Just A Girl

Amber pushes her dually stroller along the north to south corridor of her small Midwestern city every day. The adorable blonde heads of her toddler twins, Maggie and Megan, poke out of puffy white parkas like chicks hatching from eggs. Pedestrians often stop to remark how cute the girls look, calling them “little angels” and making gaga noises which are reciprocated by wide, wet smiles and excited shrieks of laughter from the girls.

Amber is a regular at the supermarket located near the end of Main Street. She knows all the managers, clerks and cashiers by first name. They always put a few extra cans of Similac on hold just for her and the store manager has even given her free diapers on more than one occasion.

Amber is greeted by Keith at the video store where she often takes out 5-10 movies at a time. Keith stopped charging Amber for late fees after she incurred a balance of $50.00 for a lost copy of The Incredibles. Keith will set aside new releases he knows Amber will enjoy: action/adventure, romance and comedy (Amber doesn’t care much for serious drama and sci-fi, and she doesn’t like anything that is “too artsy”).

After her daily grocery shopping trip, dropping off and checking out DVDs at the video store and sometimes feeding pigeons in the park, Amber returns home where she spends the rest of the day and evening on the Internet and engaged in mommy tasks.

“It is hard to tell people what I do,” she says. But then she corrects herself: “It is hard telling people what I DON’T DO.”

The father of Amber’s twins split two years ago and is now living somewhere in Georgia. He stopped paying child support ten months ago, but even before that Amber says it was hard getting even anything from him (such as a reliable address or phone number).

Amber is embarrassed by her lack of independence. Having no job and no social life, she says, makes her feel like an unproductive member of society. “I am like a useless prop,” she says. “Every city and town is supposed to have its unemployed single moms to laugh at, and that is me.”

As I followed Amber around, however, I became aware that nobody was laughing at her. In fact, people kept going out of their way time and again to help her or just make friendly conversation. When I reminded Amber of this she adjusted her position. “My thinking does tend to get clouded with negativity at times, and this is why I’m seeing somebody who helps me with these emotions.”

Amber visits a psychiatrist twice a month who prescribes Celexa for her depression. A case manager from a local non-profit agency checks in on her every week to make sure everything at home is honky dory. Amber also receives food stamps to help her buy groceries and other necessities for the girls. But rather than feeling entitled to this help, Amber instead feels like a victim. “I wouldn’t be in this mess today if I had been smart and known what I was getting into when I got pregnant,” she says.

Amber’s fixation with romance movies started when her doctor challenged her to find a way to counter her stressful feelings of depression and loneliness. While she admits that these movies make her feel good and calm her down, Amber claims that they also have the tendency to make her reality seem even more confusing than it already is. “These movies show me an entirely different world, one that doesn’t have any real hardships or consequences.”

If Amber’s life seems familiar, that is because it is.

Do you know someone like Amber?

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (Part I)

RECENTLY I traveled to St. Louis to spend a few days with my old high school friend John Jones. John and I knew each other back in 1992 when we both attended a high school in the upper middle class suburb of Fair Oaks, California. Circa 1993 John moved to the St. Louis area and I departed for upstate New York a few years later. We hadn’t kept in contact since John moved away all those years ago, and our coming together again after half a lifetime of forgotten separation is nothing short of a miracle.

***

JOHN was staring out of the window at his parent’s house which was located three hundred feet away. “When Jesus comes to reclaim his apostate church, He won’t reclaim me,” he said ominously. At 32, John is athletic with blonde hair and a bronze and slightly sun-burned complexion. His eyes are like two burnished blue spheres that seem to probe the depths of your soul and look right through you at the same time. When I met John at a Starbucks the day before, I was amazed by how little his appearance had changed since high school. Besides being a few years older and having a slightly receding hair line, he looked more or less like the 15 year old version of himself. Except now he claimed to know the truth.

“When the people asked him about heaven Jesus told them to, ‘look around them’ because heaven was much like Earth. When I look around me all I see is violence, suffering and poverty. Children are abused and neglected, injuries and illnesses afflict the righteous, and people are getting squeezed into ever tighter corners by fear and lack of resources.”

Across the street from our dark little godless meeting a much happier scene was unfolding. John’s mother was chasing two of her grandchildren around as John’s brother Kaleb and his wife Megan stared on in rapt amusement. There was sunshine, smiles, hand clapping and laughs compared to John’s dimly lit bedroom chilled by the home’s central air conditioning system. John had moved out of his parent’s house a year ago and been invited to live in a spare bedroom at his friend and next door neighbor Brian’s house. His physical proximity to his family, however, did not translate into a spiritual proximity. John had done the unthinkable two years ago and had renounced God and Jesus one night during a packed family dinner.

John humorously describes the occasion as his “coming out party.”

“I came out,” he says unabashedly. ”I told them what was what. I don’t believe in God anymore and that was it.”

“So they kicked you out for it?” I said.

“No. I made the decision to leave later on. I didn’t want to be a part of their programmed way of life anymore. I wanted to watch the TV shows that I wanted to watch and listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. You just couldn’t make those kinds of decisions when everybody is trying to sit you down and have a serious man-to-man conversation about the Bible and eternity all of the time.”

John is like a lot of thirty-somethings who were raised in fundamentalist church communities. Before John’s departure from the rest of the Jones clan, his life revolved around the fundamentalist church in his St. Louis suburb. He attended Christian rock concerts, weekly young adult functions and even participated in sports leagues which were organized by various area churches. He never had to travel farther than the five miles it was from his house to his church’s multipurpose room or soccer field. “I’ve never dated a girl who wasn’t a member of my church,” he said. He listed the names of his former sweethearts as if listing streets in a new sub development: “Kimberly, Allison, Megan.” All one had to do was put the word “Way” or “Circle” behind each name.

In comparison to the split level house John was currently residing in, the Joneses two story home was a constant work in progress. John said it was unusual to not see scaffolding erected along the walls, and the constant traffic of electricians, contractors, architects and plumbers he assured me was dizzying.

Besides Mr. and Mrs. Jones, John’s older and younger brothers both lived at home with their wives and children. The oldest son Mike is 33 and has a 24 year old wife named Katie. They have two children, Noah who is 5 and Eve who is 3, as well as an 11 year old child from a marriage that ended when Mike’s first wife was hit and killed by a drunk driver. The upstairs of the Jones house had been converted into a small apartment for Mike, Katie and their kids.

John’s younger 27 year old brother Kaleb lives in the large basement with his 31 year old wife Megan and their five children. Three of the children, 8 year old Noah, 6 year old Moses and 5 year old Sarah are biological, while two of the children, Elijah and Shadrack, were adopted from Ethiopia.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones occupy the first floor of the house. The living room has been converted into a master bedroom and a wall next to the family room was knocked out to build an extremely large formal dining room addition.

When I looked out the window at Mrs. Jones who was now twirling one of the grandkids around by the arms and muttering goo-goo gah-gah talk to the infant, I thought she looked like a happy and sane enough woman. Mr. Jones soon joined her and added loud and boisterous laughs to all the carefree family commotion.

This can’t be such a bad thing, I thought. Why would John want to run away from all of this?

***

TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE of my meeting up with John after so many years, one needs to travel back in time to the early nineties. I was raised in a family that can best be described as religiously indifferent. We were Presbyterians but only attended church on the obligatory holidays and a few other days out the year. I never read the Bible, I couldn’t have told you who Moses was, and if you had asked me who was the Son of Man I probably would have said they were a heavy metal band that toured with Judas Priest.

Despite my theologically deprived childhood, however, I had a number of friends who were ardent evangelical Christians. My best friend who lived up the street from me was an evangelical who attended a newfangled church that incorporated ancient fire and brimstone Christianity with modern rock music and Republican Party values. It was through him that I came to meet other fundamentalists – like John.

If one had pressed me in those days to explain the unexplainable, I may have gone so far as to admit to the possibility of supernatural or spiritual phenomena existing. But ultimately I was an atheist: I saw absolutely zero evidence of God’s existence either in nature or in my head. I believed that everything had either a rational or scientific explanation, and my fear of non-existence after death was attenuated by the fact that 80 years on earth was enough time to enjoy life’s sweetness and leave some footprints to be remembered by. One would likely think it impossible, for someone of my temporal persuasions, to get by with a group of fervent Christians. Despite the limitations to our friendships – even though I played with my best friend nearly every day, I was barred admittance to his house by his stoic and suspicious mother – our social synergy was mostly buoyed and maintained by other common interests, and an agreement to disagree on theological issues also helped keep the peace (this latter pact was arrived at after several unsuccessful arguments marked by mutual stubbornness and attempted persuasion reached an impasse every single time).

The distilled sum of our various commonalities was the crazy glue that held us together, and when we were flying down hills on our skateboards or practically asphyxiating from laughing none of us cared that I was a non-believer and vice versa. But this still didn’t prevent me from becoming a fifth wheel on more than a few occasions. No matter how innocent I was, there were times when I felt no better than Dr. Faustus in the company of my Christian friends. If I said, “Let’s swim under that bridge,” I may as well have been the snake in the Garden of Eden tempting them with forbidden fruit. If I suggested we ride our bikes along the river, I was afraid they might reply the way Jesus did when he rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.”

My Christian friends could get so high on God at times that it would have been futile not to go along with them. Like a straight man to a group of comics, I only would have been adding fuel to their spiritual fire. So I kept quiet at these times out of a desire not to rock the boat. The Titanic was a lavish and majestic ship before it ran into that dreaded iceberg.

Despite all of the good times we had, I also couldn’t shake the creeping suspicion that they were secretly planning to convert me. They probably realized my anarchic independence posed the biggest threat to their purity, and in order to maintain our friendship through puberty and beyond, they would have no choice but to convert me. This is why – after 7 years of having a mostly secular friendship – my Christian friends started introducing me to the religious side of their lives. I attended more Christian parties, youth groups, rock concerts and church services during my early teen years than I did during all of my previous childhood years with my family.

I was standing at the threshold of a new life. But of all the new possibilities that were forming and materializing quickly evaporated and came unraveled. In the rapidly changing world of adolescence, my Christian friends and I were soon scattered to the four winds. With all the things vying for the young mind, psychedelic drugs soon made more sense to me as a religion than Christianity ever did or could. My best friend was growing more and more serious about his guitar skills and his band than anything else. And John just sort of dropped off the radar before up and moving with his family to the St. Louis area. Other people in this Christian milieu also faded away too.

But just as drugs proved a short-lived avocation for me, my former Christian friends soon tired of their godless hobbies and each eventually found his or her way back to God. And after a brief religious epiphany in the late nineties when I was sure I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior forever, my belief and interest in discipleship slowly faded from skepticism and now – in the spectrum of religion and spirituality mindedness – is hovering somewhere between atheistic clarity and agnostic curiousness.

During my teens and twenties, after experimenting with drugs, dabbling in religion and battling addictions to nicotine, food and sex, I had finally come full circle. I was once again an ascetic practitioner of the Great and Responsible Here and Now. By my late twenties I had matured into the boy-man I always dreamed of becoming – an adult version of my 12 year old self. The only vestiges of my coming of age spiritual journeys is an awareness of and respect for the unknowable and unexplainable, and an acquired humbleness from the realization that I am mortal and insignificant in the larger picture of the universe. This is why I have traded in my naïve teenage atheism for a mantle of intellectual agnosticism.

***

JOHN UNDERSTANDS IRONY. It is all he ever seems to talk about. When he is talking about baseball it is as if he is really talking about irony. If he talks about what he is studying in college he is really indirectly expounding on irony.

“Everything I do feels like an affront to God,” John says. “And yet it’s entirely liberating, like being a millionaire.”

We are strolling through the quads and breezeways of his former church, a modern structure that looks half like a high school and half like an office park. A large pyramid-shaped building with a cross-topped copula and stained glass roof in the center of the complex is the only indication that this is a place of Christian worship. Even though it is Saturday (the day of preparation for the Sabbath), the place is practically deserted. Only a custodian and some kids on skateboards unsuccessfully attempting to hop a stairway are the only other signs of civilization besides us.

“In the mid nineties I dropped out of community college after two semesters,” John says. “What is a Christian going to do with an education?”

The actual reason John stopped attending college, however, had to do with the conflicts between a liberal arts education and the doctrines of the Bible. When religious dogma clashes with science, history and social studies, the religiously revved mind often repels any teachings that conflict with its scriptures. “The overlap between the Bible and all other fields of study is very small,” John says, “and most fundamentalists aren’t willing to yield to anything.”

“I can’t think of a single Christian I know of who aced Geology,” he adds. “In high school we all sat together and had to cheat off of each other because we just couldn’t swallow the scientists’ theory that the world was however many billions of years old.”

John says it is the same for other subjects such as political science, philosophy and even literature. He dropped his American Government 101 class after his teacher refused to admit that America was founded on Christian beliefs and principles and that the framers of the Constitution were actually devout Christian men with the same views as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. John thought he was righteously following God by rejecting what he perceived to be the lies disseminated by higher education. He was trying to obey the 9^th Commandment: Thou Shall Not Lie.

“I thought if I just sat back and pretended to learn what they were teaching me, I would be no better than a liar.”

After two years of scooping ice cream and dating a girl at his church, John got married at the age of 22. With no room at the Jones house and an inadequate income between the two of them, John and his new wife had to move in with her parents.

“It was cramped,” he said. “Screaming infants (children of his in-laws), crowded kitchen, ten people at the dinner table not to mention all the pets – it was insane.” John likened the experience to living on Noah’s Ark. “I was claustrophobic and sick to my stomach the whole time.”

Unlike the other potent and fertile members of both of their families, John and his new wife were unable to conceive. It turned out that, because of a congenital birth defect, his wife’s egg supply was deficient and she had already gone through her whole supply by the time she was 19.  John would later ironically identify this as his Deus ex machina moment, the divine intervention that saved him.

“Things started to go downhill in our relationship after the realization that we could never be parents,” he said. “But I think as things nosedived toward divorce, I was secretly grinning in the back of my mind the whole time. I knew that eventually I would be free.”

After 6 years of a rocky marriage, John finally moved back into his family home in 2004. But it was not the familiar home life he remembered as a teenager. His older and younger brothers were now both married with biological and adopted children of their own. Several additions had changed the architecture of the house and more were constantly being planned and added. While there may have been more room than there was at his former wife’s house, the lack of privacy was the same.

“When I first moved in I was sharing a room with my niece and nephew,” he said. “All these kids were like spies, looking over my shoulder every time I went on the computer or watching me every time I so much as took a dump.”

John felt as if he had switched boats from one Ark to another, and he was not happy. He found it hard to pray and find God in the midst of so much chaos. “A lot of jaded people think of religion as a private experience,” he said, “But in the households I had been living in it was a group experience – like a cult.”

John dreamed of the cloistered dormitories of the monks, he fantasized about wandering the countryside like an ascetic and not being turned away whenever he knocked on any door. He spent a lot of time listening to music on his iPod, reading books and magazines and watching movies on his laptop. These isolated experiences became his escape from the noisy world he was a part of. He had a job at Blockbuster for a while, and later he worked at Penguins and Borders. Oftentimes after work he would go to one of the college libraries in the area and read until closing time, which was as late as 2 am on some occasions.

John’s family members began to take notice that he was becoming increasingly more distant and exclusive. Concerned that his faith was slipping, people in John’s household began to sit him down and talk one-on-one to him about his relationship with Jesus Christ. They started praying for him, they gave him Bible passages to read, and his siblings even went so far as to corner him in an intervention style family meeting.

This show of family concern, John assures me, is when his real troubles began.

My Ode to Skycrapers

Skyscraper, skyscrapers

rulers of nations

your beacon lights

are the night’s winking eyes

Skyscraper

you glint sun spikes and headlight glitter

cast cold shadows and gust wind

your funhouse mirror walls appeasing

news of murder, meltdown and doomsday

You swallow up people

like an updraft of wind kicking up newspapers

others rise in you like an Assumption

to celebrity empyrean

Skyscraper

Las Vegas cannot own you

Skyscraper

New York invented you

Skyscraper

A thatched hut secretly dreams of your glory

Onward & upward with the news

Is the NY Times losing readership? Somebody asked me this recently and I didn’t have an answer. I just offered my best educated guess and tried to sound like a vast receptacle of general knowledge.

I said something about how print media is having a hard time competing with the Internet, 24-hour soundbite news and iPhones, Blackberries, the Great Recession, blah-blah-blah.

But this futuristic-looking newsrack for the Times caught my eye the other day.

A television monitor on top cyles through the top headlines from each section of the paper.

Utilizing cool pictures and graphics, these headlines are bound to catch readers’ attention better than the stacked newspapers will. Notice also how the current temperature is displayed in the bottom right corner.

A light inside the newsrack illuminates the stack of papers.

With this sophisticated new technology The New York Times is whittling its niche in the 21st Century as a leading authoritative chronicler and arbiter of news, arts and culture.

Good luck Old Grey Lady!

What comes next?

Virgin will soon be closing two of its New York City locations including its flagship store in Union Square. This is because CD sales are nosediving off the charts like– Well, if you have been listening to most of your music on an iPod for the last two years you probably haven’t bought a CD since Radiohead released In/Rainbows. The funny thing about the Virgin closings is that the Union Square store is always buzzing with life (especially during the Christmas rush). A lot of this buzzing is foreign, yes, but it is buzzing nonetheless. If any retail store that sells mostly CDs should stay open as a vestigial reminder of the modern record store phenomenon, it should be the Virgin megastore in Union Square.

I’m sure there is more to be said about this, but I am either too tired or too brain dead to put this latest rash of planned CD retail closings into a larger (and/or personal) context. But I will try:

The world as we know it is constantly changing and will soon be unrecognizable to us young’uns and our children. The northeastern US (in fact a lot of the US) is very old and antiquated compared to California where modern structures dominate the city grids. Only the older architecture in places like Pennsylvania and Connecticut that has been well cared for can respectfully labeled as quaint. Despite the gleaming futuristic skyscrapers that dominate Manhattan’s skyline, many cities in my state of New York contain large sections which were built by previous generations. I used to live in a house that was constructed during the industrial boom of the 1920s. While living in this house I worked in a fabulous building that was erected in 1912. I often used to wonder about the lives of the original dwellers of my house and workplace. Realizing that they have all since passed on, I wonder what they would think if it were possible for them to come back to life. Would they wonder at the strange person who was living in their house? Was I trampling their memories in some way? Disrespecting their sacred places? Dishonoring their legacy.

I often wonder if society is guilty of these transgressions as a whole. When I look at all of the dilapidated buildings which haven’t been preserved I can’t help likening it to a dishonorable burial. Demolishing these eyesores would be as respectful as cremating them. Likewise, caring for them and inhabiting them would be the same as dressing them up like tombs or mausoleums. But to let nature slowly reclaim them somehow seems neglectful.

On a train ride yesterday I got a good view of once grand buildings that are now shuttered with plywood, etched in colorful graffiti and crumbling under the weight of time. Will California someday look like this? Will the hip and trendy tracts of suburbs built during the 1980s one day become ghettos filled with section 8 renters and boarded up drug houses? Will the stylishly modern office parks be converted into non-profit agencies and food banks? Will some of the shiny high rises stand vacant with trees and shrubbery pushing up through the foyers? Will California one day be a state of mostly graveyard cities?

And where will people go to escape all of this? What or where is the next frontier?

I always loved and dreaded going to the Tower Records in Fair Oaks, CA when I was a teenager. I loved it because I could always check out the latest cassette tapes and CDs by the popular bands of the decade. Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss.” Metallica’s titular “Black Album.” Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking.” But I also hated going there because my mom always threw a fit. I had to prepare for whatever unpleasant scene she was going to create just as much as I anticipated the unexpected excitement of deciding which album I was going to buy with my paper route money. Usually her scenes always had something to do with the fact that Tower didn’t take checks. Cash or credit card only. No exceptions.

I think my mom knew this and only started writing a check each time out of spite for the teenager operating the till. “What do you mean I can’t write a check?” she would yell. Heads would start to swivel at the commotion and I would turn red. “I hate– This store– You guys always–,” my mom would stutter searching for the right words to define her indignation. She always left with the same threat of never returning to Tower, and by the time she uttered these words I was sweating from my shame and embarrassment.

My mom won’t have to worry about Tower (and neither will I) because they are no more. The once monolithic record, tape and CD retailer has become just another victim of the Internet and matchbook-sized compendious musical libraries.

The passing of record stores is just another example of how the American landscape has evolved and changed during my lifetime. Just as records changed into cassette tapes, and cassette tapes transformed into CDs, the communal record store is being replaced by the convenient and expeditious Internet. I guess the last domino in this long chain to fall will be the even more communal used record stores. These establishments have attracted a loyal customer base by staying true to the art of music through eschewing high profits and generic commercialism. But once CDs have been milked for all that they are worth, the technology will eventually be retired. Just like the Rubix Cube and Atari before it, the compact disk will soon be relegated to the nostalgia compartment of every body’s memory.

Technology is constantly shrinking and expanding the economy. I always envision the economy as a balloon: when it gets squeezed in one place it bulges out in other places. I’m not sure if this simile is uplifting enough to get you, or me or all of us through this Deep Recession, but it echoes a lot of other familiar sayings.

Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary about the plight of Flint, MI quoted a well-heeled citizen of the city saying, “Get up and get your own motor going, start your own wheels turning.” Basically he meant that people need to realize that the industrial revolution is for the most part over in America. People can either sit around and mope the “good” old days or they can point their compass in a new direction. Several generations who only know how to work with their hands and are familiar with grease and smoke might have a hard time adjusting to books, desks and computer screens. But that is the future. The old ways are in the past and aren’t going to come around again.

Some people are only capable of thinking one way or doing one thing. The American Rust Belt is perfect evidence of this. This has always been a conundrum to me, but in light of these lagging economic times, let’s hope it’s not an omen.

With age comes wisdom

On Investigative journalism: “I am old enough to remember a time when the media used to investigate things like presidents, politicians and corporations who abused their power. Now they would rather hide in trash cans and snap photos of Britney’s bald head and call it real, serious news.”

On Corporal Punishment: “I like these modern times when kids and parents are friends. In the old days children and parents were enemies. Growing up, the generation gap made it impossible for me to relate to my parents on the same level. I think many of my 30-something peers feel the same way. And I also think we remember how it felt when our dads or moms would twist our ears, step on our feet or squeeze the backs of our necks when we got out of line. We remember how much those little gestures hurt and how it engendered a contempt in us. This is why we choose to spare the rod with our own children. We do it for the same reason we don’t smoke around our kids: because we love them and realize how precious they are.”

On Parenting: “I think parents’ biggest fear is that their teenager’s angry phase is going to last forever and their child is going to grow up to be a sullen, anti-social and unruly (possibly violent and chemically dependent) individual. Most times this is not the case. The angry phase of life usually burns itself out within 5-10 years depending on the rate of maturity of the youngster.”

On Welfare: “Even if some view them as lazy, many people on the dole are truly hurting. These people don’t want to be stuck forever but dream of having a nice home, car and TV some day. If you have been inside their homes or walked in their shoes you will know that it is not an easy life. Having a few “free” luxuries doesn’t take away the pain and emptiness. If they drive sleek cars or wear expensive clothes it is because they are trying to paint over their misery with nice things. But, as anybody who has worked for anything in their life before knows, freebies just don’t feel as good as possessions which are acquired through hard work and discipline.”

On Americana: “We descended from the Puritans, those religious zealots who were kicked out of England. The views and beliefs of those purely devout first settlers flowed out in geography and time through tradition, writings, laws and folklore. In some ways, the American experience can be summed up as a struggle to vanquish an inherent puritanical morality in our characters which is both contradictory to our natures and dishonest to our desires.”

4 know-it-all renters discussing the subprime mortgage fiasco

Sam: California created the subprime lending fiasco in my opinion. Nothing but a bunch of greedy assessors, home sellers and real estate agents running a scheme which caused the entire nation’s real estate market to collapse.

Here is how it happened:

When people’s homes have a lot of sentimental value to them they naturally want to get as much as possible from selling it, even if it is just a piece of shit house with a lawn that’s gone to pot. They hope that by making a profit on their home they can retire to Vegas or Florida.

Secondly, assessors and real estate agents who have an inflated sense of importance when it comes to their “exclusive” suburbs drive up prices with their delusions of being the next best thing behind Beverly Hills. “Pish, we have a swim and tennis club in our community and some of the nicest Brady Bunch houses this side of the Rockies, pish,” they say. They get a sense of satisfaction sitting around Starbucks bragging about selling a $900,000 bungalow. And all the people in town get a good feeling knowing that their neighborhoods are increasingly becoming richie rich towns. Just think how much your own importance would get a boost knowing that the house next door to you just sold for a million dollars. And also consider how rich you would feel if you were able to casually say, “We just bought our first home for $1.2 million. Yeah, the market’s kind of high these days, isn’t it?”

Nope.

So they essentially created a bubble which their sorry upper middle class asses couldn’t sustain. The only ones who benefitted from this were the people who were able to sell and make a huge profit on their homes while the prices were the most inflated. But, unless they moved to an area where the cost of living was far less than where they previously lived, they probably ended up putting all that extra money into their new home (which wasn’t much of an upgrade in the first place). Now with the economy tanking and retail stores folding, people aren’t going to be able to afford those mortgages which made them feel so rich and important in the first place. With no job (not even a Starbucks barrista job to temporarily hold them over) they are going to all be living in their cars pretty soon.

Dougan: The assessors and real estate agents also got rich from this too. But now most of them are either out of a job or they’re selling foreclosed homes for less than market value. Not a lot of commission to be had doing that, is there? And as they were profitting from their scheme they all probably bought BMW’s and giant mansions which are only half paid off now. Oops!

Gregg: It’s kind of like the idiots who sell used automobiles via the classified ads. Some bumpkin wants to get as much as he can for his truck because he needs the money, so do all the other bumpkins selling their cars and trucks. Pretty soon the common assumption is that a 2001 Ford pickup with 100,000 miles on it is worth at least $11,000. There is probably a mathematical way to come up with a price for a used automobile, but everybody ignores that method and just goes with their gut on how much they think a vehicle should cost. Even the guy who knows that his car or truck is only worth $1,500 doesn’t want to be the one in the classified section with the lowest advertised price. Doing so would make him look like a schmuck or an unsavvy business man with no common sense.

Apply this to the inflated prices of homes in CA and all across the country and you can also see how we got to this point.

Brian: Sad thing is that the prices are going to come down, but not to the level they were before this all began. As a result the average price of a home in America will be slightly (and in some cases significantly) higher than before the subprime crisis. Young people should consider this when they think about going into a profession. Do they want to be business professionals and realize the dream of owning a home, or do they want to be social workers or teachers and possibly rent for their entire lives?

Dougan: Like us.

Everybody: Yeah, like us!

Is it any wonder why I keep falling for lesbians?

Strange bits of conversations I wasn’t intended to overhear (part deux)

Approaching a hot dog vendor in Union Square as the vendor and his friend discuss some secret non-hot dog related business

Friend: No, this shit will get you high.

Hot dog vendor: But there’s not enough.

Friend: It doesn’t look like a lot, but you’ll be flying.

They see me approaching.

Friend: Wait, shut up for a second.

Me: Do you guys have any soda?

Hot dog vendor: Sure. Right here.

Me: Not that kind. I don’t like the 12 oz. cans. Do you have any of the 20 oz. bottles?

Friend: Around the corner at Duane Reed they have some (his cell phone rings).

-

Two (probably gay) men in Chelsea discussing how the architect of below high rise must have had phallic intentions when he designed The Chelsea Stratus.

At the time the conversation didn’t seem anything but ordinary. However, in hindsight it now strikes me as weird (I mean “weird” in the droll sort of way and not the pejorative sense). Since the conversation seemed at the time more prosaic than bizarre, I don’t remember it well enough to transcribe it all verbatim. So I will just attempt to recreate it as best I can.

Man 1: Oh yeah, it is really tall. Tall and slender.

Man 2: And look at the zenith. It has a cute little hat on top.

Man 1: I don’t really get the sense that it’s tapering, however.

Man 2: It does taper. Just stand back and look at it.

Man 1: But I wouldn’t necessarily call it a phallic building as you say.

Man 2: It is, just look at it. Notice how the glass gives it a streamlined appearance.

Has it really been 21 years?