The cars, the bars

"I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I’m never coming back
Ya I’m going to Detroit and I won’t be back
I won’t be back"

Borax

I learned recently that my neighbor, Radiolady, has to sell and move because she just can’t afford this area as a single. She just put so much work into the house and garden it’s a damn shame. But for the kind of money she’ll then have available, she could move to New Center or Hamtramck and have a huge house with only a 400 or maybe less, monthly. I’ve got to say this is tempting stuff.

I could get, outright, a cool old house in Hamtramck and pocket 200 grand. I wouldn't need to work for a while with that kind of change. So it wouldn’t actually matter so much that I’d be nowhere near anything I know and love. The other tempting option is the same trip only in a different direction, out into the country. But then you’re much more car dependent, and everybody knows my feelings about driving, I frickin’ hate cars. But I don’t like big cities either. Face it, I'm an Ann Arbor girl.

I guess it’s just the lure of making that money off the house. While I find it pretty gross and wierd and creepy that the value has just about tripled since I bought it, (in better financial days obviously), being REALLY poor other than the house, sucking the money out of it seems like good, clean American fun. This place costs an average of ten thousand a year to keep up, and thats just keep up, not doing anything major to better it.

Maybe I’m just dwelling on it today because it’s the first day of art fair here, and no, I’m not going to capitalize it, it doesn’t rate it in my opinion. The traffic in my neighborhood just septupled. I can hear the goofy suburban ladies inane conversations from my bedroom window as they sojourn into the thrall and if Oliver wasn’t sleeping I’d probably open the windows and put on very loud Black Sabbath. For her pleasure.

Then I’ll go down and look at my kitchen floor with the holes in it and the 4 layers of linoleum that I’m trying to get stripped off to get to the wood to make the repairs. Then go to take a shower using robogrips to turn on the broken faucet in the really slow draining tub and I am so very tempted, so very tempted, to just move to Niles or Watervliet where there’s no traffic or commerce or alleged art at all, and I bet I could get a fabulous house for REALLY, REALLY, cheap. Probably with an inhouse plumber thrown in.