Halloween houses

My favorite regular holiday, one that is generally celebrated by people other than my wife and myself, is Halloween. And Halloween is in less than three weeks! 

So I am sitting here in my "Great Pumpkin Believer" T-shirt, and I'm pretty excited.

What do I do for Halloween?

Nothing. Usually. But that's hardly the point!

A few days ago out on a photography foray I saw this:

So not only did I take a picture of it (see above), but I thought:

I should take a bunch of pictures of Halloween Houses and show them to everyone on my blog for Halloween!

Yes, I have a blog. It's called Clerkmanifesto.

Thank you for your interest, but I'd rather not get bogged down in explaining that right now.

So anyway, I headed off to take a whole bunch of incredible pictures of all the beautifully decorated Halloween Houses around here.

Only I didn't find any.

Oh, there was this one. It's okay I guess. I kind of like the giant spiderweb:

Though, let's face it, the spiderweb is close to all there is to it.

And on the whole, around my stomping grounds, it is mostly just a pumpkin here or there. 

Perhaps it's too early? 

Maybe the Pandemic has squashed local enthusiasm for the holiday? 

The point is that I wasn't able to come up with a whole roll, so to speak, of pictures of Halloween Houses. And this is a shame because there are probably few places in the world with better and more suitable houses for Halloween than these general 1880 to 1930 ones we've got laying around by the hundreds in the city neighborhoods of the Twin Cities.

But reflecting upon this sad state of affairs I realized there was no need for me to give up. This brilliant fall is easily the most picturesque time of the year and with a little proper framing, a bit of tweaking of  photos of houses that have captured my heart, and a trip to my favorite street of fairytale houses, with them cozily nestled in the height of Autumn as they are right now, I felt I was sure to be able to put together a nice enough, albeit small and slightly repetitive, collection of possibly haunted, enchanted looking houses. 

And if a pumpkin or some lights should happen to show up on these doorsteps in the next week or two, it's all for the good. 

What a house is

I don't have a lot of readers out here in Internetland, something I like to periodically mention in passing in the hope that it will cause someone to write an angry letter to the authorities. But sometimes I have a few more readers than I think. And so it was when, on the issue of leaving my home of 16 years, I took the beating heart out of my bleeding chest and put it... here.

This caught the attention of some of you, in a nice way. But it also possibly gave the impression that we are perhaps being ripped from our home by heartless land speculators, or by a tragic fall in fortunes. So I would like to set the record straight, and say that while there is great sadness for me in leaving this house, and while I really don't enjoy the process of doing so (which is like all the crappy things about owning a house having one more hysterical, dramatic shot at us), I go willingly, finding the tally of the home owning burdens starting to outpace its joys.

In The Lord of the Rings there is a long sequence where Frodo knows he has to leave his home, Bag End, and the Shire, to go off on a perilous quest he may never return from. And if I recall correctly, though this is all meant to be a secret, he tips off his friends by wandering around for years muttering things like:

"Will I ever walk past this tree again?"

and

"I may never see this field again alas."

This is so totally me! 

The Black Riders, the Nazgul, are on their way. I have but a little time to get it together and, for all the grief, and practicality, and opera, strike out on an adventure. Which is what this is too. And each day I grow more and more keen to go.

So thank you for your concern.

It's okay. I'm okay.

We don't own places, we just borrow them.

House sold

The heat and humidity pressed into the world all day, and walking through my thick and soon to be former neighborhood 79 degrees felt to me much more like 90. A storm was brewing. The big storms here can sometimes take a day or two to cook up. But it's night now, and raining hard. There's thunder, and the trees toss unevenly in the hard winds.

At work I see a lot of people I know and so I was ready for it: 

"How are you?" Like a curse.

I know that "how are you" is a mere pleasantry. I know that is how it was made, barely to differ from "Good Morning" or "Hi". Greasing the wheels. Making a casual connection. The symbol of an interest that can't really be fulfilled.

It is made for "Fine".

But it has its words, how, are, you, soft and heavy words, and with a shape. It hangs out there as fruit to not pick. It sits there rotting on the tree. "How are you?"

"Do you really want to know?"

("No")

"How are you?"

Heartbroken to be moving. We sold our home. Miserable. 

(I'll be fine I swear).

"How are you?"

How are you was not made for the likes of me today. I don't know what you're asking. I don't think those words mean what they mean.

"How are you?"

Black as this storm. Sad. Sad. Homeless. Swept away on a flood.

"That's great news that your house sold! You must be..."

Fine.

Fine.

Fine.

Fine.

Fine.

Home as metaphor for life

Our house is for sale. And as we enter into the end of the initial, though not necessarily fruitful, flurry of interest in it I am struck by its familiarity. It strangely resonates with many of the endeavors of my life. As it is with this blog, a lifetime in the arts, and any number of pursuits in the wider world, so it is with the reactions thus far to the sale of our house:

Cute
Charming
Priced right
Love the updates


Not for us


3 out of 5

Arachnophobe

Because we are selling our house, each morning we go through a process of getting it all neat and clean for all the day's showings. One of the many tasks is to sweep out the vast and voluminous spiderwebs that form thickly around our back door and around the exterior light attached there.

Now if you are like me and do not like spiders so much, and don't like big, leggy, quick, scuttling, grey brown spiders so much, you might want to take this small piece of advice I have to offer you:

When using a broom to clear out thick, massive overhead spiderwebs, that amazingly were able to be constructed overnight, do not, I repeat, do not stand underneath.

 I'll be fine in a few months. Thank you.

How to flip a house for fun and profit

In today's housing market it is super easy to make a ton of money flipping houses. I should know! My wife and I are just completing our first house flipping and as soon as someone buys it instead of saying "Cute house, but not for us." we will be just shoving money into our bank accounts.

You want in on all this sweet action but don't know how? Worry not amigo, I have all the experience and knowledge at my fingertips, and I don't mind sharing. There is plenty to go around!


Step 1:

Buy a half wrecked house.

We did. It was "As is" in a hot market. Tiny, 90 year old house, old water heater, peeling paint, gaping holes in crumbling walls and cracked plaster everywhere, hideous linoleum and industrial carpeting covering the floors, ancient, corroded pipes, 60 year old gravity furnace, asbestos, no appliances you wouldn't want to burn in The Cracks of Doom and would be willing to lose a finger in order to do so, moldy junk everywhere, no functional windows and doors hardly more functional than that, and a wide variety of "minor" code violations we would have to take responsibility for.

This is just the kind of house you're looking for. These problems are your savings.


Step 2:

Get to work.

We got to work. We got others to work. We worked. And we also worked to pay others to work. We bought things, we repaired things, we stripped things, we smashed things, we dumped things, we rebuilt things, we patched things, we invented things, we replaced things, and we fixed things. We had no idea what we were doing half the time, but we did it anyway. It was hard, but we did it anyway.

And after a mere sixteen years our house was quite cute and relatively functional, considering its age and limitations. The worst was over and the cash is just around the corner. Ka-ching!


Step 3:

Cash in!

We are in a hot real estate market once again. So many people come to look at our house every day that we can no longer spend any time there. They all think it's a "cute" four out of five, but not for them because of reasons. But, and I say BUT, any day now, any day now, someone will hit go and then we will be rolling in it. Let's just look at the dollar figures even if it makes you turn green with envy ("green", get it?):

Outlays:

Mortgage, taxes, and Insurance, 16 years:
$162,325

Maintenance:
$31,350

Improvements and Rehabs:
$47,200

Replacements and Repairs:
$22,000


Income:

(Prospective) sale of home minus agent fees, remaining amount owed, and miscellaneous costs:
$102,400


Total Profit:

Minus $160,475



Okay. I know that negative $160,475 might not seem like a huge profit to the prospective home flipper.

One might even suggest that it is a loss of a significant amount of money.

But you are forgetting about the intangibles.


Intangibles:


Value of living in house for free for 16 years, several of those years with the house being in pretty good shape:
$182,000!


Greatly increased knowledge of Plumbing, Carpentry, Electrical, and Landscaping, value of Trade School Education equivalent (roughly 8 years):
$48,000


Which means that our total profit is:


Real Total Profit:
$70,475


For a mere 16 years of near constant pleasant but grueling labor.

So get to it house flippers!

The money waits!

And the clock it ticks!

The house

We're selling our home. We're selling our home and moving to an apartment.

I haven't bought or sold a lot of homes, but I have noticed that all the many people we've dealt with, agents and brokers and inspectors and so on, have been very nice, but they have also been very glib. Well, "glib" is too pejorative a word. I am looking for a word that means "I describe this thing as very simple and easy to do because I don't have to do it".

Surely there's a word for that. But for just now I'm going to put in "glib" as a sort of placeholder, that's permanent, and that doesn't quite mean what I want it to.

When we bought our home 16 years ago it was half a wreck. And all the houses we looked at were pretty wrecked too. "Oh, sure it's got some holes through the roof but you can just patch those up with old roofing tiles and some joint compound, and shellac. I think I might have some you can use in my garage." That was not the selling agent quoted there, that was our guy, our real estate agent, who was great, super nice. I guess glibness just goes with the territory. "Sure this door has no hinges, but you can jam some chewing gum in there and it'll work a treat. Or if you want a more finished job I can hook you up with a disgraced former carpenter if you can pay him cash. 'Nam kind of rocked him, but I'd trust him with my life."

To sell our house we had to get inspected by two inspectors. They were super nice and had almost no problems with our house. "Just this leaky corroded pipe." They said. "You should replace this. But five seconds and any plumber can pop this right out. Simple job."

Well sure, simple job because they didn't have to do it, or pay for it. Even I, who only had a sort of passive assisting role in getting it done, found it exhausting. My wife called plumbers and they didn't call back. One was tracked down in our alley and a visit was arranged. We were assured he would have everything on the truck. So he came while we set aside time to wait for him. Then he didn't have the item. Then we had arrange for another time, at dawn the next day. Then we had to wake up for him, and open faucets and listen to the faintly alarming man do things in the basement. Then we had to give him hundreds of dollars. For some reason now the water pressure in the shower is low.

Easy peasy.

I am not the driving force behind this move, but I will find my way through. Just so long as no one tells me it's easy:

Oh you just pop your home on the market, sell it up, get rid of all your stuff, and move to an apartment overlooking the river. Tis the work of a moment. You'll hardly notice.

Demographics for fun

Up and down the streets and river and creek of my neighborhood, driving the breadth of the Twin Cities in all the wild and mundane pursuits of 27 years of my adulthood, and relentlessly out with the teeming public at the front desk of my large, public library where I work for a living, I feel I have come to know my city with some level of detailed knowledge. So when I am hiking along the Mississippi River in South Minneapolis, in front of the river road houses there all costing between 800,000 and 1.5 million dollars, and I see a lawn sign that says:

I love my Muslim neighbors

while I am right in recognizing the impulse towards decency driving the planting of said sign, I am also quite correct in thinking:

You don't have any Muslim neighbors.

The wound

We were conducting our seasonal deep clean at my house. I was almost at the end too, finishing off by cleaning the bedroom windows. But to open these windows to clean the exterior part I had to push in two tabs and pull the top of the window out. The tabs wouldn't quite retreat enough. I pushed and prodded and several times thought "I'd better be careful. I could easily hurt myself." But I didn't listen so well.

Holding the tab in I tugged hard, and, to my delight, out popped the window from its track. Huzzah! Unfortunately my forefinger was a little in the way and, near the tip, was pinched between two hard, irresistibly moving objects. I pulled my finger away in shock and looked at it in fascination. There was this thick, instant blister on it, white and swollen, and, as I watched it, blood started welling up out of the sides of it like I'd struck oil. Ooooooooo.

I decided this would be a good time to visit my wife. So I made my way across our bed, leaving a bit of myself behind. I dripped blood down the stairs which were very clean and white. The blood looked beautiful on the pure unsullied background of the stairs. I dripped blood across the living room and found my wife.

And I was home again. 

Beautiful house

Dear Neighbor,


I could not help but notice what a lovely house you have. Not only is it beautiful, but it is so well kept up. That can't be easy because it is huge. You have a huge house! I bet you can put any sized refrigerator you want in that house of yours with no problems at all. My house is much smaller and appliance sizes have always been major considerations for us. But I don't envy whoever is in charge of dusting or vacuuming at your place. Maybe they can do it on roller skates?

Anyway, a big beautiful house like yours must be expensive. I mean, not only must it have cost a lot to buy, but the taxes and upkeep can't be any picnic either. I sure couldn't afford it even if I were being financially reckless. And your house doesn't have a reckless feel to it. So I am figuring you are probably at least mildly wealthy. Which brings me to my point.

Can you send me some postage stamps?

I have been thinking of sending some of my writing around to professionals in the publishing field, but I have hit a snag. I don't have any stamps. It would be a shame if I did not become a world famous writer merely from lack of stamps! I am the greatest writer of my generation, and that's not just my opinion, that's corroborated by, well, no one yet because I don't have any stamps. But once, on my blog, "Anonymous" commented "Nice post :-)" which I think pretty much says it all.

The truth is it's not about the fame and riches. I just want to share with the world.

You may be wondering why I am writing asking you for stamps just on the basis of your having a nice house. Surely there are many more, vastly richer people to beseech? Or, even more appropriately, what about all those wonderful granting organizations designed to help artists in just my sort of predicament?

Good ideas, but there is a catch 22. 

I need stamps to contact them. 

As you can see, you're my neighbor. I can just leave this at your door!

So if you would be so kind and generous and would just pop me over, ideally, a large, fat roll of stamps, or a stack of sheets of them, that would be great. You can choose your own commemorative style (although I wouldn't turn my nose up at those Peanuts' Christmas ones!). And if heating that wonderful mansion of yours is getting you down, even a few stamps is at least a start for me. Indeed, even if you put only one stamp in an envelope to send to me (costing you two stamps, unfortunately, total, unless you drop it by personally, or have one of your servants do it), it's something, and I would not speak harshly of you. Indeed, I would only thank you for your kind consideration, and your friendly, probably tax deductible (consult your attorney) patronage of the arts.

Thank you in advance so much for all your help.



Your neighbor,




 F. Calypso

Dream come true

This may come as a surprise to the embattled, cynical, and sober among you, but dreams come true. I am not talking about long shots and Oscar winners, not Lady Gaga, Messi, and Sonia Sotomayor. I mean everyone. All of you, everywhere. Everyone will have dreams come true.

Yes, of course there's a catch. There are plenty of catches, but that doesn't change it or make it untrue. Nevertheless, yes.

We don't really know which dreams will come true.

Look behind you. There is a trail of dreams. We are dreamers. They trail behind us like clouds. Don't worry about them. They are not broken dreams, just dreams. They were never meant to all come true. That would cause the world to dissolve into a kaleidoscope of madness. Only a few dreams come true. You generally won't even expect it when they do. You might not even recognize a dream coming true until you get the right angle on it and you say

Oh.

I dreamed this.

Then you should try and enjoy it. Because it happens, but not a lot, not a lot at all.

Today of all days I will not tell you about a big dream come true. It is private and it would not serve so well as explanation to all this anyway. I will tell you about a smaller dream come true. A dream that I just noticed come true, with an enchanted realization, in the past few days. A smaller dream, yes, but no dream that comes true can ever be that small.

I dreamed this dream when I was 12 years old. I am not actually sure I wasn't as much as two or three years older than that, but the crude, childish lines of the articulation of the dream make me happier when I put it closer to childhood. But I don't want to misrepresent, so, 12 it is.

I dreamed of a house. I got in my mind a kind of fantasy house. People I loved would all live in that house. I had it all worked out. Of course, as I maybe only loved my cousin Jimmy at that point in my life, all these people were illusions, placeholders. I just wanted love there, and security, but didn't know how to picture it. The house I struggled to picture as well. It was in the woods, on a big lake. I drew pictures of it. I made a drawing of it with markers on the back of an old poster. It was surrounded by pines, on a little hill up over the lake. It was all by itself. Because I had never seen houses I loved and had not yet feverishly developed my imagination, I borrowed from a large A-frame cabin I had briefly visited and from the house I lived in. There was plenty of heavy wood. Balconies, like the one my parent's room had, dominated my design. How extraordinary, I thought, to have balconies overlooking something safe, wonderful, and beautiful, like a lake.

That was pretty much it. The dream, toyed with for a few months, was forgotten not long after, though the poster lingered on my wall for a few years. Clouds trailing behind, an untouched memory sleeping alongside who knows how many of my old dreams.

And then, a bit less than 40 years later I am sitting in this house. Pine trees are here. A lake greater than I could imagine, and likewise with love, one person, but perfect and all around me. We are living, for a moment, in that house. The balcony, heavy wood, runs 60 feet along our windows, all facing the lake down below us. We are alone floating in a dream. I had this dream, and now here it is.

Well I'll be.

I have heard the cautionary phrase "Be careful what you wish for" and I say "Or not." You never know what'll work out, and though the world throws its dark tricks is is as likely to play ones made of perfect light as well.

Seasons in hell

As we were working our 73rd consecutive day on an exhaustive, yet intricate, raft of home improvements and home remodeling, I heard the sounds of parties ringing out festively across our neighborhood. Since we had eschewed listening to working music merely on the basis of it being too much work to set up (see: 73rd consecutive day) I was left with older things than music. A line from an old French poem came to my mind over and over:

Once my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

This, as you may know, is from A Season in Hell by Rimbaud, and my memory of the line curiously omits "if my memory serves me well" ("Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.") which goes to show that my memory itself has the same sense of humor I do.

I, at the age of 50, am willing to say that my life has been, in the past, occasionally, for not, like, hugely extended periods of time, but on special occasions, a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed. Metaphorically. I am also willing to say that A Season in Hell is a great scorch of poems and I have fond memories of hearing that first one recited in a tent during an endless rainstorm in the Sierras while drinking whiskey and eating peanut butter. But just now I am reflecting on Rimbaud, who was 19 or younger when he wrote the poem. I am feeling a bit stunted in the old empathy department. When I was 19 I had not come close to a time when all hearts opened and all wines flowed. I had at most seen two flowing wines at one time and maybe eight or nine open hearts total, ever! So this Rimbaud kid seems lucky, if you ask me. And a season in hell? Okay, but I bet this talented Rimbaud kid had never totally remodeled a small, old house like we have. Now that's tough.

But I understand. Young people buy all the poetry and you have to cater to them, all fire and anguish. They're the ones who keep it going, and they deserve it. After all, adolescence is no picnic. Except maybe for this Rimbaud cove, who apparently had one with all hearts open and all wines flowing. 

GFCI

We have been doing a lot of work on our house this year. A large portion of that work is being done by ourselves, even though, most of the time, we don't actually know how to do it. Chutzpah! Sometimes we learn how, sometimes we make it up, sometimes it ends in tears, sometimes it ends in triumph, but most of the time we include all of those ingredients in the soup.

I will tell you today about replacing a GFCI outlet. Not so that you can learn how. Clerkmanifesto is not a University, it's a, um, er, it's a, well, hmm, let's see. It's a lost ship, encrusted heavily with barnacles, going somewhere very, very, very special. But you'll always have to wait until we get there to know where exactly that is, and to my repeated surprise, we do get there on an average of two times a week.

But, alas, we must always leave once again.

Our GFCI outlet broke. Why? We are doing so much hard work and redesigning on our house that it seems cruel to have something one hardly considers fallible breakdown and need to get added to our to be done list. But more cruel things happen all the time, particularly as regards our house redesign. So we thought about getting the electrician back out. But then we thought maybe I could replace it. So I gave it a go.

I studied. I watched multiple YouTube videos. I got pretty clear on the concepts. And though the whole thing looked straightforward and clear, our house is old and strange. Opening things up reveals mysteries that can never be fully answered. And so it was this time. A GFCI outlet is generally going to have three wires running into it, or maybe five if it's protecting a line.  I was prepared for a small touch of confusion, but when I turned off the electricity and pulled the outlet out of the wall not only was the outlet faintly bizarre in its construction, but it tucked into an electrical box of outlandish complexity. Dozens of wires ran rampant around our outlet. Strange colors and unusual joining mechanisms conspired to give it a look out of Frankenstein's Lab, if the lab was built in 1962, by an Igor who was working on a restrictive budget.

I threw up my hands in despair. We prepared to call the Electrician.

But then I had a thought: What if really, at heart, it is secretly just three wires, all simply shrouded mysteriously in the form of dozens of wires.

And so it was. It was like a slipknot of wires. I started to disassemble them and before long they had collapsed themselves down to being three wires. Some of their colors were, um, old fashioned, but I was able to work out what was what with a full 70% confidence. I put it all together, popped it in the wall, and it worked as it was supposed to.

The unbridled joy and exaltation I felt at this triumph was at least partly informed by the fact that I was not electrocuted to death, which was almost as good in its own right as being able to plug in our new nightlight.

No one there to hear

After a ten day vacation that wasn't a vacation because all I was doing was complicated and difficult remodeling work on our very small house, I returned to work.

Yes, ten days working, and I returned at work at the library.

"Hi." I said.

"Hi" People said. "You're back."

"Yes." I said.

Then I caught up on all the happenings at the library over the past week and a half.

"What happened while I was gone?" I asked.

"Nothing." People replied.

And I was all caught up.

But of course plenty happened while I was gone.

It was ten solid days of trees falling in a forest. Only, I wasn't there to report them.

A question for the ages

We needed a couple of ceiling lights in our pursuit of household perfection, or at least in our pursuit of our house not being a decrepit ruin. Either way I suppose we're getting there. And part of getting there involved going to a lighting store. The lighting store is called Creative Lighting. It's big, and it has a lot of lights. There are hundreds of chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and floor lamps and table lamps are scattered liberally across the large store. There are big wall displays of anything from the mundane to the elaborate in porch lights, and there are ceiling lights as far as the eye can see. I'm just saying that it's a big place with a huge number of lighting fixtures, thousands of lighting fixtures.

And nearly all of them are on.

So my question is this:

Why was I not blinded? It was no brighter in there with over a thousand lamps of all kinds and strengths turned on than it is in my living room with one light on.

It was like if I one day woke up to find that there were suddenly a hundred suns in the sky, full, blinding, yellow suns, instead of one, but all with it being no warmer or more sunny than on any normal, pleasant day from all of history.

It's just mysterious, is all I'm saying, and I think someone is up to something and that the end of the world my be approaching. Though none of that stopped us from buying the lighting fixtures we needed. And good thing too. I suspect that in a few years even a hundred ceiling lights in our small bathroom will be insufficient to allow us to find our way to the toilet in the middle of the night.