Cocooned

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Faith Popcorn called it “cocooning.” I call it agoraphobia.

It’s not that I’m afraid to leave the house; it’s just too cold in here to take off my clothes so I can get dressed. (A $200 gas bill for one month scared me straight.) Plus, I don’t want to have to find parking.

There’s plenty here to keep me occupied. I baked a cake from scratch last night. I wasn’t even hungry. And then I watched seven hours of West Wing.

I have a computer. I have a teevee. I have a new Victory Garden of tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and herbs. I shall just wait here two months till they’re ready.

I know just how that new cache of La Brea tar pits fossils feels. But like my dad said when I told him I thought he was beginning his Alzheimer’s: “If that’s the case, I want you to know: it doesn’t hurt. It’s not a bad feeling at all.”

If I stay still enough, and peaceful enough, I can wake in a decade, smack in the middle of President Biden’s first term, when we’ll all work 20 hours a week and fix our broken appliances instead of buying new ones. What else did Ecotopia promise us? I never finished it in high school, and I forget.

I am writing this Thursday morning, and things are better already! After only three months of bargaining and one midnight coup, California has a budget, with only many billions in cuts to services. My mother, political science major of the year a couple of decades back at CSUN, told me once that a government is judged on the effectiveness and efficiency of its bureaucracy. I have an excellent Social Security office in Koreatown: shiny, quick and friendly, and naturally lighted. And I had a beacon of DMV hope in the Santa Ana branch, where I once renewed my license, changed the address on my registration, took the written exam, retook my photo, and registered to vote, and was out the door in 17 minutes; I hope it will continue to shine its miracle light—like the Hannukah oil, for the Jews!—for my old neighbors.

But I’m guessing it probably won’t. According to our California GOP friends, taxation is “theft” and government was made to be broken. And for some bizarre reason, Hemet and Modoc, California’s own Alabama and Kansas, keep electing them for the rest of us. How they claw and fight!

On my television last night, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan stopped by. He was there to explain to Keith Olbermann that President Obama’s new housing proposal will help every American, he said, because if you live next door to a foreclosure, your property value goes down. Fuck you, Shaun Donovan, I yelled at my telly. My neighbor’s property value needs to go down! There’s no more negative amortization loans!

Just ask the Irvine Housing Blog, where the latest travesty is a one-bedroom apartment for $300k you’d need an income of $75,000 to buy. Luckily, I stopped caring about buying a house sometime in 2006. Should we make whole all Bernie Madoff’s investors too?

And yet, my instant ire at HUD Secretary Donovan aside—with a dozen presidential debates focusing on poor upside-down schmucks, and not a word for the third of us who pay someone else’s mortgage, renters are the loneliest people in the world— I’m not totally spitty about this plan like I would usually be. I’m sorry if people lost their jobs. And I’m definitely sorry if they got refinanced by sharks. Obama’s got me wondering not what my country can do for me, but what I can do for my fellow American idiots. (Yes, she’s absolutely beyond, but it’s breaking my heart nonetheless: Nadya Suleman’s mother is now in danger of losing her three-bedroom house.) I have an idea: Why don’t we take all those instant ghost towns where builders put up their sad tracts, nationalize them, and turn them all into Section 8? Just get the Santa Ana DMV to run it. We’ll all be happy and housed in 17 minutes. Flat.

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.