LE PASSAGE de la «for sale» à la «sold»; not another midday tête-à-tête

Dear diary,

On Saturday, we accepted an offer for our apartment. I don’t say “we sold our apartment” because the actual selling is a process that takes many months to complete, and anything can (and will) go wrong in the meantime. Just like the transition from virgin to bride...

However, Thursday afternoon, our realtor put our apartment on the market, which means that I, our apartment’s inhabitant, had to go hide someplace else, preferably in a vacant seashell or den of a cave – as Jesus said, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head (Matthew 8:20, King James translation, hence the phrase “not where”) – and, in my absence, people were allowed to break in and snoop around our abode from that moment thru the next 48 hours: so, for the equivalent of two full days, I had to vanish myself. Then we met with our realtor at 18:31 (6:31 p.m.) on Saturday, and she presented us with several yuge bundles of legal papers – a baker’s handful, to be precise (that means six rather than five). And I said, “What be these?” And she answered “These be the cash-money offers: each bundle of papers encompasses a respective bid for your apartment. The first, as you can see,” (here she grabbed the top bundle, opened it, and dumped the papers out onto the table before us,) “is an offer to pay your asking price: exactly three U.S. dollars. And the second,” (here she dumped out the second bundle of papers) “is a bid for one dollar more than the first; & so on & so forth – here, I’ll just dump out all the rest of the bundles and sweep them into one yuge pile. Now what do you want to do?”

Then I said, “I think I’d like to accept the best of the offers.” And she said, “Are you absolutely sure?” And I half-nodded: “Fairly.”

So then our realtor had to press some buttons on her telephone and break the news to the person who won the bidding war, and that buyer immediately ordered a house inspection. So now I’m worried about that.

MORAL: There’s always something to worry about.

Also, now that we are formally involved in the transferring of the ownership of our apartment, we need to find a new place to…

I was going to say “We need to find a new place to live,” but, at our age, we’re really looking for a new place to die, because there’s no possibility of goodness left in the universe. The universe is like an hourglass, & most of its sand—which is to say, most of its goodness—has trickled from the top half to the bottom of its figure, so there’s only a smattering of granules remaining, and those grains are falling fast. And if you look back into the past, you see that it wasn’t good at all, even when the goodness should’ve been rampant. So I say the so-called good granules in the universal hourglass are more like placebos than actual exemplars of excellence.

But, like I was trying to say, we now must find another abode. And I hope that we can get something that’s not an apartment this time but more of a house, in that it has its own perimeter, which borders nature, so that we need not share walls with human neighbors. Don’t get me wrong, I love my neighbors: Jesus instructed us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44); but I just hate having neighbors nearby. It’s easier to love your foemen when they’re faraway. That’s why every mature girl hates her family.

But I say unto you, Love your family, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you & persecute you; that ye may be skyey emulators: for heaven maketh its sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

So my sweetheart and I visited about seventeen houses yesterday. In each instance, we found a public park where we parked our hybrid chariot; then we walked around the block and spied out the property. I would note whether the roof of the house in question seemed simple enough (I prefer a smooth flat roof with no angles, neither large nor steep, so that it’s easy to maintain) and whether the yard seemed modest (I want a very small yard, so as to avoid mowing, landscaping, gardening, and burying of loved ones) and whether the height seemed short (I don’t want a multi-story house, or even a split-level; I want a single tiny abode made out of simple substances: basically an above-ground sepulcher). And, opposed to the house’s interior, it’s what’s outside of the house that concerns me most; which is why I think that real-estate websites should feature photos of the homes and environment surrounding the property rather than various shots of its rooms and decor, because anything on the inside of a house can be repaired; but, if you have a rude neighbor, how can you repair him!? Like, what if GOD were to move in to the McMansion across the street and blast Bach all day?

& when we were done espying potential houses, it was lunchtime; so we called my mother and asked if we could bring her some food. For I had stayed at her house during the time when our apartment was being ransacked by potential buyers; and I had left some books there and a bottle of vodka; thus I needed to retrieve these daily essentials. And my mom at first said “Sure, pick me up a Cobb salad.” But then she changed her mind and said, “Wait, no, cancel that: my sister Roxanne Marie—your biological aunt—just sent me an instant text message via one of the many popular chat applications, and she said (I am now quoting her message verbatim) ‘By and by, in the fullness of time, shall you and I dine?’ therefore I will prepare an ham-and-tuna sandwich for her and for me, while ye twain—that is: you, Bryan, the author of this blog, and your sweetheart to whom you are legally married—can order luncheon for yourselves, take it “to go”; then meet Roxanne Marie and me at the homestead.”

So my sweetheart ordered something for herself and then asked “What do YOU want, Mister Blogger?” And I said, “Just double whatever you ordered—I want to us to be twins.” But I said this only semi-seriously, because I know that identical twins don’t always necessarily eat the same meals after a day of house-shopping.

Then when we arrived at my mom’s faux Georgian manor, we saw that my aunt Roxanne Marie (which name, by the way, I beg my reader, when reading this post aloud at public functions, to pronounce with a heavy French accent) had preceded us. What I mean to say is that she had arrived at my mother’s abode before we did; so the two of them were already chatting over their sandwiches in the dining hall, when we made our entrance. Now you ask what our conversation was like? It was a lively conversation, very rewarding. We talked about the Bible, about politics, about the economy, about old times and future times.

First, the Bible: I contended that if the U.S.A. were to forget about its (purported) onetime commitment to the idea of “separation of church and state”, I’d be OK with it, so long as the King James Version of the Bible were to be elected president; because I really like the King James Version of the Bible. But my aunt didn’t exactly agree or disagree with my views on this – she held back from enthusiastically embracing my proposals and stated instead that she was glad that the current president was making it easier for Christian groups to pray for those who persecute them.

Next, I voiced my political view and got more or less frowned upon. Only because I have a hunch that my mother and aunt are patriotic capitalists who believe that all the foreign wars engaged in by the U.S. are righteous and necessary advancements against “the evils of communism”, I put forth the idea that communism is closer to the teachings of Jesus than capitalism. I also said that capitalism is inhumane and that it incentivizes ruthless behavior. I thought that this would provoke my mom and my aunt, because they both proclaim to be sincere believers in Jesus; but they were generally skeptical of all my claims. The way that World War II especially, after the fact, in the U.S. has been re-branded as a fight against fascism, combined with the cover-up of so much corporate-business support for the fascists, makes it hard to sway the opinion of anyone who’s not willing to read more history books. But it could be that I’m wrong about everything, too – I readily admit, it’s happened before (more often than not).

And regarding the economy, I said that it was the source of all the ills that we see in society – our awful economic management, that is. My idea is that the economy is a manmade thing, and thus it should be tweaked and tailored to bring the best health to all people; whereas currently (and for much of humankind’s history) the economy has been rigged to work for only the top pinpoint fragment of a percentage of wealthy misers. But my aunt countered my complaints by asking: If we were simply to give everyone the goods and services that they need, then where would all the money come from to PAY for these things? And I said: But money is a manmade idea, just like the economy: money is part of the economy; it’s imaginary, a fabrication; we can do whatever we please with all that we have – so if we don’t want a single person in the world to be homeless, all we need to do is declare that homelessness is against our system; likewise starvation, etc. – then it’s just an easy matter of distribution: get the necessities to whoever needs them, by whatever means we can muster – food, shelter, clothing, etc. (the means of production are all automated nowadays anyway; there’s no longer any physical scarcity) – and if, at the end of the day, six rich men are left with only 999 extra yachts instead of their usual 1000, then we should comfort them earnestly, hug them, pat their back, sing them lullabies, catch their teardrops in canisters, and offer the canisters at the next auction – and the amount that these canisters will fetch, believe me, will be more than enough to replenish their recent short-lived yacht-deficiency. I’m saying that money DOES grow on trees.

But my aunt didn’t buy this sales-pitch either. She said that if society were to grant her more than enough money to quench all her needs and even her wants, she would still be sad about life, because life is imperfect – that is to say: one lives one’s life and then regrets certain actions, and no amount of economic security could ever erase the memory of those past actions, those self-styled mistakes in behavior. —But, to this attitude, I say: Accept forgiveness and move on; don’t dwell on sin: Why re-crucify Christ?

It is impossible for those who were once enlightened, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh. (Hebrews 6:4-6)

And, speaking of do-overs, at some point in the discussion my aunt mentioned that she sincerely believes that the Second Coming is about to happen: it’s in the offing, on the agenda, at hand, just round the corner. And by “Second Coming” she means that Jesus of Nazareth, whose initial appearance happened in Year Zero, shall RE-appear in 2018 or thereabouts. But she admitted that the idea of heaven being paved with gold doesn’t appeal to her: she’d prefer a less metallic look to the streets. And I agreed with her about this—the street-paving of heaven, that is; not the Second Coming—and I added that I think the book of Revelation is hogwash. But my aunt remarked that the book itself claims that whoever reads and believes it will be blessed, so she doesn’t understand how I can say that it’s hogwash. And this made me regret that I neglected to include a similar blessing for the readership of my own publications. —Also I noted that it will be interesting, when Jesus does return to Earth, if he makes no attempt to fight the evils of our age but again passively allows himself to be slain. This would be a true “Second Coming”: a repeat of what went down at Coming Number One. But my idea was ridiculed: I was told “NO! The scriptures clearly say that Jesus is to return in power and glory this time.” Yet I argued: “The scriptures in existence at Jesus’ debut appearance said exactly the same thing – that’s why the believers of Year Zero rejected St. Paul’s hypothesis of Christ: they knew that it was counter-biblical; and they preferred to stick to the scriptures. They didn’t accept it when Paul urged them to see all those promises of a miraculous delivery as merely allegorical, as metaphors or tropes for more mundane outcomes. —Now it’ll be noteworthy if Jesus comes down from the clouds and proclaims an equivalently Pauline reading for the book of Revelation: “It’s just a lightly coded, poetic retelling of Rome’s maltreatment of the original Christians – not future prophecy but ecstatic history. So you instigated all these wars for nothing; and now I’m dead again. See you next eon!”