And yet SOOOO rich is the United States – there’s so much incredible (often unconscionable, IMHO) wealth in private hands – that the numbers somehow, amazingly, fail to impress.
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UD thanks her sister.
Amid the happy revelry, this totally not into it girl, kitted out in the stars and stripes, caught UD‘s eye and became this year’s iconic image of the iconic Garrett Park, MD parade.
… and didn’t know – until her friend Tammy told her – that some of the Antioch Mosaics were just down the street from ‘thesda at the Baltimore Museum. Tammy and I went there together the other day and it was thrilling to see them, arranged around a sunny atrium.
You shouldn’t be surprised when people start monetizing the vast empty mcmansions all around you. You yourself may be happy rattling about in your own bankrupting domestic structure with no domestic life in it — because after all, here in the US, conspicuous consumption is the last sense to go.
Indeed ethically and emotionally you may be quite content to live inside a desolate, energy sucking, cave; but that doesn’t mean your neighbors think the same way. Having emptied their accounts in order to act rich, they now seek ways out of their financial dilemma, plus out of the depression that settles upon them when, morning after morning, they fetch up in an Alaskan King bed they can’t afford.
Lotsa desperate capitalists around your neighborhood is what I’m saying, and some of them are going to start cannibalizing their whale fall. They’re gonna rent their pools. They’re gonna rent their outdoor grills. They’re gonna rent their driveways. And – don’t know how to break it to you – they’re gonna find commercial uses for their nine bedrooms.
If you’d thought about your setting – hidden away cul de sacs with acres of parking and beyond that flat treeless land for more parking – it might have occurred to you that the whole setting was absolutely crying out for supermassive sex parties. That there would be more and more and more of these (“We have, you know, 200-400 strangers coming into our small, seven-house community, drinking, littering, peeing, defecating, we have people that are just screaming at the owners. We live here, I mean, my neighbor’s dog ate a condom this morning, so is that something you want your children to deal with?”) and that they might not make you happy.
Happy? You thought spending money on a house whose nihilism crushes your soul would make you happy. You thought ruining yourself financially would propel you to the land of classy rich people, and it landed you in the lap of 24/7 bullet-spewing trash. Dumbdumb.
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update: uh oh.
Not my photograph; Melissa Bouter’s.
Took me awhile to figure out why it kept flying off and then perching on the same flower again. It was hunting insects.
I don’t like hosta flowers, but if they bring hours of dragonflies to my window, okay.
… the venerable Dave Almy sings a John Prine song with his grandson.
Jawbone of a deer? Ever-present anti-mosquito spray. Pointless attractive teapot.
Gray watering can contains wren sitting on her eggs.