AT LEAST...


In the six months the house was on the market, there was a little bit of advice, attempts to pick me up, shake me out of my doldrums that I heard a BIT too often...

“At least you’re not underwater with your loan,” They were saying. “At least you don’t owe the bank more than you can sell the house for.”

Never, EVER tell anyone something designed to make them feel better and begin it with “At least…”

“Well, the cancer ate your face, but at least you still have pretty blue eyes.”

“Your family was killed in a mountaineering accident, but at least they left you the Corgi breeding business.”

“The alligator ate your leg, but at least you can get one of those spiffy spring running legs now. You know, like that guy who jogged with the President?”

“At least” doesn’t make it better. Just think about the phrase. “At least”, meaning in the smallest or lowest degree. It’s a positive way of looking at the world, but it can be a pretty stupid one. It’s like giving thanks for a world that can be brought to nuclear destruction with the press of a button, but at least we have post it notes and aren’t they handy?

When I’ve been in really bad places, either in relationships or lack of work or lack of decent work[1], I became a devotee of self-help books and especially power of positive thinking books. I read them all, from the Grand daddy of self-help books “The Power of Positive Thinking” to more esoteric fare, like the “Sutras of Patanjali”.

Lemme tell you: There’s only so much to pull from these things. They’re not crap[2], but after a point they’re redundant and being thankful for what you DO have as opposed to what you DON’T have doesn’t make much sense in a world where Kevin Federline gets two million dollar endorsement deals[3], where Heidi and Spencer seem to have no problem getting along despite no real means of support and The Real Housewives of Where Ever They are This Month even EXISTS[4] --- in a world like this, how can you be grateful to have a roof over your head and three-five squares meals a day?[5]

When you start cutting back on cable, telephones, movie rentals, comparing prices are the grocery store and driving an extra mile to get a few cents off gas WHILE you’re living in a house that’s supposed to put almost five hundred thousand in your pocket if YOU COULD JUST SELL IT!, that sucks.

Sure I have a beautiful wife and two great kids. I have a great education, I have talent, I’m happy with my looks[6], good health and pretty good exercise habits.

But, you know what?

Let’s be honest.

It really isn’t enough. Nope. Sorry. Just the way it is. Bite on that, purveyors of enlightenment. Screw the status quo has ALWAYS been my mantra. There’s something better out there and it’s pissing me off that that something better isn’t here.

So, anyway:

I was getting depressed, pissed and stressed, all at the same time. Every week one of us would call Ingo and every week we’d here that there were no showings planned, but that he’s sure let us know!

July I realized that there was no way in hell we were getting out of there before school started.

And that meant we were there until, at least, December.

And another fall of starting school, going to the busses and trying to make sure the kids and I were safe from the rogue Honda Odyssey[7].

And I’m here to tell you, that didn’t help the depression/sleeplessness/stress track I was on one little bit. If you wonder why I refer to my wife as the “sainted Patricia”, it’s because she has to put up with me in my dark, dark, darker than a really, really dark place moods[8]. Like sitting in a corner and not moving moods. Like getting REALLY pissed because someone’s chewing too loud moods.

I’m a guy who can handle BIG stressful situations well, but not long drawn out stressful situations. Give me a big, scary event and I’ll be fine. I would have been aces on the Titanic. I would have handled Normandy beach okay. I would have found my way out of the North Tower okay. But in a prison camp, a desert island, or living in Kentucky? Those things would make me crazy.

And we were closing in on four months.

Patricia and I had a long – and LOUD talk about this. She insisted that there was still a way that things could work out before school started and I took the negative position[9]. Slowly it sunk in on her, too.

We were trapped.

It’s a funny way to put it, but we were literally trapped in our thousand square foot ranch house. Any place can become a trap. Even some place where you’ve picked out the wall colors and planted peonies in the front. Any place, even a place that you’ve invested with love, can become a flaming shit hole of doom.

Patricia blamed the market.

I blamed Ingo.

And, like Beetlejuice, say his name three times and the douchebag called.

Every call was filled with hope. If I saw his number on the caller id, my heart leapt with the anticipation of hearing “We have an offer”[10].

But instead I heard:

“Can we get together?”

[1] Did I mention that I worked in retail?

[2] Well, some of them are. A lot of them are. My favorite was the one that exhorted followers to live a clean, moral, upstanding life if they wanted to succed. Not to fall prey to drugs or homosexuality. Yeah. THERE’s a real douchebag of an entrupreanuer. I stopped reading in case the next chapter was “How to overcome Negroness”.

[3] They guy got to where he is by starting off as one of Britney Spears’ dancers and attracting her attention. Does he think he’ll be able to perform this trick with, say, Katey Perry? Will she say “Hey, there’s that hottie from the no more fat guy ads! Whoo-hoo!”

[4] And can I say that these were the kind of people we were trying NOT to grow up to become?

[5] Food IS love, after all.

[6] COULD lose a few pounds, but food IS love, after all (as you may have heard).

[7] I some times still have nightmares about that. It’s not so much the car, it’s the sound of that woman’s horribly scretching voice with the accent like a villain from a 1960’s anti-commie movie. I don’t think we haten then because they were commies, I think we hated then because their voices could give you a headache that could cut wood.

[8] Once again, Irish and American Indian descent. We know depression.

[9] It was also the correct position, but you know you can’t start out a conversation that way. I learned that much from reading self-help books and being married to an Indonesian woman

[10] It HAD to happen sometime.

Entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE LAST DAY IN PARADISE

Image
“ Isn ’t it cold there?” She asked me. “Colder than it is here,” I said. I was standing outside my son’s Third Grade classroom in Woodland Hills, CA [1] , waiting for him to let out so I could put him in the car and drive twenty minutes to wait outside a motel for my daughter’s middle school bus. I was talking to one of the other mothers. I say “other mothers” because many people think I’m a real mother – but perhaps the context is a bit different. “Does it go below freezing there?” She asked. We were talking about the fact that my house was on the market and I was moving my family out of Los Angeles, likely close to my hometown of Buffalo, NY. “Well, sure. I mean, it snows. It has to go below freezing.” She looked at me for a long time, obviously cogitating over the my weather report. “Don’t you die?” “Sorry?” “If you go outside and it’s below freezing --- don’t you die?” I like to tell the story of when I was working in Montreal. The first day I was there the
Read more

Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be
Read more

Home Inspection, Part Two

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew. We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal. We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see h
Read more