Rental Breakdown

Trying to find a good apartment in a bad city in a bad time is like intentionally running into a nest of bees. Then running into another, and another, until you give up and die from the venom. If you're anything like me you hate most places available for rent because it's always a game of compromising your idea of a 'decent' place until you're in an 'okay' place that's tolerable.

By far the funniest (or scariest, if you really need a place) part of the search is the bachelor 'suites' with a microwave and hotplate meant for students who want to be as close to technically homeless as possible. The sheer number of terrible apartments for inflated prices is an argument for rent control. A landlord, if he is unscrupulous and greedy enough, will charge 200 dollars a month for a jail cell – and most likely charge above and beyond that figure once the market comes to accept it as 'the way things are'.

My own search is pretty desperate, and hopeless, and I suffer for it every day, but now and then I see something funny, funny if only because the alternative (accepting it as real, not raging at it) is not as healthy as having a good laugh. Like this new building in my city that just came up awhile ago, and seems to have been constructed to house either the elderly, the insane, artists, or the chronically out of touch. Here's what $755 a month, before bills, will get you these days:

Mind you this is a six or seven story building. It seems like it was built by architecture interns on a bender. It has no elevator, there is no chance of having internet or cable, and fuck you if you have a car. Now, it may be part of some kind of ecological-minded living arrangement for hardcore vegans, hippies, and activists. It may be that but on the other hand, why does a new building, which has gotten in my way in its construction phase, have no option for high speed (aka - 'normal') internet? This isn't the 1970s. No elevator is healthy. Nonsmoking is healthy. Everything else, it seems, is a mess. This is the kind of shit that creates squatters and the homeless. This is the kind of wasteful and stupid market, nourished on helplessness and apathy, that creates the landowners you've known your whole life.

Ask yourself: why does it have to be like this? Why is nobody looking out for rental tenants? How many bastard landlords must a man suffer, until he becomes one himself?

Squatters' Revolution

Well America is looking as dirty as the last 30 years predicted. Sometimes I get the sense that there are significant instabilities in North America in general, and that the oligarchy can no longer mask itself and therefore has adopted the obscurantist angle. "Obscurantist?" you ask, mouth agape stupidly. Yes, stupidy, obscurantist as in not revealing anything to anyone AKA dealing with the world sensibly - information-as-necessary style living. Which is a pretty great hypocrisy in a system where your bank is entitled to know your state of employment in addition to the wealth of other personal information they are entitled to. Yes the ability to go to your bank and cash a cheque and go home without them having explicit statements from you concerning your status is probably eroded.

Now it seems a small thing, and it is. Frankly I don't really care so much as I find it odd the bank cannot just simply assume a thing like that. So you know nothing about the people who ultimately shape your reality (unless you think actors, celebrities, and personalities do this) and the global reality, but you share your information on a 'no-need-to-know-basis' because the information of your life is so useless to anything but a marketer or criminal that it is a balm to your existential angst that at the very least you can have a cyber-billboard. This could be protested by refusing outright to identify yourself on the internet, boycotting Facebook, Google+, etc... but of course your networking opportunities would suddenly revert to mid-90's standards. In other words we could go back to making personal statements in person, but then we can't hope 1000 strangers will praise us. We could hope for maybe 10 intimates to admit our ideas have some merit.

Not that protest will mean anything since freedom is still exactly what it was at the dawn of humanity: a dream that can be indulged in only by the most powerful individuals or through the most powerful delusions. Freedom is a pretty goddamned stupid goal, yet it is a noble one Oh, but ironically the idea of freedom has generated the idea of slavery. Currently there is also a pervasive mode of thought which infers that freedom can be bought, assuming freedom is laziness, recreation, or inaction and time is the currency which buys it. Microfreedom does exist - yes in day to day experiences you have a sense that anything could be done; in the macro scale there is no significant freedom at all. You must acquire and spend wealth, dress well, pretend to be contented with the system, and enter automobile culture or else live as an abnormal, stunted, or subnormal individual.