05 February 2008

Fat Tuesday



The big screen in the living room- it is paid for- is barely cool from the late run on Sunday night. Today, it is going to heat up again when I get home from work to tally up the votes from the Super Primaries. Forty-three races in twenty-four states to pick over three thousand delegates is going to be a lot to keep straight.

It will get easier after today, since someone is going to head for the showers with any luck. The race thus far has had so many players it has been hard to keep track. My Dad had a method for bringing order to complex problems with many moving parts. He was not much for politics, though, and applied the organizational skills he had acquired to navigate a Navy Skyraider laden with bombs to a designated point in space to monitoring the progress of the Indianapolis 500.

The two activities were disparate in medium, but shared high-octane gas, powerful engines and speed. Combined with piercing noise, they were both incredibly appealing.

Dad would set up a command post on the patio on the picnic table, complete with the position of the cars and drivers on the starting gird, two stop-watches, graph paper and several sharpened #2 pencils. He had the lap times and estimated mileage for fuel expenditure to calculate pit-stops by the contenders. It was quite impressive.

My approach to tracking the destiny of the Republic is going to be a little different. I may put on a few strands of shiny beads, since it is Fat Tuesday, and pour a tall one. I could imagine that there is a cerebration in Big Pink's parking lot. I could see the working poor who straggle across to the church's feeding program at five each night as a sort of bedraggled parade.

Maybe I will lift my shirt and wave. Lent begins tomorrow.

I have not decided what to give up this year. Chocolate would be too easy, since it is not one of my many vices. I could find vices that are tangential; perhaps giving up whiskey and fine cigars, while not eschewing all distilled spirits.

The Church of England wants its members to reduce their carbon footprints, a shameless gesture calculated to give the faith currency. It is a pretty good idea, and I may give that a try.

I suppose I will lose karma points, though since it is not like we have a choice about it, you know?

We are all giving things up these days. The notion that we have to pay for what we consume is gaining currency; it a fad, if you will. I'm sure we will go back to our old profligate ways at the first opportunity, regardless of knowing better.

It happens all the time. I remember it happening after the first energy shock in the 1970s; and it came back to me last night, coming home from work. I was stopped at a traffic light on George Mason Drive and happened to be next to one of those enormous glittering Lincoln Navigator Sport Utility Luxury vans.

It filled the lane, from curb across the center-line, nearly to the door of my Hubrismobile. It towered so high above my roofline that I could not see it without lowering my window and sticking my head out.

The sleek black flank that I could see was tricked out nicely, with the big chrome wheels and low-profile fat tires. The detailing emphasized the brand name, and the windows were smoked and impenetrable as the mind of its owner.

I should be charitable. I have no idea what any of us were thinking.

I have been living a practical example of late. The low interest rates that Mr. Greenspan gave us to avoid the last recession generated the great housing bubble. I participated in that adventure with grim intensity, though my stakes were far lower on the pyramid of needs proposed in 1943 by Abraham Maslow in his “Theory of Human Motivation.”

The bottom of the pyramid is about food and shelter. The pointy-end is about esteem and self-actualization. The Lincoln Navigator must have started out way up there, but all I could dredge up, looking at it hulking next to me, was contempt and maybe a little pity.

My big gamble in the bubble was the purchase of the efficiency apartment. I rode the wave upward, and began to panic that prices were going so high that I would never be able to afford more than one room again.

I rolled the paper profit out of the efficiency, converting it into the paper down-payment on the larger two-bedroom unit upstairs, so I could wave to the parades in the parking lot.

It was at the top of the market. I ran the numbers the other day to see if I could fix the cash-flow problems with a re-finance, which I have done frequently down through the years. I was disconcerted to discover that things are really different.

In order to get the loan-to-value ratio rate to an acceptable level, I would have to come up with real money. I'm trapped, though at least there is a roof on the cage that keeps the rain out.

Re-financing or sale for now is a non-starter. Thankfully, the Wasington market always seemd to rebound, at least the close-in properties, and deficit is only about a half-year's pay. It is probably manageable if I watch my carbon footprint. That is not the case for those places out in the Counties around the Imperial City.

The McMansions that dot the rolling fields of Fairfax and Loudoun are vast, and the amount of cash that people have lost in them is so staggering that I can only assume that the owners have plunged from the tip of the pyramid right down to the bottom.

There is a mountain out towards the Valley for rent, temporarily off the sales market due to timing. The summit has a 17,000 square foot castle on the top. I do not think I could afford the gas to get back and forth.

The owner of the $5.5 million dollar extravaganza cannot come up with enough money to sell it at the price it would bring. He is stuck, big time, butted right up against default and bankruptcy. There are many others in the lavish little estates who are renting them for less than they are paying on the mortgage, gambling grimly that they can wait out the downturn until the enforced Lent passes and the good times roll again.

America was built on optimism, and I assume they will. Something fundamental is going to have to change, though. I am not sure what it is going to be, except that the Navigators clearly have to go, as do the fancy V-8 Hubrismobiles. The one who figures it all out- or even a part of it-   is going to make a ton of devalued dollars.

I can't imagine what we were all thinking. I jumped on the accelerator to pull away from the Navigator when the light changed, since it made me nervous to drive alongside the behemoth. I suppose I could have slowed down and let it get ahead of me.

But that is not the way things work, is it?

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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