Could it be the that the best hedge against being hit too hard by any present recession is to live in an area that never recovered from previous ones?
I made it. I drove nearly three thousand miles (Well, I didn’t do the driving, but I was a passenger for every one of those miles!) and am now ensconced in a poolside apartment complete with central air-conditioning and a patio. It’s a veritable paradise compared to what I was living in before (an absolute dump for which I have yet to receive my security deposit. The filching hand of East coast casual criminality strikes again). Nestled at conjugal nexus of two glittering freeways, this apartment made of Chinese plaster and drywall awakens vague memories of middle-class luxury, the first of such memories I’ve had in years.
Despite the boxes scattered everywhere (I didn’t manage to throw away nearly as much of my Scottish woolen skirts and Swiss balance balls as I intended), I feel at home in this shoddy stucco box in the desert in a way that only someone who has given up on the future can. At night the gently aggressive hum of engines of speeding cars lull me to sleep, the vapid giggles of boozy sorority girls home from last-call hookups wake me in the morning. The sun beats mercilessly through my vinyl blinds every day without fail. Towering clouds gather ominously on the horizon but never deliver themselves of cooling rain, being held at bay by a dome of heat that rises from miles upon miles of concrete. Some might call my living situation hellishly empty, but I’m unabashed enough to admit that I haven’t experienced such creature comforts in years. An in-unit washer and dryer can do much to soothe the modern soul. Read the rest of this entry »
Every five years or so, I move. And it’s torture. I’m suddenly reminded of how, despite my best efforts, I’m a slave to all those ephemeral impulses that advertising loves to fill us with till we’re fit to burst. I’m surrounded by boxes upon boxes of things I don’t even think I need. It’s going to cost me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to transport these things, and I ‘m not even sure anymore how half of them came into my possession. Scottish woolen skirts and kettle balls and European board games and Norwegian dictionaries and swim paddles and dutch ovens and bread machines and Laughing Buddha bookends — they all are scattered around my apartment or tossed in a box and I don’t know why.
A heat wave grips New England, making the days downright tropical. Thunderstorms, which come daily, bring no relief, only a kind of steamy weight and closeness. Air becomes almost too heavy to breathe. Everything is obscenely green, bringing to mind those films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski in South America.
So I took a break (as did Rob and Anton). From all the news about finance moguls and oil well caps and dying shrimp and a dying economy. I took a break and tried to focus on things like the stars at night and interpersonal relationships and how, despite all the ugliness, the world is sometimes beautiful and how life is worth living even if you can’t get a job. I thought it would make me smarter and more engaging if I weren’t so doom and gloom all the time, writing about the resurgence of National Socialism and the end of history and all that fun stuff we don’t talk about over the World Cup and cheap beer.
When I was eight years old my family traveled to Chile for Christmas. The country was then under Agosto Pinochet’s reign of Friedmanite-directed neoliberal terror. The night of our arrival, we had to evacuate from the Santiago Sheraton because of a bomb scare. The next morning a major subway station experienced a severe explosion. All in all, it was an exciting trip — to say the least.
I can’t say I was terribly surprised to read the lede, “A three-decade analysis of prior research reveals that American college students are not quite as empathetic as they used to be,” in 
The author of a 2004 
My attitude toward consumerism was indelibly marked by my having grown up during the cold war, when the conflict between East and West was popularly depicted as a struggle between a deliriously joyous consumerism and a gray life of deprivation and standing in lines to secure soap and crusty bread. Throughout my years in junior high and high school, I can remember hearing repeatedly about how jealous youths in the U.S.S.R. were about Americans owning multiple pairs of blue jeans and how a pair of Levi’s was worth as much as a car over there. The shopping mall was in its ascendancy, commonly touted as an air-conditioned paradise, the architectural triumph of consumerism, offering an ideal civic space for contemporary times that could and should make dangerous urban city centers moribund. Suburban neighborhoods in the U.S. may have been boring and isolating, but it didn’t matter because the mall was where you would go to meet friends, fetishize a panoply of goods, stock daydreams with branded luxuries, cram down junk food and generally become who you really were. ¶ But there were no malls behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, we learned, there were state-run depots from which goods were issued to the demoralized population, who could ask no questions nor offer suggestions about what sort of things they actually wanted. Everyone was forced to have the same stuff, because no one was allowed to be different and it was a crime to think of yourself as an individual.
Sometimes I’m sad the bubble burst. Fortunately, Americans’ bubble-butts endure. ¶ The age of lenders pushing jumbo mortgages gave rise to eateries pushing jumbo portions — The Cheesecake Factory, as well as 