Of Nests and Pests...

 Please forgive the lateness of this post, for the Overlord had 'puter problems -- both keyboard and monitor gave up the ghost, simultaneously -- and my attempts at bodging together older components, and the blatant lies told by UPS concerning the definition of "two-day delivery", kept me from my regularly-scheduled duties. Sometimes, even the Dark Side cannot overcome the power of What Brown Can Do For To You. In the meantime, I also have to deal with this)

I think I've mentioned before in this space that The Overlords are currently in the process of selling the Death Star. The semi-suburban Hell of Staten Island has gotten to be something of a major annoyance in recent years, due mainly to the influx of what I like to refer to as The Middle Class With No Class, and a political leadership to the Left of Stalin, only with fewer braincells and more verbal diarrhea.

Generally speaking, this archetypical diseased Middle Class consists of a mated pair of douchebags and their 2.5 bags of genetic potato salad.

Mr. Douchebag will have "a city job" which means he's an unfirable, unionized fucktard who does nothing for 8 hours a day and then sticks around to collect overtime on the taxpayer dime and then retires at 50 with 75% of his base salary and gold-plated medical benefits which he didn't have to pay for the entire time he's had them. It also means he probably barely finished high school and has the mental capacity of a 10 year old. He typically owns a boat (all that overtime) -- which he parks in his driveway because marinas are expensive -- and this leads to continuous fighting with the neighbors over street parking because he also has three (always over-sized, compensating for the small brain) vehicles to chauffer his brood of morons around in (all that really good overtime, again).

When he's not fleecing the taxpayer by pretending to work, you'll find him binge drinking in the local dive, taking a whizz against any convenient vertical surface, or taking his garbage out in a wife-beater and boxers.

Mrs. Douchebag is usually a former aspiring pole dancer, call girl, or close facsimile thereof, who spends her days getting her nails done, stuffing her fat ass into yoga pants two sizes too small in order to sweat for 15 minutes at the gym, then proceeding to hold up the drive-thru window at McDonald's ordering a custom-made "coffee" which consists mainly of whipped cream, caramel syrup and sugar, before rushing home to binge watch Real Housewives, chain-smoking a pack of Camels. Her only redeeming quality is that you'd take a blowjob from her, if only because you'd only have to look at the back of her head and she can't annoy you with that high-pitched-nasally-whine when her mouth is full.

That's how she snagged a bus driver or a Sanitation worker in the first place, you know. Otherwise her prospects for a better life probably involved a donkey and a move to Tijuana.

Junior and Missy Douchebag are probably enrolled in a Catholic school -- because good education -- but still manage to emerge functionally illiterate, anyway -- because poor genes --  and when they're not enjoying the busy life of high school football (where Junior leads the league in both traumatic brain injuries and misdemeanors), or Dance Classes (where Missy leads the troupe in skipped periods), they're making nuisances of themselves with expensive cars that all seem to vibrate because of the over-sized bass and which are driven with the same care and skill you'd expect from monkeys...with Parkinson's

Incidentally, 90% of the time, the junior douchebags are named "Joey" and "Adriana". 

The City, in general, is going to shit, the predictable result of eight years of Comrade Bill DiBlasio and Andrew "Angel of Death" Cuomo, who between them might combine to form a decent-sized pile of shit. Crime is up, taxes are up, services -- provided by Mr. Douchebag -- are practically non-existent (unless you're homeless, female, non-Caucasian, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict, in which case, you have but to whine and your wish is granted). Businesses are closed, the local economy devastated. Wall Street, the city's economic engine has finally had enough, and is leaving for greener pastures, leaving millions of square feet of empty, recently-built high-rise commercial real estate that has no utility. The police, and who can blame them?, don't even pretend to their jobs anymore.

So, getting out of here is a priority. After 39 years.

Now, call me older than Nancy Pelosi's cunt hairs, but I seem to recall a time when buying or selling a home was a straight-forward process. If you wanted to buy or sell you simply rang up a Real Estate agent and they sent over a halfway-decent-looking babe in a hideously-colored blazer. She took a personal interest in your transaction, was always knowledgeable, and knew a lot of occasionally-useful bullshit about zoning laws, escrow, free-standing structures, and so forth. Buyer met Seller, they agreed on a price, and the transaction was completed.

But much like everything else in America, this relatively simple process has been turned into an ordeal similar to attempting to escape the clutches of the Khmer Rouge, SS Einsatzgruppen and the gravitational pull of Oprah, simultaneously. You'd rather spend the day having the IRS audit you to within an inch of your anus. This no longer happens.

This is because some asshole encouraged women to start speaking, and worse, attempting to think.

Instead, you get a Real Estate agent who doesn't even bother to come see your house. She doesn't have to: we have the internet. All you need is pictures and a flashy website. In addition, there are seventeen thousand or so "home appraisal" apps available that somehow either manage to overvalue or undervalue your home by about 20% in a process in which no two apps ever agree, even with the same input. Even more-disturbing is that "your" Real Estate agent doesn't even work for you: instead, they farm the showing of homes out to other brokers through something called the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) which is sort of like Uber for real Estate agents -- they're all essentially bidding against one another for the right to split the broker's fee with "your" agent for doing all the legwork for them.

But they don't bother to come and see the home, either; they basically transport buyers to your front door and then "show" the house without having even the most-elementary information to provide to their "client". You have to provide this when questions get asked and so what happens is that you end up selling your house yourself. You are doing all that salesman shit, because the salesman doesn't know the first thing about anything -- s/he merely drives the "client" to your home and then lets them wander aimlessly around the house.

For this, they expect a 6% fee for the sale of a $700k+ house? I cannot abide this.

The surest sign that Ragnarok is upon us, however, is just who these "Real Estate Agents" are bringing by.

At the risk of sounding raaaaaayyyyciss (like I care?) I want to posit the following question:

Do White People buy houses, anymore? Except the hipsters?

I ask because there has been a constant parade of Chinese, Koreans, ex-Soviet Central Asians, Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians and Central Americans traipsing through here, sometimes in groups as large as half-a-dozen, almost every weekend for nearly 8 months. I'm certain most of them have been wonderful people -- at least I've had few problems with them -- but one wonders: where are they getting the money? Because it's obvious in about 95% of the cases that they're recent immigrants to these shores.

You can tell from the aroma of manure.

They also have a bad habit of making an offer somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k less than asking. I'm willing to negotiate, but I'm not taking that kind of haircut. The other frequent problem is that having made a tentative lowball offer they frequently end up not qualifying for the mortgage, anyway. We've had three offers fall through, with one prospective buyer even going through the elaborate ruse of having a relative pretend to be an engineer finding "a problem" that is a "deal-breaker" and I know the guy is full of shit.

Particularly when you ask for a copy of his report and you discover none was ever produced.

But the worst of the worst is the discussion surrounding some woman's Nesting Instinct, especially one who is high on HGTV. That's when the harried husband has to negotiate from a position of weakness because his vagina was already thinking of remodeling bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms before she even entered the house. Invariably, his position is that since his wife is going to cost him $100k in renovations, that I should help him out and take the loss just to facilitate the sale. 

Fuck that. I'm not in a rush to move (I can afford to keep on living here: I just don't have to) and I'm not paying for your new breakfast nook, solarium, pergola, meditation room, or whatever baroque, trendy monstrosity of molded plastic and faux marble your wife saw on Ty Breaker or Rehab Addict Rescue that she simply must have that put sand in her vag. I'm selling you a home with a new roof, new furnace, new siding, new paving, with a rentable apartment, in one of the last decent neighborhoods of New York City, with good schools and easy access to Manhattan and New Jersey so you can work. That's all I'm required to do.

Once you buy it, what you do with it -- and how much her menstrual cycle will cost you -- is your problem.

You knew what the asking price was before you got here: it's in the listing. You also knew that your Blushing Bride was going to go ballistic with the Good Bones bullshit and if you have to short me or sweat the added expense of your unwanted indoor spa, then you couldn't afford to live here to begin with.

No wonder you don't qualify for mortgages. In which case, why are any of you wasting everyone's time?

And the thing is, if you do get to talk to hubby on his lonesome you discover he's just like you -- the sort of guy who hasn't a fucking clue as to what a duvet or a fucking day room is, and no idea why anyone in his right mind would want one -- who is trapped between the hard realities of his wallet and a raging bag of uncontrollable hormones that can will make his life a living Hades if she doesn't get her way.

So, when my non-visiting, non-working, never-leaves-the-office "Real Estate Agent" calls me two days ago and says "we have a tentative offer; just waiting to see if they qualify" I'm expecting to have to negotiate bullshit around the margins, expecting an almost-insulting offer, and to hear someone nearly  beg me to "give him a break" so that the monster he married doesn't put him in an early grave in two languages...before he fails to qualify, anyway.

This is a straight-forward business proposition, but like most things, involve a woman and her subjective feelz and it all goes to shit.

UPDATE: Not ten minutes after posting this, the agent calls to tell me I have three new viewings scheduled for this Saturday. I want to slit my wrists.