This has absolutely been the most fucked-up year of my life; I lost my house, I hit the skids of poverty like a plane making an upside-down landing, I came unnervingly close to going to prison, and now I ended up in the ER.If you want to hear the hilariously sad details you must become a Facebook friend of Leonard's (you can always read his excellent everyday material here). He might be more inclined to friend you if you sent something to his PayPal at leonard.pierce@gmail.com, but I can't make any promises.
While alicubi.com undergoes extensive elective surgery, its editors pen somber, Shackletonian missives from their lonely arctic outpost.
Monday, October 15, 2012
HELP A BROTHER OUT. Wordsmith and occasional alicublog commenter Leonard Pierce on Facebook:
OK, I enjoy the heck out of LP, but anyone who owned a house (at least he didn't type that he'd "Lost his 'home.'") is a fucking stupid middle-class pig who deserves everything he gets. Or doesn't get. You play w/ matches, you will get burned.
ReplyDeleteAs much as I would like to "friend" Leonard, hell would have to freeze over before I would join Face Book.
ReplyDeleteI'm not middle-class! Fuck you.
ReplyDeleteAbout the best thing I can say about you right now is that you've made the case for downvoting rock-solid.
ReplyDeleteCome on M. you are better than that.
ReplyDeleteI own 3 houses.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Roy -- and thanks to all of you who help(ed) out, even if it's just by wishing painful death on my enemies.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, almost all of my posts on Facebook are public, since I'd hate to restrict anyone from hearing the clownishly luckless details of my recent downward spiral. The short of the long of it is that I've been out of work now for over two years (aside from the occasional freelancing), and I just got hit with a particularly gross kidney infection, and no insurance to pay the bill. This puts me in the elite company of only a few hundred million other folks in the world -- believe me, I know I ain't special, which just makes me all the more appreciative of anyone who's lent a hand.
I've pitched in to this place's good karma stream in the past, never expecting I'd be a recipient of it. I'm happy it works both ways, and am looking forward to being back in fighting trim. So, when's the election? Still a good couple of months, right?
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't own it. I just lived in it and ran out of money to pay for it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Bouffant is a French anarchist. La propriété, c'est le vol!, or summat.
ReplyDeleteChrist, what an asshole.
ReplyDeleteIt's morally superior to be dependent on a property-owning landlord? Whut?
ReplyDeleteMB, this is beneath you. Lots of us bought houses back when it made sense to buy them (when a house payment was cheaper than rent on the same house). Doing something that makes good financial sense doesn't make one a "middle-class pig" when it allows one to save by piling up equity rather than to flush the money away on rent. I bought my house 20 years ago for a payment that averaged $300 less per month than it would have cost to rent it - that was a choice between waving goodbye to $168,000 in rent vs. building up equity of $100,000 in the time since I bought it. Not to mention that with paying higher rent than I do on the house payment, I wouldn't have been able to save any money otherwise.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it was shockingly bourgeois and unimaginative to have purchased my little 915 sf, now 75-year-old bungalow, but I hardly think it would justify calling me stupid or gleefully rubbing one's hands together should I for any reason lose my house. Your comment assumes that everyone who bought a house did so during the bubble when there were all those shenanigans going on in the mortgage market. An awful lot of us who have mortgages had them long before any of that began, and took them on for very sound financial reasons.
Real artists squat. Or mooch off their friends. Or find an upper-class patron. Or go insane and kill themselves.
ReplyDeleteThey don't live in a house.
guess not
ReplyDelete