Valerie Bertinelli In A Muumuu
I don't really like to brag about stuff, mostly because I think that the gifts I have make themselves so readily apparent, just exposing them to you in any way is practically bragging in and of itself. Also, as I've said before, I'm a very humble person. Probably the humblest motherfucker you've ever met. I kick everyone else's ass when it comes to humility and self-deprecation.

I also don't really like to talk about anything that is actually true about my real life. Sure, I tell you people that I have no job and I have three kids and a wife and that I'm a hetero male, but really, are you sure any of that is true? It's easy to believe what people tell you publicly, but when the autopsy comes back and we learn that "Jerry Falwell" is and always has been a woman, well, you'll know anything is possible.

All that said, it's with some reluctance that I tell you all: I'm worth quite a bit of money.

Now, before you all head for Riverside with a car trunk full of shovels, chloroform, some sturdy rope and a bucket of lye, I would like to point out a couple of things: A) it would be stupid to kill me outright because then you'd never get at my money. Better to torture me first so you can get my ATM card PIN out of me. Whatever you do, I ask you, do NOT tie me naked, face down over a barrel and then lash me with a cat-o'-nine-tails whilst asking me where my biology homework is. I would TOTALLY hate that.

And B) All the money I'm actually worth is pretend real-estate money.

Mrs. Pops and I bought our first house back in '99, which means all this housing madness has occurred while we were part of the market, watching our equity balloon and balloon, like Kirstie Alley every year since Cheers went off the air.

Like Kirstie Alley, however, as nice as it might be to have a little extra junk in the trunk, it doesn't mean very much (for us: financially; for Kirstie: hygiene-wise) if you can't get to it. My wife and I like to discuss what we'd do with our big fat wad of equity, but we know capital gains would kill us if we tried to take it out and we'd need every single penny of it if we ever wanted to move again within SoCal. So it isn't actually any kind of money that's worth murdering me over. But don't let me discourage you from the torture thing. It's worth a try.

The problem is, that fake though or enormous wealth might be, like Kirstie Alley again, it's now on some kind of bullshit diet that we think frankly it's undertaken just for the publicity. See, it's already all over the news how for the first time in 12 years the average house price actually fell last month. If our pretend equity fortune shows up on Oprah in a bikini, we're totally fucked. And I mean I-guess-we-have-to-move-to-Texas fucked.

Believe me, nobody wants to move to Texas. George H. W. Bush took his family there from Connecticut and look how that worked out for the rest of us. Do you think anyone would have voted for his son if he'd been from Connecticut? A New England Jesus-freak Republican? I don't think it's possible on a quantum level for such a creature to even exist, let alone win an election. But this is the kind of dire consequences I face should the real-estate market continue to deteriorate. The entire geopolitical state of the world may very well depend on my kids growing up unremarkably anonymous and godless California liberals.

With an eye toward a difficult future, belts are being tightened around the Bucket household. We've already downgraded from 12 HBO channels to 10. The days of our dog's regular monthly champagne enemas? Over. Goodbye deep-fried fois gras sticks for my kid's lunch, hello chicken fingers.

We make these sacrifices, because my wife and I realize it's all up to us. There's no use sitting around waiting for our public officials to help us out. We're Americans, after all. We're all supposed to do it ourselves.

Proud as I am of our country's long history of ignoring those who need help, I will say I sometimes envy a more corporatist, collective approach to social well-being as is practiced in Europe. Public servants there expect a certain level of involvement and interference with the slow slide down the social ladder that afflicts an expected percentage of the citizenship and are quick to react. For instance in Italy, specific economic realities are prompting a certain segment of the hostess and hospitality industry to offer their services, gratis, to alleviate some of the roiling, pent-up economic pressure that afflicts a population.

Sure, I could use a free handy every now and again, but as I said, I'm an American. Not only do I have a certain amount of built-in overdeveloped individualist pride, but the hostess-and-hospitality industry over here works somewhat differently. Italy enjoys a proud tradition of sophisticated concubinage, a mantle currently taken up and probably upheld by a wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa nudged into the profession by indentured servitude or organized crime. Over here we have a bunch of skeevy, scabby meth-heads.

That said, for the sake of my family, I'd totally take a run at Kirstie Alley. I hear she's swimming in Jenny Craig money.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 8.9



Pops

Labels: sigmoid

- posted by Pops @ 9:36 AM