Mark Allen

Three months ago I left New York City and moved with Jim into the mountains of upstate New York. The area we live in is mountain-y, cliff-y, with rivers… and big gaps where there are giant, lush rolling meadows lined with borders of thick, dark woods. Most of these areas you can just wander into and be all alone with not a soul around. Lots of space and time to really think. Our house is a Victorian-style old house, ancient actually, with a big wrap-around porch in the front and side, on which we have old rocking chairs and piles of dead, drying poppy flowers (which we use to counteract the smell of the skunk that sometimes lives under the porch) and glasses that are always full of red wine (which we use to try and blur the sense of the skunk smell out of our brains – who knew, it works!) We love our breezy, smelly porch. We spend our evenings there, frying in the neon orange sunset lightwhich blasts right onto the front of our home at sundown everyday (we’re on the top of a hill), and casts all kinds of weird patterns on the hallways and rooms of the inside of the house through the old, wavy natural glass windows. Very nice. We have an ample front yard. Weirdly, the person that lived here before was a tulip-maniac (maybe he was a descendant of the deadly Tulip Wars). So anyway, without us doing anything, as soonas we moved in all these multi-colored tulips just sprang up all over our yard. People walk by and say “Great tulips!â€? and we take all the credit.

Our house is a very, very very old house (ancient actually), full of mystery and intrigue and horror – the interior layout resembles the home in the film “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?â€? which is an inner projection on my part and a refraction of our inner worlds. Did I mention there is a working toilet in the middle of our living room? There’s a long story about how and why it’s there (involving the former tenant) which perhaps I will share with you some breezy, poppy-filled night on the porch over a glass of skunk-scented red wine. The former tenant actually still occupies the home sometimes, we think. He keeps getting in through some sort of afterlife, inter-dimensional portal – which is hidden somewhere in the house (hmmm… maybe it’s the toilet). Anyway, regardless – there is a brand new working toilet smack in the middle of our living room, with nothing around it, just out there for anyone to use who wants the whole house to see them take a crap. We were going to have the landlord de-intall it and knock it down, but we’ve decided to keep it there. Not only is it an homage to Marcel Duchamp, and a great conversation piece – but actually… it’s kind of a liberating experience taking a crap in the middle of a massive foyer/living room/den/dining room/breakfast nook area. Especially when other people are around (and an inter-dimensional portal to another dimension is massaging your buttocks). We don’t have a septic tank, our human waste is transported metaphysically to another universe. Jim and I are over trying to save Earth, we’ve already moved onto screwing up a parallel one. So anyway, we’re going to build a bookshelf (which will hold only old Mad Magazine paperbacks) on the wall behind our little white porcelain flushing Freudian aversion therapy nightmare conversation piece, and maybe a little lamp and some pillows.

The town we live in is 33% white trash and 33% rich old gay antique dealers, 33% ex-NYC burn-outs and 1% Grendel-headed Slew-foot Monsters. It’s a mad town nestled in the most lush, old-fashioned, nature-overloaded environment imaginable – right on the Hudson river. The other night we went to the drive in, which was right next to the county prison, which itself was next to the town dump, which was next to the Grendel-headed Slew-foot Monsters family cave nest (convenient). We have a really intriguing war vet club/pool bar/biker-hang-out kind-of place right down the hill from us. I have yet to get up enough cajones (it takes about five) to actually go in there… but I’m thinking it may end up like that scene in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventureâ€? where he dances on the bar in those big shoes.

At night, we sit on the porch amongst the crickets and frogs and listen to the night wind rustle through all the big trees in our yard – that’s my new favorite sound – wind rustling through trees – a la David Hemmings traipsing through a London park. Very soothing – with an undercurrent of imagined menace. The only drawback is, there’s a road leading right up the hill to our house that people drive up on and turn right or left. So at night, their headlights (usually on brights for the country) shine right on us as they decide to turn right or left. It happens so much that we’re thinking about getting some glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth and putting them in our open mouths and holding our hands up to our faces, finger’s splayed, and hissing “Eeeaauugghh!!!â€? while staring wide-eyed at the driver every time it happens. Maybe we’ll shave our heads and wear pointy ears too.

Our backyard is a very dense forest, which all goes down the side of a steep mountain (which is all our property). It’s actually acres and acres of mountainside, which is all covered in dense trees, and smells like pine, and looks fantastic in the foggy mornings. I think I’m gonna get a red-hooded cape and a picnic basket for traipses to grandma’s house… and bring a gun. Speaking of, there’s also lots and lots of animal life here, insects, woodland creatures… insects mostly. In our back yard we have wild turkeys walking around, no joke… full wild turkeys just strutting around… as well as the usual squirrels, deer, rabbits, birds (some really bright-colored robins of different varieties, geese, hawks, etc.) garter snakes, frogs, wild cats, chipmunks, possums, bears, hogs, narwhals, bigfoots, chupacabras, mothmen, giant squids and a dalek. Did I mention insects? Yep… lots and lots of insects. As I am typing this right now, there are about seventeen… no make that about seventeen billion moths, in my room, bumping over and over into the light, walls, even me. Humans may have the animal kingdom beat in the realm of brain power… but animals certainly have us outnumbered in the population department. All animals and insects in this part of the state appear in swarm form. I’m afraid to walk out the back door sometimes because I’m afraid that I’ll get attacked and eaten by an instantaneous panic cluster swarm of owls. My friend Pseu says that fear or perception of swarms = paranoia. Like the world is conspiring against you. Yes… and? It’s kind of like that creepy feeling you get where you start to think that you are the only actual human being in the universe, and that everyone else is part of some super-robot-alien conspiracy army drone population that monitors your every move and reads your thoughts through invisible wires and conducts tests on you while you’re sleeping, and that your whole reality is just a fake hologram world created just for their experiments. Everyone gets that feeling sometimes, right?

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