.SOMETIMES RAW.

DESIGNER 1: The investors want us to make extremely small urban apartments more enjoyable. Got any ideas?

DESIGNER 2: Yes. Extremely small balconies.

DESIGNER 1: That’s genius. How small are we talking?

DESIGNER 2: Just big enough for one person to stand.

DESIGNER 1: How about half as big?

DESIGNER 2: That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. But isn’t that still too big?

DESIGNER 1: Yes. Let’s make them smaller.

DESIGNER 2: I’ve never lived in the city, but it feels like we’re onto something.

DESIGNER 1: Me neither, and I completely agree.

DESIGNER 3: Hey, I heard you’re working on an extremely small urban apartment project. Do you need more help from someone who has also never lived in a city?

DESIGNER 1: Yes.

DESIGNER 3: Perfect. Let’s put some balconies in complete shade and some in direct sunlight. Never anything in between.

DESIGNER 2: And there should always be something dripping from the balcony above, even when it’s dry outside.

DESIGNER 1: You know what would be great, too? If the exhaust vent from the neighbor’s dryer was positioned at eye level on each balcony so you have to smell your neighbor’s clothes.

DESIGNER 2: Outstanding. But which apartments should have a balcony?

DESIGNER 1: Only the ones facing a major street. It’s my understanding that people who live in cities like seeing, smelling, and hearing traffic at all times.

DESIGNER 3: I couldn’t agree more. I have a cousin who visited a city once, and he said that everyone there does traffic as a hobby. Also, they hate privacy.

DESIGNER 1: Terrific. We’ll put all of the balconies really close to each other.

DESIGNER 2: Wait, we forgot to enclose the balconies with the strongest metal railings ever made. The whole reason people move to cities is because they yearn for strong metal things and hate things that are soft and natural.

DESIGNER 1: Plus, they need something to tie their clotheslines to, which is a thing they all use.

DESIGNER 3: Just make sure there are wide enough gaps between the railings to accidentally drop things through.

DESIGNER 1: Great idea. What’s the point of having an extremely small balcony if not for exposing yourself to the possibility of killing a passerby with a small household item?

(All designers nod in agreement.)

DESIGNER 3: Hey, I have a question for another project I’m on: Do city people like access to parking?

DESIGNER 1: Only if it’s underground, extremely difficult to use. And smells like pee.

DESIGNER 3: You’re not gonna believe this…

*with the Person Who Dumped You.

You get an email from your ex-whatever-it-was-you-two-were-exactly, asking to meet for lunch. The tone of the mail is friendly, casual, if a bit stiff. You agree in a friendly, casual, if a bit stiff email of your own, and a date is set. But what kind of lunch will it be? Hold your breath and SPIN! THAT! WHEEL!

The No-Hard-Feelings-Lunch

This is probably the best-case scenario. You can be friends again and put all the ugliness behind you. “You and me, we are okay, right?” You will agree that whatever it was that you had was nice, for what it was, but the timing was bad, you wanted different things, you are two different people, after all; it was “Just One of Those Things,” as Tony Bennett sang. You will offer each other weak declarations that there are no bad guys here (because there aren’t, not really) and half-hearted promises that you are not reviled by each other’s friends, that there haven’t been long, heated conversations about how much you suck. Most important, though, is the unspoken understanding that both of you are people – weak- wounded, fragile, forgivable people doing the very best you can under the impossible circumstances that is day-to-day existence.

In the great grand scheme of things, this is nothing, this wound- it’s a nick of a razor, a scrape of the knee – and if you say it enough times and with enough intensity and smile wider each time you say it, you can even convince yourselves. After all, what were you hoping for, really? What was this ever going to be, realistically? Isn’t this the best thing that could have possibly happened, for it to have ended now before somebody really got hurt? This is much better. This makes sense. Everything’s fine you can assure each other and yourselves. Everything will always be fine.

The Loaded-Weapon Lunch

Are you prepared for this? Do you have a list, with bullets, ready to go? The breakup was abrupt. Maybe you didn’t say everything you wanted to say to each other; maybe now, with time, you have started to realize all the ways in which you were wronged. I hope you are crafting the righteous indignation in your head, shaping it, sculpturing it. What’s the sharpest turn of phrase, the cruellest, fastest way to draw blood? When the sparring begins, hang back, float like a butterfly, let your opponent use up all the good material, and then strike. Remember, the one who laughs last laughs longest, so make sure you laugh last and when you do you laugh heartily but with a detached air none-of-this-really-matters-I-haven’t-been-lying-awake-at-night-staring-at-the-ceiling-regurgitating-all-this-pain coolness. This lunch will decide once and for all who is the winner and who is the loser of this breakup. This is the moment you have been trained for, the reckoning where at long last justice will be had. The crowd roars. The judge pounds the gavel. O, Glorious Retribution, how sweet thy taste, how bitter thy sting. This will not be pleasant, this lunch, and you will both feel terrible afterwards – it will not at all provide the closure either of you had hoped for – but if there is a silver lining here (and you are not sure there is one), it is the assurance that what you had, whatever it was, had weight. It made an impact. You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person’s life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.

The Reconciliation Lunch

The Tail-Between-the-Legs Apology Lunch. The Tearful I-Miss.You-I-Made-a-Horrible-Mistake-Can-We-Please-Get-Back-Together-Lunch. It is probably isn’t this, but you should maybe have a plan just in case. Because if it is this, if your former lover has indeed decided that the wasteland that was your relationship is more attractive than the wasteland that is being alone, you have a couple of options and you should consider them both ahead of time. Option A is yes, yes, yes. You can attack that yes with desperate vigour, charge blindly, romantically, hysterically into yes. Take a match to your pride, turn back the clock and pretend this breakup never occurred. You were fools, both of you – you were different people then, you were children. You can make it work this time, because now you will know what it is you could have lost. You are really going to try this time, you swear it, this time you will do everything not in shades of beige and grey but in bold, brilliant, beautiful COLOR.

But then again, maybe you have done a lot of thinking since your split. Maybe you have seen the foolishness of throwing yourself so recklessly headlong into the fray that is this other person. Maybe this was just the splash of cold water that you needed. I mean, let’s be realistic, after all. This is the question and you should have a plan: Do you welcome back love with open arms, or do you, under the auspices of rational thinking, break this person’s heart, like this person broke yours? You should have a plan, but don’t get your hopes up. The lunch probably isn’t going to be this. There are a lot of things this lunch can be, but it almost certainly isn’t this.

The For-Old-Times’-Sake Lunch

If you meet for lunch near one of your apartments, your meal might be a prelude to one more roll in the hay. You know, for old times’ sake. You know, for the sake of the old times. All those old times that would be really disappointing if you didn’t fool around again, you owe it to them. This isn’t a reconciliation, and don’t fool yourself into thinking this is closure. It’s something in the middle. Is it even something? Perhaps, in the loosest sense of the word “something.” It’s not quite something but slightly more than nothing, this.

It’s like a movie adaption of your favourite novel, a theme park ride version of your favourite movie. It’s a shadow of a ghost. It’s gluten-free pasta. But at least it’s pasta.

The Here’s-Your-Stuff-Back Lunch

What more is there to say? The world, it turns out, has continued to exist. The waters have receded. The fires turned to ash. You knew this day would come, but you didn’t want to believe it. The scars have healed, the universe has cooled, the porcupine that is your cautious heart has uncurled itself, put away its quills, and continued on in whatever random direction it was headed. And a sweater has been sitting in someone else’s closet, a barely there reminder of nothing much really.

You had every intention of being depressed forever, but as it turns out, there’s work to be done, meals to eat, movies to see, and errands to run. You meant to be in ruins permanently, your misery a monument, a gash across the cold hard earth, but honestly, who has the time for that? Instead, you survived – apparently; you both did – and things are shockingly okay. But a sweater has been sitting in someone else’s closet. A book perhaps, or a knitted winter cap. The memory of whatever spark you had is rusted, corroded, hardly maintained, and scarcely revisited. This was no great affair, this thing. This was no tragic heartbreak. This was just another thing that happened in a long series of things that happened. Here’s your stuff back. Have a nice life.

If you are a book nerd like me, it’s impossible to spend more than 20 minutes online without coming across the following quote from filmmaker John Waters — “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!” 

Whether or not he actually said the quote doesn’t matter, it sounds genuine enough that it’s taken on a life of its own. Etsy and similar sites are filled with tote bags, shirts, hats, and even fucking decorative pillows bearing the quote. It appeals to a certain type of book snob, of which I am one, but not that type of snob.

I don’t particularly care whether or not you read books as long as you subscribe to my wonderful website, www.sometimesraw.com, but I do care about whether you show those books the proper respect. That’s why I lose my mind whenever I see color-coded bookshelves. Any book nerd knows these insta posts #shelfie or #bookstagram and ways on how to make your bookshelf prettier.

Even the dumbest book you can imagine — which for me is “Hillbilly Elegy” — deserves to be recognized as more than just another prop to make your Zoom background really pop. Or to take the place of actual art in a misguided attempt to simultaneously create an aesthetic and give the impression that you’re well-read. The fact that there are Etsy stores selling books by the foot (2 feet = 60cm) makes my point that this practice is disrespectful to the very purpose of a book.

This is how a bookshelf should look. There’s a little something there for everybody: fiction, non-fiction, periodicals, shit I wrote, shit my friends wrote, my grandma’s super old still functioning typewriter, a candle, a cookbook, some comics and more.

One of my favorite things to do when I’m at someone’s place for the first time is to peruse their bookshelves. I like to see if we’ve read the same things, if they’ve read things I’ve been thinking about reading, and, if they have some books I can borrow. So when I approach their shelf my thoughts are along the lines of, “Wonder if they’ve ever read any Howard Zinn?” and never, “I haven’t read a purple book in a while, wonder if they have any good ones?” 

I’m not trying to come off as a hater, at least not entirely. But I do firmly believe that when your bookshelf is designed to be looked at in purely the most superficial way I’m not wrong in assuming you don’t give a shit about what’s inside of those books. If only there was some sort of idiom I could call on to illustrate my point… 

Beyond that, I like to think of a bookshelf as a living organism that is always altering its appearance. Organizing it by color ends up making it static. For example, if you take out a blue book, you need to find another blue book to take its place, or if you buy a new book, there better be room in the indigo section, or it won’t be able to find a spot on the shelf. 

My mom will probably laugh upon hearing me say this, but I’m not against the concept of organization. All of my graphic novels are on one shelf. Most of my dense-as-hell history books are in their own bookcase. And my Russian novels are spread throughout all of my bookcases because those bastards are so big they work as bookends. Thanks, Tolstoy! 

Maybe I’m just being an asshole. I have been working on curbing those urges lately, so I should probably stop being such a snob about books… but I do believe my heart is in the right place. If it wasn’t for the hundreds of books I’ve read over the years I’d be a pretty dull person to hang out with. My love of writing (which is sometimes done in a form called “books”) has shaped everything about who I am, so when I see the writing being treated as an afterthought it pisses me off. “The Master and Margarita” is proudly displayed on my shelf because it’s a brilliant allegory about Soviet Russia with some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever encountered, not because of the cover’s earth tones. 

Before I bring this post to a close, there is one book-storage method that is even more infuriating to me than color-coding. It’s whatever is going on behind Jenny Mustard (the Youtube infcluencer) here in her minimalistic living room. This is certified psychopath shit. 

Have the books’ spines been removed? Were they painted? I want to fully understand what’s going on here… but I’m not going to wait to start hating on it. This is terrible. The worst. 

I’m sorry. I spoke too soon. This is 10,000 times worse than color-coding.

Please sound off down below and let me know how you organize your books (or if you don’t organize them at all). Hell, if you show me an amazing color-coded bookshelf there’s a chance that I might come around on the subject. It’s an incredibly slim chance, but never say never…