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| Oh,
the irony! My last post
lamented the sorry state of Seattle's churn and
change, but here I am, caught up in the
maelstrom, like Poe's narrator, a hapless
subject of chaotic forces that shape one's
life without being understood. (It's all good.TM)
Through no intrinsic virtue of my own, Sarah and I
signed some papers and now we can claim some cubic
space very close to the surface of this
spinning planet English speakers call Earth.
(I can't explain my luck, I just live it.) We
signatoried in the morning, braved our way through
typos and pro forma elisions. Keys changed hands,
a picture was taken. Behind the scenes, chaos
reigned. Our new unit wasn't ready, and there was
no way the seller would have all her precious
possessions vacated by the end of the day.
What to do? I couldn't deal, had to go to work and
sell my time for less than a penny per second.
That seems low, don't you think? It's certainly no
way to get ahead and retire to Tahiti. Forgive me
if I'm obsessed with money at the moment, but
Seattle is being ruled by these concerns; there's
a land rush on and everyone is trying to cash in,
one way or other--house flipping, airbnb, price
gouging simple services, or just trying to find a
foxhole to hide/die in while the rest of the
beachhead explodes. One can either ignore it in
some rare rent stabilized situation, or struggle
to find a temporary permanence of one's own. This
is what it means to live in one
of America's richest cities. |
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