Never stand in the way. Of anything.

This is a narrative about the evolution of depression. Don't read it if you are uncomfortable with descriptions of awkward mental processes.

In a renewed effort to find a place to live before the November election fucks up interest rates and house prices and all we can afford to live in are those yellow Goodwill clothing drop boxes in the corners of grocery store parking lots, I went on a couple of house tours today. The places I looked at were not great. I had many thoughts while on these tours. Here are a few of them.

First thought for the day: The places I looked at were condos. There were limits and restrictions and requirements. These are not things that I get excited about when I imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in my own home. Conclusion: Living in a condo is like willingly giving up one's adulthood and reverting to that stage of childhood in which one must co-exist with parents who require one to ask for permission to do all of the things that a reasonable adult would know how to do and be able to manage on one's own. Why? Why oh why oh why do people agree to do this? Do they not trust their own instincts? Can they not handle decision making?

Second thought for the day: Most real estate listings have some sort of sales history. One can tell by looking at the sales history whether a place was owned by one party for a length of time. The length of ownership often correlates to the degree of maintenance a place has received; the longer one party owns the place, the more likely it is to look deteriorated or outdated. Places can look "frozen in time" with light fixtures, cabinets, decorations, appliances and such from decades gone by that suggest that the home's last occupant was older than Joe Biden and probably in poorer health and didn't keep the place up very well. One of the places I looked at today had an old-fashioned cuckoo clock on the wall. It had been painted white just like the wall it was attached to. The bedroom hallway smelled like cleaning fluids and medical equipment and supplies. I wondered how sick the occupant was before they moved away. Third thought for the day: For a hot minute in the late 1990s, I became president of a homeowners association board because, as a "know-it-all," I argued that the existing board president's decision to prevent the installation of small satellite dish antennas on homeowners' roofs was a violation of the tenets of the federal Telecommunications Act. Elated homeowners forced out the existing board president, I was declared board president by acclamation, and thus I served as such for a few months, during which time several small satellite dish antennas were installed on various roofs in the neighborhood. I stopped being board president when a different neighbor, whose husband was a cop, threatened to use her husband's gun to shoot me because she didn't like the way I was presidenting and she wanted to be board president so she could manage the neighborhood pool. Never stand in the way of progress, I say. I resigned, gave her the notebook of meeting minutes, and am still alive today.

Fourth thought for the day: I am going to go look at another house tomorrow morning. The people that lived there previously operated a copier repair shop. They sold the house to a flipper last December. The flipper spent some quality time and money remodeling it because it looks great inside now. They didn't pick it up and move it to a different neighborhood, which would have been great, too, but they installed new floors, new fixtures, new windows, and repositioned the front door, painted it inside and out, and generally made it look pretty pleasant. But in a city where houses are sold in a matter of days, this one is long in the tooth. It has been on the market for three months. I am already imagining the worst. Aside from the lengthy time factor for the listing, the fact that the lot and house are zoned for business rather than residential, the fact that there's a really busy and noisy main thoroughfare about 800 feet away plus maybe some other kinda clunky neighborhoods just a few more blocks beyond that, I have no reason to imagine the worst. Do I?

There were other thoughts, too, even more tedious and dark than these. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I felt so bad I took a COVID test just to reassure myself that I was not sick.

Final thought for the day: Just thinking the accumulated negative thoughts of the day should have been sufficient. They put me in a foul mood, which is precisely what accumulated negative thoughts do. But I could have let them go. I didn't. I am going to bed tonight blaming myself for all of these ills, some of which are nearly 30 years old. I did nothing to cause any of these things to be what they are -- well, except maybe for the little uptick in satellite dish antennas in the New Mark neighborhood in 1997-98 -- and as a bystander, I should have been able to watch these matters blow on by. But I have internalized every one of these things and decided that I am somehow simultaneously responsible for and a target of all of this crap because of the bad choices I have made in my life. This is not accurate, but this is how disappointment and frustration turn into depression. This is intriguingly fucked up. I am looking forward to sleeping so my brain can sort it all out.