used to do when i felt bad was call my mom, but i can’t do that anymore because she exists in a different world that i can’t always enter (especially when i am in a different state). and nobody thought i was more awesome than my mom—she let me know about it all the time.
i miss getting emails from Wordpress about my mom scream laughing in all caps in reply to something i wrote. when i found this screenshot, the thought occured to me that i was going to need to be my own cheerleader now. and then i realized that…i already was. at some point over the years, i started rooting for myself. this isn’t just because of my mom, of course—it’s many years of therapy and hard work. but it’s not NOT because of her either, because she lives in me and always will.
how could she not? you don’t love someone that much and NOT keep them in your heart forever, dude, as a living alive thing. i’m starting to think that you don’t really lose the people you love even if they’re not ~~~““physically there.””~~~ they sort of just live within you and around you. i think that’s just, like…part of what love is, i guess.
(…after that last sentence, i almost wrote, as a joke, “and that makes me go, damn, dude, love actually is all around,” like you know from the movie love actually? but then the skeleton manning the ship inside my brain whacked me on the side of my head with a big broom and called me a fucker. “too far,” he shouted, “you went too far and it sucks, do not do it, bitch! jesus christ” and i was like absolutely my man. you are right—i won’t. and i didn’t!)
but what do i know? i’m not saying anything, like, profound. this is just one of those moments and i’m just a guy sitting on a rock observing the world then shouting my findings. so maybe one minute i’m singing a poem into a megaphone about what i think love is, the next minute i am being thrown out of a town hall for rushing the stage and pulling out a scroll to explain why batman & robin (1997) is actually good, the next minute i’m crying in a grocery store thinking about tofu scramble, and the next minute i am trying to figure out why in the goddamn hell a tea kettle can sit on the ground in the hallway for four days but my hilarious notes get taken down in two Damn hours!!!!!!!!!!!
and all of this is fine.
I love this! My mum died a couple of weeks ago and the thing about holding your own hand and being your own little clown made me weep. I wish I lived in a building with someone who wrote funny notes about whale sounds. Keep on being you - as you have proved, it’s powerful stuff ❤️
This email changed my life, a little bit at least, for at least a couple hours. Maybe more? I don't know, ask me tomorrow!