Wednesday, 09 October 2002 | White on white

The walls are white, and of course they are: they are white on white on white, layer after layer, that no matter how deep you drill into the wall, the drill bit returns with a dusty coat of flakes all the way up to its neck. The place you really notice is around the borders of the doors, where you can tell that the lines were once sharp but are now so smoothed over with paint that they blend softly into the wall, creeping down in a gentle slope. And the cabinets and the doors, all of them wearing so many coats that they have trouble stuffing themselves in the places they're meant to go. Underneath there somewhere, I'm sure there are spots and stains and holes and bruises, hiding in their secret layers from each new tenant.

But the windows, they can't be painted. Today I cleaned them for the first time, while in the midst of hanging the curtains "properly," an exercise that took hours and caused me to get plaster in my eye and burn my finger and crawl around on the floor smacking a blind hand under furniture in order to retrieve finishing nails.

The first three attempts at each window turned my cloth completely black, as if my predecessor had been a diesel vehicle of some sort, and the back window had a patch of jagged blue crayon in its center. Prior to cleaning the windows, I had been able to see through them just fine, which was a surprise once I discovered the blanket of dark that covered them. Perhaps it's like LA, where you don't really notice the smog when you're underneath it.

I think it's finished now.