Waiting for Zombies
I’ve lived in a couple of places now where the windows look out on to another building or block of flats full of people. The best one was the last one where the rooms were just at the right height and distance to see what was going on in them. They – the occupants – could definitely see what I was doing. I didn’t really care about that while I hung out of my window and saluted the stars with my smoke through the summer. Basically, it was a brilliant big screen that lit up at night with occasional fucking and fighting in a giant weird West London entertainment system installed at the bottom of my garden. Or it would have been if exciting stuff happened in it more often. For all the promise of my big TV, a lot of what went on was people sitting in their flat and watching TV, alone. Occasionally there’d be two people, or the lone person would be looking at a laptop instead of a plasma screen.
I once saw this woman who I knew lived alone from the weird pile of egg boxes and junk in her living room just take off her clothes in the kitchen and put them straight into the washing machine ready to wash them for the next day because linen baskets are just pointless inventions by IKEA and the Swedish autocrats of home furnishing anyway. Another time I woke up scared that I was without doubt going to die as my giant face towered 2m tall at the bottom of the garden before the scene changed and I realized the neighbours had picked up a projector and were watching a film on the third floor of their tower block cinema.
It wasn’t an anthropological study with rigour, I know. But I like to think I learned something from my time at the window that I wouldn’t’ have done had I, say, never taken up smoking in the first place. That basically if you remove the urge to create, procreate and make our names come first in Google searches, we’re very boring creatures. Sure, there are people who cure social ills, make them, make themselves ill with the burden of brilliance and still make time for a heavyweight CV crammed with Bluechip experience and an ‘Interests’ section that’s actually interesting. But the rest of us have fired up our search engines, bought the box set and settled in for a slow sedentary decline. The rest of us are waiting for zombies.
