Monday, June 23, 2014

For the care and feeding of my soul.



This weekend I had to escape from the world. I didn't even turn on my monitor yesterday. Some days you just want to throw your hands up in the air with how stupid things have gotten. Sometimes the best you can do is try to block it out for a short time. And that is what I needed to do.

Even though I'd gotten rid of the exploding mortgage on my place in January, my rental again got all the attention. I had to fix damage from the previous renter. I had to upgrade the property so I could get PMI off. That house has been robbing me of time and money for years. I'd just gotten it gutted when the market fell out. My renter was living in a brand new place, and I couldn't even work on my own because until January of this year because I wasn't sure I was going to be able to keep it. Even when I was working on getting a new renter in there this time, I had a particular bitterness because I was fixing the place up for someone else and I couldn't even work on my own place yet. For the second time!

There is a particular psychology that happens when you have an exploding mortgage and are underwater - you aren't going to do that much to keep the place up. You don't want to throw good money after bad. You just want to keep it up enough that if you have to do a sudden short sale - you don't get super raped. So, I did the yards because if you have some aggression to work out - running a bobcat and putting down a few pallets of sod isn't the worst way you can spend doing it.

Through the recession I realized how much we are all governed by the same impulses. I'd think I was this unique flower - but you could see people were reacting to things the same way I was. Sometimes it would take a while to see it unfold, but it just takes some longer for some than others. The recession made me understand the invisible hand in a way you can never explain to people. The invisible hand is just people all having the same impulses at about the same time in an unconscious way.

This is why politicians can never really understand why the stuff they do doesn't work. Until you are living it - you can't figure out how people will react. It doesn't matter what your algorithms and models say - the invisible hand knows better. Always.

Anyway - that was a really long way to tell you I was painting this weekend. And let me say - you have not lived until you own your own scaffolding. Just say'in.

No comments:

Post a Comment