The little ones come. They range around the yard, and the invisible curtain of the shaggy edge of the grass holds them captive. Their voices are like the waves at the beach. There is an ebb and flow, regular but not rigid; the occasional roar, the sizzle of the receding push, the intermittent quiet pause before the next little assault.
They tackle one another like linebackers. The one that gets the worst of it always seems not to notice; the one that delivers the blow cries. It passes the moment the action risks beginning again without the one with the quivering lip. The only fatal sin is missing out.
A fork is a rake and a cup is a bucket; a hamburger is an ottoman. They show at the rudely made table from the eyes up only, and the evidence of their efforts are identically parsed between their interior and their exterior. Nothing is wasted if one bit of it manages to get inside them.
Their lilting, ill-formed words tinkle in the warm breeze, like a nursery rhyme sung in some sublime opera. Their gestures are as broad and expressive as anybody who has trod the music hall floorboards. They furtively search the crowd of adult faces, congregated to the side, looking for mother — like a performer looks in the audience for the critic. They run like madmen from a doctor.
They run out of gas, long after you do, and find some niche that fits their mood and size. They sleep the sleep of physical exhaustion and mental freshness. The difference between eyes open and shut is tiny. Everything is wonderful.
I don’t want to hear a word about any housing bubble. Not one more word.
I’ve been forced to listen to people that have no idea what they’re talking about talk about a housing bubble for… well…
There never was a boom, according to the Bubblers. Their switch only has two positions: Bust and Bubble. Well, people who work on Wall Street know that advice that has no basis in time is worthless. I’ll trump that and say it’s not worthless; it’s actively bad.
I’m not going to bother to direct you to an article about the “Housing Bubble. Google it. 8.4 million hits. Help yourself. For balance, you could Google “Housing Boom.” You’d get 15 million hits for that. Of course, the most cursory inspection of those reveals that every damn one of them covers the topic of why the boom that never existed is now going bust.
I lied. They do, why shouldn’t I? I am going to direct you to an article outlining an opinion about The Housing Bubble, from one year ago. I wrote it. And in it, I mentioned that one Fed chief ago, I had been listening to years of housing bubble talk ad naseum and no one had any idea what they are talking about. And they still don’t. They’re a busted clock, and they seem to think that since they’ve been telling you for ten years that houses will become next to worthless overnight, they’re right now. And please notice, my only advice to avoid losing all your money in real estate overnight was to never buy any in a place where corrupt or incompetent local governance could make your house worthless overnight. Paging Ray Nagin. And I wrote that before Katrina. What did those soothsayers at CBS say back then, I wonder?
Well, I read CBS Marketwatch –oops I lied again– as they had the most gratifying end-of-the-world-overmortgaged-smoking hole headline. CBS Marketwatch.
They mention all sorts of things that are meaningless things, if you’re talking about a “bubble” instead of the normal workings of supply and demand: “Sales of new homes dropped 4.3% in July“- There is not an everlasting supply of persons that do not have a house. If home builders keep building units for imaginary persons, they will indeed go out of business. I think that would apply in any business, though. Maybe they’ll build or do something else when they get these signals. Just a hunch.
“The July sales pace was the lowest since February’s 1.038 million.” Like I said, I’ve been in this business for a long time. I remember the fervent prayers of the building industry to crawl over the million unit threshold, just once in their lifetime. I distinctly remember Builder magazine discussing 900,000 units as a sort of “happy days are here again.”
“New-home sales are down 21.6% in the past year, the biggest drop since late 1994. “ How exactly does comparing this year to last year have anything to do with 1994? I was in the business in 1994, (and 1984 too, by the way) and I can tell you lots of capital was fixing to run down a rathole in 1994, and it wasn’t a housing rathole.
Housing was in the toilet in 1994, and every day since I’ve been warned to stay out of the housing market. FYI geniuses: If I had listened to you, and rented in the interim, I would have had to come up with the 497.75% of extra appreciation my property would cost since then. Read that number again after I tell you I’m not joking or exaggerating, that’s exactly the appreciation in the value of my property, including what I’ve “lost” in this bubble. I lived in it while it appreciated, too. Try that with your Exxon stock. The chairs in Exxon’s lobby are uncomfortable to sleep on, anyway. CBS Marketwatch says home sales in my neck of the woods are down 43%. I’m sure they can point me to lots of investments that return 497% in 12 years. Is my house overvalued now, or was it undervalued then because people read the newspapers back then too, and listened to people like you? Try building one down the street like mine for less than mine would sell for. Good luck getting a building permit for your non-existent lot. Hint: this isn’t Holland, and we’re not making additional land here to compete with mine.
You’ll have to come up with every penny I mentioned to get me to sell. Even then I wouldn’t, come to think of it. It’s my home, you schmucks. And if it loses 10% of its value I’m not going to move in the swamp out back and leave it for the bank because it only appreciated 487.75%, not 497.75%. The horror! Please, continue reading while I knit myself a noose.
Don’t invest in Pulte, Centex or Toll Brothers if you’re afraid there are no more housing customers. Seems prudent, as it appears the boom that never happened is now over before it starts, or something. I wouldn’t open a Real Estate office this week either, unless you like to work real hard for your dough. Like the rest of us.
But I’d invest in every single one of them, before I’d invest in CBS or the New York Times.
We celebrate the older son’s birthday today. He’s eleven.
I feel like a successful human being because I’ve managed to get him this far. I tried mightily to harm him at various playgrounds over the years, though not purposely, of course. He escaped with a stitch here and there and bumps on his noggin. And we’ve muddled through. His little brother is too tough to harm in any way, so my cares are not increased by the simple arithmetic of a brother added.
My son has that thing… a sort of internal glow that even others see emanating from his innards. His heart is good, and that trumps all other concerns. I will be pleased and sad to spring him on the world undiluted by supervision in a few years. The glow looks vaguely like the one that attracted me to his mother.
There will be little skinny friends frolicking by the dozen, smeared with cake and bug spray, and little cousins to tag along or sit padded by their diapers, watching. Aunts and Uncles and neighbors will gossip and attempt to allow things to happen, and grandmothers will dote and receive obeisance. The day will be a fabulous blur for him, and just a blur for his parents.
And then the clock will return to its quotidian desultory ticking, ever closer to the detonation of the bomb that all we parents set, that will blow our lives all to heck when he leaves us to be a man.
My mind is a cobwebbed thing. When I was young, I was like a human filing cabinet. You could ask me almost any obscure worthless thing and I’d trot it out rat-a-tat. The Lusitania’s sister ship. The manufacturer of Richtofen’s plane. Churchill’s mother’s name. Who played Agarn on F Troop. The chemical name for silicone.
I’m not like that anymore, and I don’t want to be. It’s tiresome for everyone involved to be a Jeopardy contestant out on the street. No one knows very much, really; most people don’t know much of anything.
I now know the joy of “Not Going.” By that I mean, I am not willing to subject myself to the exertions of chasing the trivial I’m not interested in. I have no interest in many things others commonly do, and I’ve lost the desire to manufacture that interest or feign the concomittant enthusiasm. It’s certainly not any form of elitism. I have the most profound disdain for the supposedly highfalutin’. I still watch football on television. If you think I’m going to sit still and have Katie Couric read me a bad newspaper every evening, you’re nuts. And I’ll read Twain ten times before I’ll read ten sentences of Norman Mailer. And I’ll only read the ten sentences as a sort of chore, to allow me to mention he’s a lousy writer and a defective thinker over dinner, if called upon.
I’d rather watch SpongeBob -again- than Sixty Minutes, anytime. SpongeBob is rooted in reality, after all; there are sponges at the bottom of the sea. Mike Wallace is unmoored from reality, and what reality he has is of his own invention. He wants to give me an impression — and he does –just not the one he’s aiming at. They both make me laugh, but only one pleasantly.
The internet is a most dangerous and magical sea for us to navigate. I swim through it, and let its atoms wash over me, and get a kind of impression from it, like the ocean. Warm. Cold. Tepid. Dangerous. Limpid. Every sort of thing.
It is said that most people have their minds made up, and simply cast about for information that gibes with their static worldview. The internet is perfect for them, as there is no thing too lame or outrageous that you can not find it by the metric tonne, footnoted. And defended to the death elsewhere in the primordial soup, to the very horizon and beyond, if need be.
I am not a utilitarian. I have no ends, so I seek no means. I swim through the vast thing — the muck, the weeds, the pale green still water, the rush of the waves and the pounding of the hurricane — and it washes all around me and gives me an impression. Or more accurately –an ongoing impression.
There is a kind of bloodsport being played in the internet world, and I think people are getting way ahead of themselves in their assessment of how important they are in the scheme of things. They are like sailors in a leaking tin tube creaking with the pressure, sweating and whiffing stale air and listening to pings on the hull, all the while thinking they’ve got it all figured out. The game is played so ferociously because the stakes are so small. Me? I can’t help but notice that Neither Ned Lamont nor Joe Lieberman is Julius Caesar.
My cobwebby mind betrays me again. A tidbit comes to mind. Is it Paul Johnson? William Manchester? Paul Johnson writing about William Manchester? Manchester writing about Churchill? I think it’s Paul Johnson writing about Manchester writing about Churchill, but to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I could find it on my shelf, but not on the internet, and so it does not exist, according to many.
Anyway, one of them went into the heart of northern India after the British decided to skedaddle and let Gandhi do it. A million persons lost their lives then, give or take, as that simmering pot was unlidded. The vestiges of the Mughul Empire showed right through the modern fabric. Anyway, the assignment was to go to remote parts of India, and ask the man in the unpaved street if it was a good or a bad thing that the British Empire had left India.
Time marches on. I’ve got no use for nostalgia. Check that. I’ve got the proper use for nostalgia, I hope. But I get tired of old thinkers. I like to acknowledge what was good in the framework of what was possible at the time. And when you look at what’s going on, right now, it’s much harder to determine what’s Good and what’s Bad and what just comes under the heading of What’s Possible. That’s why everybody’s always Monday morning quarterbacking people like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. It’s easier when you’re in the stands and not on the field. “That’s not the way I would have founded the most successful political entity ever to exist on the face of the earth, by beating the then current greatest political entity on the face of the earth. You’re doing it all wrong, George and Tommy. My mother’s basement or my rent controlled apartment gives me the perspective you two so obviously sorely lacked.”
I’m not buying.
These new technologies are a fact, and must be dealt with. If you haven’t picked up on it by my endless fascination with YouTube here, I’ll tell you straight out: I’m fascinated with YouTube. It’s the most democratic of mediums. There’s lots of chaff, but what the hell, the things it competes with, in my humble opinion, are getting to be all chaff. I’ve seen plenty of YouTube. I haven’t seen television since the Superbowl.
Look what you can find on YouTube. You can find…jaysus! That’s my nephew!:
And look what you can find on MySpace. You can find… jaysus! That’s my friend Steve’s son and his friends, who might as well be my nephew. And look, he’s stolen my little story of his first paying gig and posted it on MySpace without asking. Why, I’d sue, if I wasn’t dumb enough to be flattered by their interest in it. Make sure and click on D’yer Mak’er. It’s better than the original. And yes, that’s them playing the Fox Sports Theme when you open the page. They’re really good
Our children. Better than the… ahem… Originals. Yeah baby! Yeah!
Month: August 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments