My heritage I’m flippantly flushing down a backed up toilet as I browse subscription single origin coffee services

Because of the economy

My girlfriend and I looked at an apartment one street east of our current place, in the same enchanting neighborhood of majestic oaks and ornate fountains and geriatric mushroom people and inscrutably isolated and affluent individuals living in three and four story homes by themselves, crocheting and sharpening knives in the turret windows, in the same densely foliated grid that hosts parades and flea markets and fish fry’s, with the requisite two or three colossal government assisted shanties housing 60 tenants who deposit engineless 1989 dodge chargers and two door pontiac sunfires on the streets and in the alleys behind their homes.

This apartment was a hand carved dream, a darkly gleaming jewel of prewar craftsmanship, probably loaded with asbestos and other discontinued materials that destroy brain and sperm cells but the build, the old wood trim, the wide hallways where you could ballroom dance down to the kitchen, the two true bedrooms and a dining room with built in bookcases, the claw foot tub, the front porch hidden by hedges, the backyard garden, the diffuse atmosphere of elegance, all would make the inevitable ingestion of paint chips and fiberglass worth it.

Of course, moving from one apartment to another in the same city in the same neighborhood solves none of our problems, such as the continuing devaluation of the dollar, the accelerated splintering of our immediate families and decrepitude of our parents, the increasing distaste for available lines of work and the all-purpose spreading of a spiritual, cultural and social wasteland within and without, the plastic, unreal yet undeniable Helmann’s Malaise flooding the decivilizing world.

And the apartment isn’t available anyway, as we learned toward the end of the tour that pets aren’t allowed, and we have three cats, our late millennial replacement for children as everyone knows and bemoans; the birth rate is tanking because we selfishly decided to become Disney adults and devote our lives to riding the tower of terror and taking pictures of ourselves with mouths agape while holding Cambodian corn dogs with spicy red sauce and playing obscenity laden board games with our cats whom we dress up as our favorite marvel superheros and harry potter characters, and children wouldn’t work with our budget and lifestyle, sorry human race, sorry great grandparents I never knew but whose grim struggles and knife fights and dirt sandwiches were endured solely for the sake of continuing the family legacy, them thinking golddamnit I’m only scalping injuns and sucking down squirrel head soup and burning the great plains to a crisp so that my descendants will one day be fruitful and multiply and carry this genetic line forward; my heritage I’m flippantly flushing down a backed up toilet as I browse subscription single origin coffee services and listen to three podcasts at once —a lifestyle that includes sleeping in until 2 pm on weekends, sleeping in hyperbaric hydroponic marijuana steam pods and watching lewd atheist cartoons and eating psychedelic cereal, letting Mayan demon pimps trick me out on astral streetcorners, and if we had a kid or two who might be the latest son of Satan, or a Stephen King style firestarter, a force of elemental or devilish chaos, or a supercharged genetically modified cornfed autist, the real heavy kind, not the slightly cerebral bore with peculiar obsessions but the headbutting holes in the wall Kodiak bear sized nonverbal nightmare child of God, a miracle and a gift, I mean—that would be fine, but cats, pets, absolutely not, out of the question. The 120-year-old woman landlady, who has lived in the building all her life, who has bruises on her hands from gnats landing on her that won’t go away before she dies, who inherited the house from her mother, who surely haunts the estate, who, if I were to live there, would appear to me at 3 in the morning in the abyssal hallway, in a shimmering gown, as a skeleton with bits of skin and flesh still sticking to her bones, reverberantly cursing her long dead husband for likely though never proven infidelities, has forbade pets, and I and my cohabitating girlfriend— whom I besmirch every day with my male stagnancy and squalor, leaving the toilet seat up, no, rigging an acme fake collapsing seat to the toilet so that she plunges backwards into my filth again and again, she keeps falling for it, whom I string along and refuse to marry, withholding from her the security and dignity of marriage, a right extended to all people and things these days, finally realizing the ancient potential of a sacred bond; why can’t I participate in this noble tradition and uplift myself and my girlfriend, when there are men who’ve married their three third wives for the second time, their main jack off hands, their aloe plants and their chatbots, their backup truck, the weekend one with the wheelchair lift—must resign ourselves to renting, lamentably, never owning our own home stuffed with our own children, as our forebears intended, renting not a beautiful and capacious two bedroom dwelling in a Faulknerian mansion where we might enjoy a bit more charm for the rest of our barren and desperate pleasure seeking lives, but a one bedroom laminate floor apartment in a plywood complex where shifting populations of indeterminate nationality drift through the common areas inhaling vape pens and playing hyperpop world music from handheld speakers, where there’s no pet policy and many of the tenants keep ducks and exotic farm animals. But why move at all, we’re not going anywhere.