45s on 33 – #16: “Open House at My House (Part 1)”

Where is everybody going? There are houses with no sign of people all over, other than NO TRESPASSING or PRIVATE PROPERTY signs posted because obviously derelict homes gonna get derelicted even more, always. But where has everybody gone? On top of this, most cities I seem to go around of various sizes have booming downtowns, at least in the sense of hammers pounding and nail guns shooting and cranes and scaffolding and basic (but very complicated) gentrificational rebirths happening. It’s a lot harder to get shot in a lot of places you could’ve easily been shot ten or fifteen years ago. But where have all those people gone that used to be there, that were mired in that shit to where shooting or getting shot at was normalized behavior? I’m not clear on where the human Americans have gone.

Through trick-nology algorithmic calculations, we have less jobless than ever before (they say), but I honestly know very few people happy about their work. There seems to be a pervasive frustration with stagnant existence, which generally is a nice way of putting, “I’m not getting anywhere in life, and in fact probably am sinking backwards, financially speaking.”

But all these empty houses just sitting there, with signs protecting their ownership against anyone actually using them without given proper paperwork to personal property ownership system. That’s some weird shit. I am more likely to be harassed by law enforcement if I’m walking around some vacant property, publicly, even though no one is there and I’m doing no harm to it, than if I were running some sort of financial scam on a group of people, so long as it was a legally acceptable financial scam (like home mortgages). Regardless of what devil ass math is used, America certainly has no shortage of PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Legally, we love some private property. No need to simultaneously mention the criminalization of being homeless through vagrancy laws and ordinances, because those aware of such things are aware of such things, and those who don’t care already don’t care. But I’ve never understood, regardless of how callous a person may be, how you could care about inanimate structures and unoccupied parcels of land more than actual human beings. Even if those human beings made horrible decisions that left them in dire circumstances, we should be more apt to rehabilitate people than blocks of real estate. But we ain’t. Haters gonna hate, as well as redevelop with hate in their heart, exiling the hated to god knows where. There are some horrible suburban gulag ghetto tenements full of the exiled somewhere that none of us pay attention to or the common public knows about. Oh wait, that’s jail. Everybody’s in jail.