All politics is local, as Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill
famously and ungrammatically observed.
Which is my way of saying that I have been absent from this blog because
of a very local matter – preparing our apartment to be shown to prospective
buyers. The market is very weak just
now, so our real estate agents [a mother and daughter combo] have made it clear
that the apartment must be made to look pristine, which is to say uninhabited. Susie and I have spent a frantic five days
throwing things out, taking vast quantities of clothing to Good Will, and
generally clearing from surfaces every tschotshcke, every memento, every half-empty
box of tumeric or cilantro, in short everything that makes a house a home. We shall not be here when the apartment is “shown,”
as they say, which is just as well because I would be hard pressed to restrain
the urge to shout “If you don’t like it the way it is, you can just get the
hell out of here,” which is not, as I have learned from reading that great
work, The Art of the Deal, the best
way to close a sale.
This experience has given me some insight into the behavior
of our prehistoric ancestors, who, Archeologists tells us, buried their dead
with weapons and cooking implements.
This has rather sentimentally been interpreted as an expression of love
for the dearly departed, sending them to the next world with a starter kit for
their new homes. But I now have a rather
more realistic interpretation of the evidence.
I think what happened was this:
The living dug a hole for the dead, and then thought to themselves, “Why
waste a good hole? Let’s get rid of some
of the stuff that has been lying around in the back of the cave cluttering up
prime sleeping space.”
Are Susie and I done?
As if!, as the young, I am
told, are wont to say. But we can anticipate
a moment, several weeks from now, when the apartment will be ready to show. At that point, we shall start living like
Tinker Bell, without making a mark or leaving a stain on anything we
touch. I hope the buyers, God willing
there are some, appreciate our efforts.
But probably not; they will just have gone through the same exercise
themselves. There has got to be a better
way to handle this business of changing homes, but I cannot for the life of me
see it.
5 comments:
You could do what both my parents did. Move your entire home furnishings into a storage unit, then never unload the unit, but complain every week or so about how one day you need to unload the unit because you're tired of paying rent every month.
Actually, I think you may have misread "The Art of the Deal." Judging by its putative author's behavior, I think yelling, "If you don't like it, get the hell out of here," may actually be his recommended strategy. Don't envy you, having just done it ourselves two years ago. There's a reason that moving is #1 on Somebody-or-Other's list of stressors.
Friday report: Went to super-organized meeting of agencies and congregations interested in providing sanctuary. Got on a bunch of call lists for various support services. Sent some money to Alejandra Campoverdi, running for open Congressional seat in CA. Called and wrote to website of our Republican Congressman, Faso, about the travesty of the ACA repeal.
I had an opposite experience when selling my apartment. My real estate agent had insisted that I repaint the apartment and clean everything, but being lazy, I did not heed her advice. I found that prospective buyers had studied the real estate market with the same attention that I dedicate to a text of Nietzsche, followed housing prices daily and were not likely to overly influenced by whether I hadn't washed the windows lately or ever. Cleaning my apartment would have made about as much difference in the price as cleaning a certificate of stock ownership before selling shares.
I'm glad to see you back blogging in any case.
This week I donated some money to the Muslim community in Tampa, and tried to help the democratic party by filling out a survey on party strategy and emailed Senator Gillibrand on why she should obstruct Trump's nominee for ambassador to Israel
O'Neill's observation was not ungrammatical. Like "ethics" or "optics," "politics" is validly construed as a singular noun.
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