Lordship

Life has been complicated but I think it’s time for screeding again. Let’s see how it goes.

Landlords are terrible. I know this isn’t news to anyone who has ever heard of a landlord, but I have spent the last decade bribing mine to leave me alone and am super annoyed now that they feel entitled to harass me again.

I have been supporting my landlord’s family for 9 years now, for about $300k. I paid for their mother’s end-of-life care. But she’s dead now (at 105 years), and so he doesn’t need me anymore. What they think they need now of about $1M than I’ve already given him, paid up front, to allow me continue to live in my home.

Beyond the abusive economics of rent seeking, their lordship is asking for a lot of emotional labor. They don’t like to think about this house, or about being a landlord, and it’s very taxing when they decide I am the person who should help them with this false reality. They emailed me 5 times in a week, without saying what they wanted, then called and left a 3 minute message that also didn’t say anything, and when I finally called them back they needed me to reassure them for 1 minutes that I would handle ¹I definitely don’t intend to handle anything, but my landlord can figure that out for themselves. Lies to dickbags that expose their dependency are a moral good. their realtor for them. They then asked me another half dozen times, I writing and by phone, if I wanted to buy the house – without first setting a price.

I told them I would be interested but wasn’t sure it was in my budget ²It’s definitely not. This house is probably going to sell for $1.1M and I not only can’t afford that but don’t want it. I’d maybe pay $450k for this place ($750k including my rent), but I’d much rather live someplace less white and more walkable., but this information didn’t take. Eventually the realtor convinced them I wasn’t buying and so they called back (and left a bunch more messages and email with no content) and gave us 37 days to be out. You know, a week longer than the legal minimum, in a place I’ve lived for a decade. Since they don’t want to think about this place it was easy to talk them up to 67 days, which is good because it takes 30+ days from making an offer on a house to being able to move in.

So I’m buying a house. Hopefully this one [fig 1]. It’s near Alaska and Rainier, at the Columbia City light rail station. I’ll share more about it later as the process chugs along, but I have decided for safety reasons that the street address will be secret from Mother and Pete, so I’m not writing it here.

But you’ll see from the map that I intend to live someplace more walkable. Grocery, lunch, parks, transportation are all significantly eaiser to access than in my current place. There are two tiny movie theaters (at least there were pre-COVID) which I’m pretty excited about as a way I might be able to practice doing movies again – something I used to do obsessively but now can hardly tolerate. There’s a big park that goes all the way to the lake.

I also really like that the place is accessible. There are stairs into it, but all the necessary bits including a real sized bedroom with a full bath bath on the first floor. Even the backyard is level with the first floor. The whole second floor is a master suite, but at least right now stairs are not a problem for me, and I’d be happy to live downstairs if they became one. The back yard fully surrounded with trees and hills so that the sun cannot murder me, and even enough to hide the neighbors despite the tight lot.

And a million other things. Some trips to the hospital and bad drug impacts and wet dogs and lots of crying. It’s not all bad news but it is a lot, and I’m out of practice at ranting, so let’s keep it simple.

I saved tons of images to screeding but it’s been so long that they’ve been archived off my phone. I’ll pull them back out, but not tonight, so here are some more recent selections.

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.

• 

• 

• 

• 

•