I love Ben Katchor and I'm pretty sure I've been influenced by him. An old strip of his about peepholes makes me think about my own peephole experiences. I try to maintain control of my lurid voyeuristic tendencies, because I think such proclivities are more interesting as latent little quirks than as full blown fetishes, colorful sprigs of garnish for the personality rather than the main course or even a side dish. One can have a somewhat distanced involvement with a phenomenon like voyeurism that's still more personal and intimate than a merely intellectual interest. It's like a mild itch that's more fun to think about than to scratch, because if you scratch it maybe it won't ever come back, or will seem too silly to even think about again. As a perpetually undernourished fixation it stays fresh and intriguing.

In one previous apartment, a ground level unit in a drab apartment complex in suburban Washington D.C., with a back entrance through a sliding glass door and a front door opening onto a long, sterile corridor, the peephole was especially useful because my apartment was at the very end of the hall. I could always hear the elevator's telltale groan, thirty yards away, and have time to creep up to the peephole if it sounded like someone was about to walk by on their way to the adjacent stairwell (a convenient rear exit to the parking lot for many upper-floor residents). I'd hear approaching muffled footsteps, maybe murmuring or hushed conversation, long before someone came into view in that distorted fisheye lens manner that peepholes produce. Occasionally a group of children would run by screaming, and that wasn't interesting at all, children held no interest since they weren't trying to hide anything and weren't wary of being observed. Adults, on the other hand, are always aware that they are walking by a series of peepholes and are therefore sometimes imagining people looking out at them. So there's self-consciousness, and mystery, and the small tingle of unseemly possibilities. What such peepholes produce by their very existence is an eroticism of looking. It doesn't even require any actual observing, just the built-in possibility is enough to create a tantalizing frisson. I was always excited when I watched someone go by and they momentarily glanced at my peephole. At that moment we were locked together in a perverse kind of shared fantasy of improper attention and the complicity of letting oneself be watched. Maybe they noticed the darkness behind my peephole and suspected an observer, maybe they just idly wondered. Either way the moment was always electric, a special kind of pleasure.