Slipping Through v.1

This is probably a consequence of living in the world at the time that I so happen to be living in the world. Lemme tell you, anyone in the future who may happen to see this, it's so tiring to live through such constant "unprecedented" times -- Though, I suppose there's not much "precedent" for any time. Funny how it keeps doing that "always moving forward at a constant rate, and never repeating" thing, isn't it? But anyhow, this isn't another rant about AI, or an open letter to fat cat bureaucrats. This isn't about COVID or anything like that either. It's just about the persistent feeling that "something just out of reach" keeps slipping through my fingers.

So: I'm trying to buy a house. Really. That's what this is: I'm trying to claw the barest minimum of that ol' "American Dream" before they move the goalposts again and take it even further out of my reach. At least then I'll be in the familiar hands of bankers and other well known evils, but the money will at least be going into something that I own. Using my money to pay my own mortgage rather than filling the pockets of some landlord and paying off his mortgage(s). Sort of half jokingly, I've become fond of saying, "If I have to watch the country burn, at least let me sit on my own porch while I do" -- Let me smoke my cigarettes in my own chair on my own deck, rather than abide by "Be at least 50 ft from any door/window" rules that were tacked onto some lease halfway through my second renewal. If I sink or swim, let it be on my own terms and not because some landlord realized that they can increase my rent by some absurd percentage this next year.

But it's feeling like an impossible task. Sure, sure, maybe rates aren't great right now. Maybe it's never a <quote/unquote> "gOoD tImE tO bUy" property. Maybe the world our parents lived in is dead and gone, and we've inherited the corpse of a fucked up society after the maggots and vultures have picked the bones clean and the acid rains have leached any viable minerals from even those bare remains. It's depressing. It's ennui. It's disheartening and discouraging. Long gone are the days of "a starter home" (but everyone will keep telling you how you chose the perfect "starter home" anyhow -- $300k is a steal for 420 square feet of a shipping container prefab! When they were my age, not only had my parents already owned their own "starter home" but they had sold it and bought the new construction house that I spent most of my life in.

The house that they just sold (without it ever even touching the market, mind you, due to a family friend "knowing someone who wanted to move back to town"), which financed their new new construction home. I looked it up, you know? In 1994, they sold their home for $115k... Adjusted for inflation, that's about $250k now. Imagine: being able to buy a house, live there for 5 or 10 years, sell it off for enough to cover the balance on the next 20 years of a mortgage, and then roll that into a brand new home? And then, 30 years later, sell that house to finance yet another brand new house? It feels the same to me now as it must feel when I explain VHS tapes and audio cassettes to the high school kids. Such an absurd thing, I don't believe it's real. Especially not in today's culture: fuck a "starter home", us millennials are just trying to find a house so we can live there, die there, and will it to our children so that someday they'll have a house to call their own. The era of "starting simple to cut your teeth" is long gone. Sink or swim, baptism by fire. Either you can afford a $500k home, or get fucked, don't you know we've got corporations buying up spare houses and hoarding them like participation trophies? Collecting real estate as though they were Beanie Babies in the 90s, and just holding it in order to have it. It ain't no "investment" for us, we ain't gonna ever be financially secure enough to consider selling. The smallest bit of schadenfreude amusement I get out of it is hearing that the boomers have also eaten themselves into a corner too. "You know, Donna still lives in what you could call a 'starter home' because she can't sell it: she can't afford a new home" -- Not that I'd want to put anyone in that position but at the same time: fuckin' good! At least you can be here with me.

And then there's the entire market in general. Picture this: I went and saw a house and I loved it. So much so that I put in an offer. Of course, I didn't get it (that's how it goes, I'm not mad at that)... But when I shrugged it off and thought "Oh well, good thing I have 4 other houses I wanted to get a tour of" -- Imagine my surprise when all 4 of those houses were also now "under contract" and off the market, each within 3 days of even being made available! So, not only did I get my anxiety all worked up over making an offer in the first place, but now I'm actively worse off than I was at the start of the week. Back to square one with nothing to show for it other than a list of useless addresses and the looming sensation that none of this even matters in the first place. House hunting is fucking depressing -- Or maybe that's just the normal depression, but that's not a good premise for a rant/article/post/story. I'm so burnt out from life, why should I keep wasting my time looking at pretty pictures of things I'm not allowed to own, burning days away staring at fantasies?

Anyway, that's just were I'm at, I guess.