Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, December 15, 2022
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75 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Texas attorney general sought data on gender changes to state IDs
If ever a pervert mf’er was in the running for “Most Punchable Face,” he would easily be in the top 10… I mean 5… No, 3. Greg Abbot would be right next to him.
Top 10 books about freedom
Atlas Shrugged clocked in at #6, which makes questionable the judgement of anyone who would include that piece of claptrap on such a list. I mean, why would anyone actually read the whole of that trash?
That bolded part above does not exactly inspire confidence.
The burning question that has troubled me for most of my life has finally been answered: Snakes have clitorises: scientists overcome ‘a massive taboo around female genitalia’
On the serious side, I love this kind of shit. I really doubt It would have ever occurred to me to wonder about it, snake penises either for that matter. I see a future Ig Nobel Prize winner here.
Why do you choose to live where you live?
You could answer that anyway way you want to.
———-
My first reaction would be as to type and subtype. I live in an urban area. I have to. I live fairly north. In a house I own outright.
I used to live downtown in a high-rise. I’ve mostly lived in downtown high-rises most of my life. I like balconies. I like being high up above the street. I enjoy a good high balcony. That is my preferred view. That is my preferred mode of living.
About a decade ago I bailed. The HOA dues were outrageous and had tripled in 5 years. I owned my unit outright. Paid in cash at closing. The HOA dues went from $180 a month when I moved in to $640 a month when I left. Dudes!
Let’s do the math here. What the fuck are you talking? There is a common party room. There is a pool. There is a pretty crappy exercise room. You are obligated to clear snow off your sidewalks. You need two people to man the desk, you need a handyman.
I got the distinct impression that I and all of my neighbors were paying exorbitant HOA dues to service the debt owed by the company that bought the building. Nope!
400 units at a generous $500 a unit a month is $2 million a year. You spend maybe an eighth of that on maintenance, upkeep, and salaries and that is very generous reckoning! Egregious gouging! Nope! I’m out.
I bailed, put my unit up for sale, basically got the purchase price back in two months and was fully satisfied. I bought a house about a quarter mile from the Drake campus.
I had never lived in a house before. Well, since I was a kid, anyway. There are upsides, people keep telling me, but many obvious downsides. I have to mow the lawn. I have to clear the sidewalks of snow. I am on the hook for everything. The roof, the furnace, the yard, water in the basement.
What, exactly, are the upsides to owning a house? Am I supposed to feel proud? Pride in ownership? I mostly feel belabored unduly and kinda pissed off generally. Owning a house is a pain in the butt.
This will sound extraordinarily entitled and whiny, but I hate yard work and will gladly pay for others to do it for me. I get nothing positive out of doing it myself and generally resent it. It annoys me greatly.
As to why I live in Des Moines, I moved here because of a job. It was supposed to be a quick in and out, maybe two years. A big ass impressive job title for a solid company to burnish my resume. Two years max, I told myself. Yeah, right.
And then I met someone I liked and she liked me back. A gig became permanent thing. Not in job, but in place. Quick was out. I got stuck.
Those owning a house responsibilities probably sound like “duh! What did you expect?” things to a lot of you are normal, but to me these were brand new responsibilities I had not dealt with ever. I kind of resent those responsibilities, do not like doing it, and get negative enjoyment from doing them. It is a pain in the ass. Plus, it was a corner lot. All of my neighbors had about 40 feet of sidewalk to clear and I have about 180 because I own the corner lot. That sucks!
Des Moines is a really cheap place to live and I have a lot of friends here.
I am now out of that relationship. I should have scooted back north to Minnesota, but most of my friends live here. Real estate is basically a third of the price compared to MSP equivalent.
The only friends I kept in touch with there now live in Germany, Arizona, and Oregon. Minneapolis is no longer home for me except for nostalgia.
I have wanted to move to Duluth for years. I was thisclose to buying a crappy house in a very cool neighborhood there. On Minnesota Point! The house was too crappy and I would have to spend way too much to get it to be a home I would enjoy living in.
Now it’s just mostly inertia. I live where I live because moving would be a bigger bother and hassle than staying put even though I know staying put is very unsatisfying and pretty lame. I kinda dislike my life here, but changing it for a possibly marginally better one elsewhere would be a majorly huge pain in the butt. I would know two locals as friends and they are married so that essentially counts as one. It would be a huge disruption. I want to. I am afraid.
It would be starting all over again. I still want to do it. Maybe, kinda, possibly.
Now you know what you were paying those HOA fees for (not commenting on the amount, seems pretty egregious to me, but I have no baseline to measure them from) Regardless, you don’t have to do any of them. As to,
And there’s the heart of the matter. Where you are may not be perfect, but you know plenty of places would be worse and you can’t know for certain if a new place really would be better, probably wouldn’t know for years. So, inertia? Nothing wrong with that. At 64 I find myself no where near as adaptable as I once was.
@de stijl: I don’t know about $2M/yr, but your estimate of $250K/yr for upkeep, insurance, repairs, and staffing on a 400 unit high rise seems unbelievably low. Was your tax bill separate or part of that monthly payment?
One of the things older suburbs had to learn to deal with is that when they are first being built up people accept taxes that keep out the riff-raff and get them shiny new schools and libraries and so forth, but are very angry when that same amount of money or more is needed to re-wire and upgrade the HVAC in an aging school or library, with no visible improvements and lots of disruption and mess as you they rehab a building that is in use.
I’ve said this before but recently came across it again: I just don’t understand the logic of continuing to go to sources that deliberately try to mislead you in order to get some sort of “balance”. If a source ignores or obfuscates the facts and arguments that belie their position and so refuses to address them, erects straw men and flails away at them, or does a mid-article switcheroo from one type of measurement to another in the hopes that you won’t notice, there is no balance to be had there. They are playing you for a sucker and continuing to engage just proves that point.
I moved out to Bourbon MO from STL in 2002, after my ex’s husband went after my eldest son. I didn’t want my sons to have to change schools so that choice was baked into the cake. The next 5 or 6 years were full of legal headaches, shenanigans, and my ex’s abusive behaviors as well as death threats from her whacko husband and his friends, all of which culminated with her going to prison and him eventually dying while she was ensconced there.
So very sad. Not.
Adapting to the culture out here (if one can call it that) was not a big deal for me as I had been running around the hills and hollers of the Ozarks and Appalachia for most of my life. I had a MYOB attitude and people did*.
By the time my sons had finally moved out my wife and I had decided to buy a place, and if I was going to invest a whole lot of blood, sweat, tears, and time in making a house our home, it was going to be a place I wanted to die in. We found this 2 1/2 bedroom cabin on 12.5 acres of hill and hollers (the hollers keep the neighbors at more than arms length) and bought it. I’ve done a lot of work on this place over the past 12 years and I’m not done yet, but that’s OK.
It’s beautiful here, and quiet, except for when the gravel trucks and the Harleys drive by (not a frequent happening, thank dawg). It’s not perfect, probably never will be, but I prefer to think of it as, “I’ll always have something to do.” Seeing as boredom is the #1 killer of old fucks, maybe I have a shot at living forever.
* my youngest recently commented that he, “can’t believe you (I) lived in Bourbon for almost a decade and nobody knew who you were.”
@MarkedMan: Motivated reasoning. Most people don’t like to face uncomfortable facts. They’d much rather hear the comfortable lie.
Well, what’s this about?
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-major-announcement-superhero-homelander-1767356
Dressing up as a superhero? I hope he’s kidding.
@de stijl:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Very much enjoying this prose. Storytellers here. Nice.
@CSK:
He has the power to kill one million Americans. No one else has ever been able to do that.
@de stijl:
Consider a certain high rise condominium is FLA whose residents objected to the amount and proposed assessment to undertake some repairs. Without an itemization of what was covered by the fee and what percentage was going into a kitty to fund future capital expenses, it is impossible to know if that number is outrageous or reasonable.
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t live in Texas, but we should start a movement to send a photo of our genitalia to the Texas AG once a year. We could do this the last week in February to coincide with the siege of the Alamo. This will facilitate the important work of controlling citizens’ crotches which is the foundation of liberty that Texans love.
@MarkedMan:
I paid taxes on my unit. I paid taxes on my parking space. I was obliged to pay about $600 additional bucks a year to the state/city because I had a parking on one slot three floors underground in my condo building. Roughly 10′ x 16′ or close enough, a space big enough to park a vehicle in. A piece of pavement in an underground garage. I was on the hook for that.
The first time I saw that on my tax bill bill I said out loud “Are you fucking kidding me? Is that real?”
@de stijl:
Fleuris là où tu es plantée.
@Slugger:
I’ve been doing that for years! For unrelated, personal, reasons, but still.
@DK:
Such a pleasure to read good prose. Practically everything here is so well-written.
Thus far I’ve lived in California, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, Maryland, Iowa, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina, Maine, Minnesota and the District of Colombia.
Which actually understates the case for my transience, as, just within California there were homes in Long Beach, Bellflower, Irvine, San Francisco, Concord, Tiburon, Kentfield, Crockett and now Los Angeles.
Which still understates the level of impermanence as, for example, there were two homes in Irvine, two in SF and four in Crockett.
Also, France (two cities, Royan and Fouras, with two homes in Fouras,) the Azores, Portugal, and Pelago, Italy.
So the question of why are you where you are is not a surprising one to me. I’ve asked myself that question many, many times. In childhood: because the Army sent my Dad to X. Then, because I got into the impermanent lifestyle. And then because I was avoiding arrest. And then because why the fuck would I stop at age 48 just because I no longer had to fear arrest? Onward!
I’m in Los Angeles now because I had been in London shopping for a neighborhood when a producer said he wanted to adapt one of my series for TV. And he wanted me to stay involved. And unlike 90% of producers who say that to book authors, he actually meant it. I took the meeting, went and had Thai food with my wife and presto! Bye bye London, and off to L.A.
Now at 68, I have a problem: I can’t really think of a good reason to move again. I actually like my house. I like the view and the pool and the spa we just had installed. But a week never goes by when Katherine and I don’t check out property prices, lately in Lisbon and Barcelona and San Sebastian. But also Paso Robles and Santa Monica and Petaluma.
Many years ago I was driving a Karmann Ghia convertible from California to the DC area. I had a paper bag of stolen cash in the little hideaway under the passenger side’s footwell. I stopped at a motel somewhere empty, like Nebraska. Desk clerk asks me for a home address and I had to admit, I didn’t have one. An old road warrior was checking in beside me, openly jealous. Michael Reynolds: no fixed abode.
@de stijl:
Because it’s home.
I grew in this small town in Wisconsin, and spent weekends across the river in a cottage that my Dad bought when he lived in Chicago.
I went to school in Green Bay, lived summers in Appleton and Rockford. Moved back to Green Bay for several years (living in 2 different apartments–between which I spent 6 months on the road; a different city every week), then DFW area in Texas, and out to Portsmouth VA. I’d lived in the East, and the South. I wanted to be back in Wisconsin, where there are four actual seasons (sometimes all in one day!).
My folks had stopped using the cottage, so I moved in. At the end of a 2 mile road, with 99% of the other houses only in use between Memorial Day and Labor Day–and then only on the weekends. In the winter, there were only 3 of us on the last mile of that road. No street lights, no traffic (I was at the literal “end of the road”). It was a few months after I moved in there–sometime in February–that I stepped out onto the deck in the middle of the night, looked up and had an epiphany. I’d been having a rough go of things for a few years. I gave up drinking because I didn’t like who I was when I drank. But that night, I realized that it wasn’t the booze. It was me. Something was just…. “wrong”. And one single thing made everything fall back into place: I looked up and saw the stars. The full Milky Way, splashed across the sky.
I hadn’t seen stars in over 10 years. It was all street lights and haze.
I realized I couldn’t afford to buy the cottage, so I moved back into the little town I grew up in and rented the upper floor of an old house.
Walking to the C-store, I’d pass this little Craftsman Bungalow that had a sheet of paper taped to the door. Finally, I walked up and looked at it: “This is a Footsteps home”. It had been foreclosed, and was in the process of going up for sale. Much to my surprise, I was the highest bidder. Got it for a song. Why? Because nobody else could see past the 1970’s “remodeling” and recognize the beautify house underneath. Solid plaster walls, solid maple floors, an “alligator varnish” colanade between the living and dining rooms. And solid bones.
Being away from it for 6 years in massive Chinese cities (I lived in 4 different areas of two different cities), just solidified how much I love that house. I’ve been working on it, bit by bit, for the past 17 years (including that 6 year break), and I expect it’ll be another 17 before I get close to where I want it.
It’s mine. It’s on a tiny lot, but it doesn’t share walls with anyone else. The yard work and shoveling is the price I pay for my own space. It’s cozy, warm, comfortable. And it is the only thing of significance I have accomplished in my life.
There’s only two ways I’m leaving it: Feet first, or in handcuffs, kicking and screaming.
Trump was teasing a big announcement today. Apparently he’s made it. The Trump Digital Trading Card collection. The third time as farce.
When Charlie Baker steps down from the governorship of Massachusetts, he’s going to become president of the NCAA.
@gVOR08: Hahahahahahaha!
After living in another college town, abroad, in Boston, in DC, in Rockford, back in DC stint in NY, my then-wife and I decided to move with our young son back to my Midwest University home town. We found a quirky house with a 45 degree turn in it sitting on a large city park (and, because the turn, 3 sides face the park). When that wife moved out 15 years later, I kept it for my sanity and my kids’ stability for another decade. When I got engaged a year ago, my fiance wanted us to get our own house and I wanted to stay where I was, so we compromised. We stayed put and are just finishing a renovation that is more or less a new house. We have been out for 6 months (living at her house), now married for 4 months and will be moving back in next week. I have no interest in moving out until necessity requires, which I hope is more than 20 years down the road.
I’ve lived in a number of places, though not nearly as many as Michael Reynolds. I was born in NY
City, spent about seven years in New Jersey, then moved up to my father’s hometown of Andover, Mass. After college, I transplanted myself to the University of Edinburgh for grad school. I came back to the U.S, Ph.D. in hand, and got an awful job teaching at a truly horrible college. Left that, thank God, for a position at Tufts, moved to Somerville, Mass. (Davis Square). Got a teaching job at Harvard; bought a house in Cambridge.
I made a mistake when I moved to western Mass. for family and other seemingly good reasons. Terrible place–people wouldn’t acknowledge your existence unless you were married and had a couple of kids.
I finally escaped and am back in the home of my paternal ancestors.
@gVOR08:
Dear God. Is this a fucking joke??????
@CSK:
Apparently it’s not a joke.
http://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/donald-trump-big-announcement-selling-161804314.html
@gVOR08: This cannot be real. Even for Trump.
ND, MI, IL, TX, IA, IL again, MI again, IN, OH, and now retired in FL. All decided by jobs, family, and happenstance. The pattern has been generally south and east. Looks like I’m done unless I hit the Powerball and decide to move to Key West.
@MarkedMan:
Trust me. It’s real.
@MarkedMan:
I recall reading a financial reporter admitting that every morning he’d see how the market moved, then started calling his contact list. The first printable quote he got became the explanation for the market’s move whether it made any sense or not. Reporters, and pundits, may claim their job is to defend truth, justice, and the American way. But they get paid for filling column inches.
The 3 rules of rhetoric:
1) Tell them what you’re going to tell them
2) Tell them
3) Tell them what you just told them
@Slugger: Not a bad idea…
@Mimai:
Cette plante fleurit en automne.
—
I took three semesters of French 40 years ago. My initial read was “flowers do [something] (or) are where they are planted”.
Fairly okay. My brain did okay with that translation. I never would have figured out “bloom” which seems to be implied, not stated.
I am probably misreading fleuris. Flower can be both a noun or a verb in English and I assume the same in French.
Bloom where you are planted. Flower where you are. I like it.
Is that a quote? From a famous big brain thinker? It sounds like it. It is new to me.
I like it but it does not quell my on-going anxiety about whether I might be living in the wrong place. I am fairly sure I am living in the incorrect space for me right now.
The reason I like the thought of Duluth is that I get positive pleasure from gawking at that big, stupid, cold, huge lake. From a perspective up the hill it is gigantic and infinite and solid. It resonates and speaks calming words.
Where I live now is utterly unremarkable urban residential. It is so visually boring it is markedly unremarkable. Many days I walk to a fairly boring park with a man-made pond just so I can see the sky unimpeded.
If you sit down at the northern edge of the trees on top of the hill you get a clean, clear view of the sky. Any idiot can lay back and look up at the sky and gawk. But if you look at the sky obliquely from a good, high vantage point infinities emerge. Life seems bigger and fragile and way less mundane.
I crave big sky and big water views and I cannot get that here.
Yeah, I need to move. I feel perpetually stymied by constricted vistas and seemingly endless miles of comfortable middle class homes on every fucking street and avenue. It is stultifying. I am tremendously bored by my surroundings. I need to see farther. I hate flat, I need some fucking topography. I want to see the horizon.
@Mu Yixiao:
Thank you for sharing that. It was really beautiful.
You like where you are. Stay there. You can always go visit those other places, for a month, 2….
Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Colorado, Tennessee, and I’ve been back in Wyoming since 2008. Tied to the land since my brother decided ranching was not for him. If the ranch weren’t here, I would definitely not live here….at least not in the winter.
Duluth definitely has that. I’ve passed thru it a number of times and always wanted to stop and loiter for a few days. Find a few nooks and crannies I would never see if I didn’t go looking for them.
@MarkedMan: Whoa. It’s real. Trump’s big announcement was a $100 set of crypto adjacent trading cards that feature him as a cartoonish superman with bulging muscles.
I honestly think this could be the end. I’ve long speculated that once he gets tainted as a loser his fans will start to drift away. But this is more than that. It taints him as a fool. A schmuck. A goofball. Get that taint on him and his fans will run away.
@OzarkHillbilly: You or de stijl visited Duluth in Dec or Jan? My brother lived in Duluth for several years. We visited once over Christmas. Never again. It didn’t break above zero F for a week. Snow and ice on those scenic slopes.
Differing from you, de stijl, I love central Illinois because it is flat and that’s how I see the horizon and can look at nothing. I noticed once during an extended stay in Manhattan that I was uncomfortable with the often stunning view, but unrelenting view. I concluded that I needed to be able to look some direction and see nothing. If I couldn’t do that I was slowly exhausted.
Even in Chicago, I can get to the lake front. I am a plains boy. I gotta have regular access to some nothing.
A word to the maybe not so wise:
A word to the maybe not so wise:
@MarkedMan:
You can look at them yourself here:
http://www.collecttrumpcards.com
@gVOR08: No, but I know of what you speak. It’s the cold pole of the continental US, regularly recording the coldest temp south of the Canadian border. Imagine that combined with that wind coming off the lake and… No thanks. I once passed thru in early November and that left a definite impression on me.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I had a flash of insight just now. I wouldn’t be this angsty and emo right now if I had stayed in a high-rise or found a new one.
In Des Moines I lived on the 11th floor and faced the river. In Minneapolis I lived on the 20th floor. 2001: A Space Odyssey. One balcony overlooked the Mississippi, the other overlooked the roof of the downtown Post Office. Nobody ever goes up there ever. I reckon there might still be a few 12 inch LP vinyl records there I flung that way. A handful actually landed atop there. (That is a very bad and dangerous thing to do and no one should fling lp records around from several hundred feet in the air willy nilly unless you are really drunk and very bored.)
I miss the view. I miss the height.
I get extreme pleasure and great relaxation from hanging out on a high balcony. Kick back. Watch the world go by. Gawk at the sky. Take a nap.
Many nights I slept outside on the balconies. It just felt like the right thing to do. I slept like a baby.
Had I not moved to the ground floor equivalent with all of you weird messy bastards, my mental health would probably be in a way cooler state. You can dump a whole lot of stress and boatload of steam just chilling on the balcony vaguely looking out at nothing at all.
It’s the height and perspective. Stress melts away geometrically faster for me.
If I did not have to go downstairs and muck about with all of you weird bastards life would have been much simpler.
At the time I was a smoker and decided I would never smoke inside. So enforced 7 minutes per hour either looking down at you puny humans on the ground, or straight out at the horizon, or up at the sky. I would look at the world wander by for 7 minutes every hour guaranteed. It relaxed me. I miss that.
What is messing with my brain and my overall chill meter is I am missing height and unimpeded sky views.
I know what you mean, drove to Wyoming a couple years ago after several years of not heading west and driving across S Dakota felt… Good. Like a part of me had been missing and I found it again.
@gVOR08:
Yeah, I know it is very cold and it snows a lot there. Not a problem for me at all. I kind of welcome it.
They also enjoy the crispest coolest most gorgeous summer months in the lower 48. You have to pay a price for that perfect summer day or else it is basically unearned. Yin and yang. Harmony.
Your mileage may vary.
I’ve lived in Ohio (2 homes), Long Island, Buenos Aires (2 homes), back to Long Island, Connecticut, Indiana(college). Joined the Air Force and lived in Alabama, Florida, Japan, Ohio, and finally, Texas. My wife (she moved around a lot as a kid (with added burden of a very messy homelife) and I have been in the same house now for 28 years. I think it is because of the frequent moves as children, we don’t really want to move. Plus the children have stayed here. And there’s grandchildren. The only place we would consider moving to is Wilmington, NC where the wife has two of her sister living there. Plus I like it there a lot.
If that is what you need, go get it. I need to be able to look up at the night sky and see the infinity of stars. I need to dip my paddle in a clear spring fed Ozark stream. I need to commune with a tree, especially the ones growing where no living thing should be. I need the absolute silence of a snow storm where the flakes are falling so thick and fast you can watch your feet disappear. I need to hear the ‘Who hoots for you all” of a barred owl or the yammering of a pack of coyotes 3 hollers away. All that and so much more. I am very lucky to be here. I am home.
@CSK:
Holy shit. The “artwork” on those things is awful!
@Scott: I had put a down payment on a small piece of Arkansas mountain in Newton County when my first grand child came along. My wife had a change of heart and we bought up here where we are close to 3 of my 5 granddaughters instead.
@Joe:
My favorite drive in the world is the state highway in North Dakota just south of the Canadian border. Way North of I-94. It continues in northern Montana. That is one zen fucking road.
It is the loneliest road in the US. The road is flat and straight and all around you is the most empty stretch of land imaginable. Glacier flattened in times past. Not entirely flat – there are noticeable grooves in the land, tiny hills and valleys.
It is so fucking empty! You see a turnoff to a farm or ranch every ten miles or so. The sky is so huge and the land is utterly bereft of any signs of humanity it messes with your brain. You drive 50 miles a hundred miles from nothing to nothing. Just huge sky and empty land. It zaps your head.
It is incredibly spooky in the coolest way possible. It is stunningly empty. Stupendous in its simplicity.
I need to drive that road again next summer. From Fargo to Flathead Lake. Just drive and absorb its message. I love that road.
Speaking of homes:
If any of y’all are in the Madison, Wisconsin area on Jan 1, give me a holler. It’s my 25th Annual Chili Feast.
@Mu Yixiao:
Yes, it’s truly abominable.
Saw this bumpersticker for the first time today:
So I guess I should get some long sleeved shirts…
@de stijl:
Francis de Sales. The gentleman saint.
There’s deep wisdom in that simple directive. And it has nothing to do with stagnation. Or resignation. Quite the opposite in fact.
@de stijl: I live where I live for the sake of proximity to the two remaining longer-term friends that I have not outlived and because of economic constraints. Because I rent and live a relatively frugal life, I must live where rents are lower. I would not choose to live here without those two factors in play.
@de stijl: “The economics class that I took from my coworker, Jim Craven at Clark College, suggested that the reason to own a residence is that it functions as a capital sink. That is, it is a marginally liquid asset that will return its value over time and adjusted for inflation. In times of greater volatility, such as the one in which we live, residence ownership may yield slight gains, but most people don’t keep adequate records of how much they actually spend maintaining their property and probably can’t get really accurate balancing of cost relative to worth–fortunately.
@MarkedMan: @OzarkHillbilly: Confirmation bias was the phrase I couldn’t quite dreg from the nether regions of my brain,
@de stijl: I’ve been on that road, and you’re right,
I too am long past overdue.
@MarkedMan: Also, a wise HOA board keeps huge reserves for long term maintenance. I heard later, I’d moved by then, that the owners of the townhouse I’d lived in were relieved about how their “ridiculously confiscatory” (in our minds back in the early days) HOA dues had reduced their costs to nearly zero at the time that 32 units needed to be repainted and re-roofed in the same two-year period. I know I was glad that our dues were high enough to pay for the $20k repainting when our beautiful transparent stain had become waterlogged and the siding started turning grey. The buildings have been repainted 3 or 4 times since (maybe more, I bought in ’79). Always with no assessment to the owners.
@OzarkHillbilly: Many moons ago I had a girlfriend who brought the book Atlas Shrugged home. I asked what that was about and she said that there was a scholarship she could get if she read the book and wrote a report or something of that sort. I warned her that it was going to be a lot harder then she expected. She was like “I know it’ll suck but hey it’s free money I’ll manage”. Spoiler alert she did not manage. On the positive side she did have quite a rant about the book. Many statements such as “I have no idea who the fck I’m supposed to root for because everyone is a terrible person!” and such. Attempting to read that book got her into politics which we bonded over.
I tried to read the book properly multiple times but I just couldn’t do it. I ended up basically speed reading it so I had a summary of the important plot points by the end.
In my experience basically anyone who considers that book a great literary work is a deluded idiot who cares more about the message than an actual story or likeable characters. If you can relate to the main “good” characters you’re most likely a selfish SOB.
@Kathy: In my rhetoric classes in grad school, we were told that there were only 2 rules:
1) every speaker has an agenda of some sort and
2) every speaker uses whatever devices he has available to promote/defend that agenda.
And we were taught stuff about enthymemes. Mostly about why people who use them should be approached with suspicion and skepticism.
@de stijl:
@OzarkHillbilly:
And for a really mind-blowing thought, think back to the 1870-80’s (when G-Gpa Luddite moved from the old country to build churches and suchlike. Or even earlier. Your 50-100 mile journey would be weeks. The horizon never changes; nothing as far as the eye could see…
@Matt: I’ll be honest, I never read Atlas Shrugged. The daughter of a friend (he had largely disappeared from their lives and I had taken over the role of “surrogate uncle”)* gave me a copy of The Fountainhead and recommended strongly that I read it because apparently in her mind, my being a carpenter meant I would identify with that asshole.
NOT. ACK.. GAG… I had known way too many architects who were married to their “art” and thought 32″ could be compressed to 30″ just because they wanted it to be so. Please, spare me.
Anyway, I love that girl and her sister, and am very happy they grew out of that stage. Not that I had all that much to do with it one way or the other. I recently attended her wedding to a BLM geologist from AZ where they both live. Seems like a nice guy. I hope they are right for each other. We are supposed to get together with her family at some point in the next few weeks for a Xmas gathering. I don’t put much stock in Xmas but I do in her. I hope it happens.
*her sister once said to me that she thought of me as her father. I told her don’t. Just don’t. She had a father. Flawed man that he was, he was still her father. That they should think of me as an uncle. He is now in a home with alcohol dementia. I don’t know what exactly happened to him but I miss him dearly.
Very intelligent person, could barely read a book** because of severe dyslexia but could read a street in a NY second. Began to fend for himself when he was 10 after his father had left him with his schizophrenic mother. I’m babbling now, thinking about Michael does that to me. He was a special person. Not a good father but I suspect he inherited some of his mother’s problems.
** he once told me he had read 3 books in his life, 2 of which I had given him: Huckleberry Finn, and Black Elk Speaks. I don’t recall the 3rd one.
@Flat Earth Luddite: Oh yeah, I think I would have loved it but I can see why it would drive some people crazy. “I have seen the elephant! And I don’t want to see him again!”
Does traveling around the country working in 14 states in at least 300 cities and towns, staying in motels and eating in restaurants for weeks and months at a time count as living there?
CA FL IL IN IA KS MI MO NY OH TN TX VA WI
All the work was outside. Maybe 20% in urban areas like Houston or Chicago. The rest in small towns and rural areas like Clarence, Missouri or Quinter, Kansas, where I drove past Castle Rock every day on my way to a job site. Worked along the shores of the Mighty Mississippi and the levees of the Ohio. Visited the University of Virginia on company time. Saw the statue of Thomas Jefferson and examples of his architecture.
Some times the work was close enough so that I could sleep in my own bed every night.
When anyone asked about my routine my reply was: “I don’t mind traveling I just don’t like being away from home.”
@just nutha:
I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague today about the output of Large Language Models (LLM) that are so much in the news at the moment. He made the fascinating observation that LLMs produce text that is what all language would be like if the postmodernists were right.
BTW, the only appropriate response to someone asserting your 2 points above is “I can see why you would want to say that…”
@DrDaveT:
Your friend may be reading Gary Markus. Or perhaps he is your friend. Regardless, there’s some interesting stuff in this piece. And in his other writings.
@Mimai: That’s a reasonable take on what’s actually happening, but I was more amused by my colleague’s observation that postmodernism asserts (usually indirectly) that we are all merely doing what GPT does, all the time. Frankly, I think Derrida is the best pastiche of LLMs you could hope to find…
@just nutha:
Enthymeme was a brand new word to me. Thank you! I am a word nerd and an armchair linguist. I really enjoy encountering new words.
I especially enjoy etymology.
Places I’ve lived for at least six months:
LA. NYC. Atlanta. Miami. Ft. Lauderdale. Austin. Dallas. London. Paris. Vancouver (CN). Richmond (VA), Richmond (UK), Las Vegas, Shreveport, Chicago, Bangkok, San Miguel DeAllende (MX), Hagerstown, Baltimore, Oahu, Prague, Oslo, Stockholm, Edinburgh (UK). All except for LA and NYC were while working on film or TV projects.
Why do I still live in LA? It’s LA. I like my house, my pool, my spa. I like being able to golf in January. I like being able to rollerblade in February. I like being able to ride my bike all year around. And I like being able to drive 35 mins to jump into the ocean in Malibu when it’s 110 degrees in the valley.
But… my wife and will be probably leave the US as soon as the studios and networks stop hiring me. I’ll trade it all in for South or Central American beachfront home near an international airport, with a healthy expat community, and good health care.
@Mister Bluster:..14 states…
For some reason I always forget about the job in Waldron, Arkansas so it was 15 states. Nice drive up from Texarkana where I had been working on the Texas side. Arkansas job only lasted a few weeks.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
(Nice name, btw, for the topic at hand.)
Oh, that road goes on way longer than 100 miles. The stretch I have driven extends the width of North Dakota and northern Montana. It is the State Road about ten miles just south of the Canadian border.
I cut south about 2/3 of the way through Montana because I needed to see a guy in Missoula. I would imagine it just keeps going west until you run into Glacier National Park.
I don’t have Google Maps open presently, but I reckon the stretch I drove was about 600 miles.
You know, I have never driven that road east. I imagine it just keeps going until you run into Lake Superior probably in Grand Marais, which is a kick-ass town.
New plan: drive up to Grand Marais, drive west, hit Glacier NP eventually in a few days, drive home.
I dated a girl originally from Moorhead (don’t giggle, that’s the actual name of the town). Her parents had a cabin north east of town. That area up there is astonishingly flat. It is like a logic lesson in two dimensional space. There are zero trees unless clustered near a creek or stream. There is just a flat plain for miles around the Red River. The Red River floods every few years and the water just spreads out for miles into the plains surrounding. Kinda like the Nile delta.
Like the Nile, the Red River flows north. I believe it eventually empties into Lake Winnepeg. The problem with that river is that the southern bit thaws out first and the big burst of running water flows north and hits the bit that is still frozen and the running water has no where else to go so it just oozes out east and west onto the flattest plains imaginable.
Think the opening establishing shot in the movie Fargo where the cop cruiser crests the little tiny hill and comes into frame and the kick-ass music starts up. Like that, but flatter.
It is way flatter than that IRL. The weather was not cooperating so they moved the production up to Saskatchewan for exterior shots, I believe.
It was a good trip. We had to go to Moorhead (don’t laugh, you pervs!) to get the keys. A cabin about 25 miles northeast on a fairly large lake.
Xan and I crossed a new intimacy boundary four or five times that weekend, which in retrospect, was ill considered on my part. So many mosquitos at dusk, holy crap! – I was a pin cushion. A good canoeing lake. A nice cabin with running water and a wood stove.
I distinctly remember driving home with her on I-94 and glancing over at her and a inescapable conclusion came over me. We have to break up and very soon! I was way too iffy on the chemistry thing and, frankly, could not imagine her as my future. She was cool and interesting and really pretty sexy, but if you are not feeling it, you are not feeling it. It is futile and foolish to force that. That either happens or it doesn’t and forcing it never works.
I knew in one glance over that I needed to call this off. Not exactly now, that would be extremely rude, but within 48 hours. I remember distinctly that exact moment. I can instantly recall the band and the song playing. They Might Be Giants, Istanbul / Constantinople. She liked that band and I did, too.
It really sucks to be the break-upee. A pain I have experienced often. It really, really super duper sucks to be the break-upper. To be the initiator of a conversation that will be extremely uncomfortable. “Hey, Xan, we need to talk…” was probably the hardest thing I had ever said. It had to be said. That was super painful, awkward, and icky. Two days after a “romantic” getaway. It had to be done. Holy crap, that sucked!
I had, then, almost no experience as to how to do that, to responsibly break off a relationship, properly. I winged it. I hope I did okay. Lordy, that fucking sucked!