I don’t know if it is what one would call a well-worn truth, conventional wisdom, or mantra. But I prepend the comment “New Yorker don’t know their neighbors” with the assurance that it is commonly said.

It is commonly said that New Yorkers don’t know their neighbors.

Thing is, I don’t know if it really is commonly said, or if I have simply said it to myself often enough that I came to believe it.

I just talked to an upstairs neighbor for the first time in at least a couple of years. If New Yorkers do not know their neighbors then this was an exception, though I can’t say I ever knew the guy terribly well. I know at one time he had a few speaking roles on shows like CSI, a show which seems to be on the resumé of every actor that ever lived and every bartender I know.

We used to talk a decent amount. He was the “super” of the building until recently, but by his own admission he never did anything “super.” He helped me fix my toilet once and commented afterward that this was the first “super” thing he’d ever done.

Another guy moved in, next door to me, and he is now identified as the super on a placard in the lobby. I don’t know who he is or how super he intends to take his super responsibilities.

When the ex-super stopped me in the hall to ask me something I was afraid he was going to question me about the loud music reportedly coming from my apartment at midnight. But no. He just wanted to know how my heat was. Evidently his is not good. He is on a higher floor than I. I also like the cold, and leave my windows open even at this time of year. So I’m not the best guy to ask. I added that my hot water is all over the place, and sometimes I have to let the water run for 20 minutes before it warms up above room temperature. That’s a waste of water but we are not in a drought, and what am I to do?

Anyway… about the neighbors… you can learn a lot these days, a lot more than would easily be found a generation ago. I once searched the name of an elderly man who lived upstairs. I don’t remember his name now but it had the fortunate quality of being distinctive, making him easy to find. I learned that decades ago he invented something and got a patent for it. Offhand I can’t remember what his invention was but it fueled my observation that a lot of people’s only public record is their ambitious, high-spirited patent applications.

I found a few people buried at Calvary Cemetery in patent records and nowhere else. I mentioned this to a friend and wannabe patent troll, who admitted he had never considered that factor of public exposure in his voluminous patent applications. That is kind of hard to believe, actually, but that’s what he said.

As for the elderly man, well, I have his umbrella. It was stashed under the stairwell with a bunch of his other stuff after he died. It is yellow. The umbrella appears to have never been used.

I looked him up after discovering that ancestry.com allows you to search against street addresses. It is not comprehensive but if you punch in the street address of an apartment building you will get a dossier of sorts listing people who had lived in that building. My particular apartment had no surprises in its past. I knew a Japanese woman had lived there for 2 years before moving back to Japan. Before that the sons of the owner of the building had lived here for 10-12 years. Before that I know nothing, and ancestry.com’s void of data from before the 1980s did nothing to fill that dearth of knowledge.

It would be interesting, would it not, to have a reunion of sorts for everyone who lived in a particular apartment, or even a building. Reminiscences of obnoxious neighbors (like me, blasting his music at midnight) and perceptions of the people we never quite knew, like the dude who lives alone in the house next door. I know, or have been told, that he was born in that house, delivered from the womb on site. His mother lived with him until her death several years ago. Under her watch I remember the dog barking almost continuously. Today, under her son’s care, the dog howls naught. I never put those two together on my own. Someone else had to suggest it. But the old lady must have taken lousy care of that animal. The dog barked so loud you could hear it from 2 blocks away. It sounded like it was being tortured.

I see a room full of nodding heads, the heads of those who presently or in the past lived under the same slate of ceilings and roofs, experienced the same peripheral sensations and annoyances. Our floors are our roofs, are they not? My floor is your roof.

I don’t remember what else I learned about my building’s history from that ancestry.com lookup. Not much, as I recall. I expanded the search incrementally to other addresses on the street. I found that a Brazilian bombshell singer lived across the street, a Russian actress I met at a bar lived a few houses down (I knew that), and nobody of any obvious note had ever lived on the block, at least not according to Ancestry’s records.

I was thinking today of the indivisibility of lives. I see people coming toward me, walking opposite directions, hauling laundry home from the laundromat. Every one of those human bags of water and bones has a definable history, and their minds harbor secrets known only to them. We carry secrets that even our most intimate lovers will never hear, and that we ourselves never allow. The mystery of human consciousness is itself a secret. A secret of secrets.

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I have been embracing the underdeveloped portion of AsLIC, west of 21st Street and south of 36th Avenue. That area still feels real to me, even with its pockets of hotels — which do not particularly offend or freak me out as does the apocalyptic invasion of behemoth high rises in other parts of AsLIC.

Today’s misophonic encounter at the library with the incredibly annoying but sympathetic dude gabbing into his cell phone about all the things he has to worry about reminds me that this is a poor neighborhood, filled with people who have little to do and nowhere to do it.

I get looks once in a while, looks which ask what the hell a white person is doing here.

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Sometimes I fear there are versions of me floating around out there that even I do not recognize.

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At a beer hall. Love this place for its well-lit tables, at which I can type well enough because I can actually see the keyboard.