TWO STEPS AT A TIME

An article on the internet mentioned a seven floor walk up apartment. Which automatically got me thinking oh good lordie no. Although given that I live on the second floor, up one set of stairs, and regularly traverse that when I need to go out for groceries, pipe smoking, mail call, laundry, what have you, and self-delusionally regard myself as a young man (hah!), that doesn't seem bad. The average temperatures in the place where that seven floor walk up is located are in the eighties Fahrenheit (around thirty Celsius).
I quail at anything over mid-seventies.
Legs won't function.


By the way: the Fahrenheit scale was invented by a long-time resident of Amsterdam. Which adds lustre to a city long known for free-thinking, eccentricity, and psycho-active drugs. And surely you can see why? Also, Amsterdam buildings are known for having brutal staircases.


In my actual youth, I'd take those stairs two at a time, at speed. Even when I was living four up. Hop hop hop ooh vimful vigour! Now, after a day at the salt mines, I'm slower. I like to be the stairs, feel the stairs, become one with the stairs, dig the groovy gestalt of the stairs.

Seven floors of them would be a bitch.

A further by the way: recntly I've been getting spam calls concerning my "end of life financial planning". Based on being on a list of presumably old farts on the cusp of shuffling off. Gee thanks, bitches. At the end of my life I wish to be lowered from a strong hook at the apex of the building, front side, like they have in Amsterdam, which is there so that moving furniture in and out, considering the narrowness and steepness of their stairs, can be expeditely done.
It strikes me that a coffin or a brancard, even an entire hospital bed, fully loaded, may be thus lifted with minimal wear and tear on the joints of the people tasked with doing so.
At least without dinging the plaster. Life means concern for plaster. Or it should be.
Perfect plaster is a sign of civilization.

Oh, and I also wish to have an onion tied to my belt.
Like grampa Abe Simpson. It's the style.

Seven floors. Heavens.



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