We all will take our stand in God's name

Let us accept correction and not be judges of earth

When we call answer us o Lord

Do not allow people to rise against you

The truth is, I don’t quite know what Sort of Person I am, materially. One byproduct of living with others for one’s whole adult life is the freedom to abdicate having a personal aesthetic in service of the existing commons. Group living means it’s always someone else’s house, other peoples’ furniture, a hodgepodge of lives and lived experiences to which we are offered the opportunity to fit in, and the invitation to add on. Collective life is mostly a matter of getting creative with constraints. Mismatched cocktail glasses means it’s time for a dinner party; old instruments get repurposed for band rehearsal; modular furniture and a surplus of sticky notes, well — the workshop writes itself. Living with others also means living with others’ stuff, and over time you learn to be responsive and generative with both.

Modern apartment buildings, too, lift us away from the world. But unlike music across rooftops, their verticalness mostly serves to confine. An apartment building atomizes its residents; converting a collective of people into units, each one ensconced safely away, behind precise lines and sharp corners, cushioned from unpredictable people and untamable earth. Modern life seeks to atomize us across every vector, and here I find myself wondering how I will find ways to live in an apartment in a way that feels organic: weird, serendipitous, enmeshed with others, with a sense of time and history. I’m wondering what it means to construct meaningful relational rhythms in a world that is increasingly architected to prevent them.

A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having, writes Alan Moore. I feel this way about couches. A couch that is not prepared for four or more bodies all wedged or flopped onto it together, giggling and trying to balance food and drink and talking over each other and trying to win laughs or the argument or the remote…well, is no couch at all. My new apartment will have room for one of these couches, so finding one up to the challenge has become my primary obsession. I’m moving into an apartment complex — my first apartment in 12 years, and my first-ever apartment alone.

Here is the furniture I’ve got to bring into the new space: a chair, a desk chair, a floor lamp, 2 table lamps, 6 shelves in assorted styles.

That’s it. All purchased from outlet stores or the internet, and all of them <3 years old.

Fairly or not, our domestic spaces can reflect how we care not just for ourselves but for the others we bring in. Right now, looking at my small pile of cheap, generic goods, I don’t see myself, the places I’ve lived in, or the friends I’ve loved and lived with along the way — and I don’t see evidence that I care for others (again: no pans).

Unlike rented houses, rented apartments — especially here in East Austin — are likely to come new-ish, and new-ish means studiously wiped of character. There are no quirks in these buildings. Nothing that makes no sense, nothing placed there out of love or a moment of misguided inspiration, for future tenets to laugh at and balance beer bottles on. In one of my old houses, an upstairs sunroom sprouted a spiral staircase, that led to a skylight, that opened onto a DIY roof deck, that teetered over the city. I loved it. I moved into that sunroom and shivered through winters and sweat through summers and threw concerts on the tiny deck overhead, listening to friends’ music floating away across the rooftops while constantly worrying my ceiling would cave in

We have taken refuge over our enemy's