housing market

so i signed off on some paperwork pertaining to a three month lease on a rental house the insurance company is putting us into next week...a nice place i am told...two bedrooms and a full basement...newly redone kitchen for the stove and refrigerator that we are getting ( also courtesy of the insurance company )...seems we will be renting furniture ( but not beds...i draw the line there ) to go into the rented house...a lot of cash floating around...but what has really caught my attention is the rent on this modest house...it amounts to $240 more per month than my mortgage on a three bedroom home runs...the housing market has been said to have "turned a corner"...seemingly so... i can imagine that this might seem a reasonable deal to someone dispossessed from an "underwater" mortgage...but who in this blue collar town has that problem? foreclosed, perhaps, but not on a house worth less than what's owed...i can't help but wonder about the distress serial renters face...i'm doing this on someone else's dollar ( less twenty-five years of insurance premiums )...how many people can afford this in this economy here in the rust belt? and if they do what do they forgo to do it? life can be a struggle sometimes...some people just struggle more...nietzsche was mistaken...what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger if it doesn't cripple you in the process of not killing you.

a shade west of the eighty-seventh meridian

"however sympathetically or sentimentally a white american viewed the indian, the industrial culture was certain to eat away at the tribal cultures like lye...what destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without... "beyond the hundredth meridian" wallace stenger __________________________________________________________ to the very best of my knowledge there are no native americans in my lineage...i am from only the second generation of my mother's family born in this country...dad's family goes back a bit further with roots deep in jasper county indiana ( and my father's mother's mother was from kansas )so stenger wasn't writing about me at all...but i am just as corrupted and even more embedded in the "industrial culture " that corroded the indigenous ones....i was born into it and the only work i can find perpetuates it...so inside the box that i am at odds with what i think i should be...as i look at this second dumpster and say "YES!" finally the stuff is going i am also coming to the sad conclusion that all it's going to do is fucking fill up with "stuff" again...okay..perhaps i can ride herd on just how much and what kind of "stuff" gets in...but some is so ubiquitous that its is preordained...there will be a furnace ( yes there are statutory regulations on wood burning stoves in my town ) and a water heater and a stove and a goddamned phone and an internet connection and windows and doors and carpet and paint and drywall and nails and trim..all of which degraded the environment in some way in their manufacture and transportation...i doubt the building code would allow the deletion of most of the "essential" fixtures...the way my great grandfather lived would be illegal in lake station in 2012 ( or more like 2013 by the time this is finished )...no kerosine lamps or outhouses allowed...sanitary and fire hazards...so i'll keep growing bits and pieces of my own food...and explore edible native plants and try to be more native to the place i live in...and i'll try to stop fooling myself about exactly what's going on here...i'll live as far outside the consumerist utopia as i can manage but without its utter collapse i'll lay odds it's inescapable...more as the "stuff" rolls back in...we'll see how deep it gets.

empty fully before refilling

the appliances are in the dumpster and many personal belongings too...no great loss...clutter more than anything..rather liberating in a way to come to the point of needing to decide what really is important and what can be jettisoned..some of it has actually become a burden rather than a possession...nothing especially profound in these insights...four years of economic stagnation paved the way for a culling of expendable rubbish...i have rented a 5' X10' storage area and aim to keep it less than full...some appliances form the basement that can be salvaged and some books...the rest is moveable and lends itself to my current nomadic existence...this is, about to end as we seem to have found a short term rental that meets our needs and our insurance company's budget...situated in midtown and closer to work than the half-unbuilt ruin we have temporarily left behind...the smoke damage on the east side of the house was extensive...two rooms on the west side had the doors closed and so will be sealed and painted...the rest of the house will be gutted, sealed, and rebuilt..new furnace...new water heater...new roof. floors, and walls...perhaps i will be retiring in somewhat worry-free circumstances...dwelling-wise anyway..a process that will be ongoing into next year so this blog will be filled with all the pathos and drama i can come up with...this is all new to me...i've been to rehab but my house never has...will there be a relapse? recidivist behavior? is there a twelve step program for this? fha?

things = memories?

the first dumpster load of "stuff" from our burnt and smoked out house is loaded and ready for the landfill...what does that say about my environmental "native perennial species" gardening pretensions? so much for movement away from the consumerist/disposable society...most of my house has become as disposable as a closed big box store...true i am salvaging what i can in the way of books and cds and dvds...but they will end up as disposable eventually...when the owner dies or technology renders them obsolete ( like the boxes of vhs tapes stacked up int he living room...keep or pitch? how do you recycle them? )and no-one but some nostalgia freak wants them...i'm still tied down by "stuff" in more ways then i am prepared to admit apparently...time to rethink my position, motivation, and the assessment framework i'm using to evaluate what i am doing... lots of memories in there" someone said yesterday and i thought how important could a memory be if it had to be indexed by an artifact? wouldn't some important memory stand alone? independent of anthropogenic "stuff"? why would it need a memory jog? seems to me the last thing it would need would be some token...but symbols seem so important to people in their self-definitions ( not to mention their definition of "others"...yellow stars of david have made me wary of symbols for a long time...political symbolism is shorthand the makes actual thought unnecessary...another reason to seriously question anything politicians say...inattentiveness can kill you) and even if a thing is attached to a memory, what is a memory? when you remember are you remembering an actual event or person or are you just remembering the last time you remembered it? is that why human memory cn be so fallible?

is this deconstruction or what?

dispossessed and nomadic...i have slept in three rooms in two different houses in four nights...after a number of years on the road in the 1970s i converted to sedentism because i had had enough of moving around...this is dredging up old memories of " sleeping where i fell " rather than some fixed point, and i am not as young as i used to be...i can deal with this, but not without some questions...so, as if i am not sticking my nose into enough other stuff, it seems as though i am going to have to explore exactly what "home" means...at first i thought of starting another blog to do this with but since this deconstruction of "home" through rapid oxidation and its resultant confusion lends itself so well to post-modern "death of the real" i said what the hell...this blog has fallen into serious disuse and this seems like the time to resurrect it...as it is a lot of "home" stands to end up in the dumpster and when "home" is rebuilt as a shiny, squeaky clean version of its old self what does that do to memories? the corner of the carpet that molly the bunny chewed isn't going to be there anymore...so what happens to memories of molly? less frequent because of the lack of a non-verbal indices of what was? how much do visual cues play in making "home" home? there won't be any outside what we rescue and clean up...yeah some photos will remain but they will be unreconciled...the reality will have changed...old reality brushed out like an out of favor commissar disappearing from a stalinist group portrait...this is going to be a weird trip because i am in a weird frame of mind...thrust back to 1975 in some ways when i thought i had buried that particular reality for good and all...hang on...there will be grumpiness...