Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

So I told you I was selling a house. Did you think I'd have time for blogging too? Sheesh, I barely have time for sleep, let alone profound blog thoughts.

Anyways, in case you were wondering I've been doing this house thing, and let me tell you, it's no fun being a seller. You just keep worrying and wondering if it's going to sell and if anyone's going to want to buy it, and it certainly doesn't help that every night some gloomy gus comes on the news and starts telling you how lousy the housing market is now. "Why, you'd have to be some kind of moron to try to sell a house in this market."

"Gee, thanks. I feel better now."

Now I'm sure that there are lots of people who have no problem selling their house. They just go with the flow and let the markets work their magic. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people. I'm the type that when the house inspector comes out I'm just sure he's going to find major damage -

"Say, Mr. Myers, we checked under the house and it looks like the whole thing has fallen off it's foundation."

"It has? Is that what that big crack in the living room is?"

"Must be. It'll cost you three million dollars to fix it."

"Anything else?"

"Well the upstairs plumbing is leaking and you've got water damage in all the walls and floors."

"So that's why we haven't had any water pressure."

"Cost you three million dollars to fix it."

"Anything else?"

"Oh, and about that roof."

"Yes?"

"Well, have you noticed you don't have one?"

"To tell you the truth I haven't really looked."

"Yeah, it looks like the termites and the roof rats have eaten the roof all the way down to the rafters."

"Don't tell me. Three million do..."

"Cost you five million dollars to fix that."

Yeah, it's no fun to be a seller. It's kind of like going in front of St. Peter and answering for all your sins, you know what I mean. You know that Judgment Day is going to come, but you just keep putting things off. Then, you decide to sell and find out that all those little jobs you meant to get to sooner or later are written right there in that book. On the other hand, I am blogging tonight so I guess that can only mean one thing. Yep,

Someone actually wants to buy the house!

In fact it's better than that. Lots of people want to buy the house. Hmmm, seems to me that maybe that old saying is in need of a rewrite. Happiness may be a warm puppy, but true happiness is a good location and multiple offers. Anyways, that's why I'm blogging tonight. The house is sold, and for 3% over the asking price. So much for the great housing collapse of 2007. It might look like that in Detroit, but here in the Silicon Valley jobs are plentiful, demand is high, and folks are flush with cash.

Of course, the fact that it was...I mean is...I mean was...a great house might have something tgo do with it. I'm gonna miss my little castle in Spain. I really am, but life goes on. Still, I get a little misty eyed just thinking about how the new owners are gonna feel on that first peaceful morning when they look out their window at that serene little yard and see the dew on the grass and roses in bloom, and the deer out in the front yard eating all their exotic flowers and fancy ornamentals. Damn, I'm gonna miss those #$@^! deer.

But I don't want to talk about selling the house because, frankly, who cares. I've been thinking I should start a blog about books that came out four years ago and that I'm now just getting around to reading. I mean, that's how most books get read, isn't it? Most people don't read a book the day it comes out (except for Harry Potter). They hear about it or read a review, and think "Sounds good. I should read that sometime", and then four years later they finally get around to reading it.

The book I just read is The Devil in The White City by Erik Larson, and it was great. I know that's not much of a review but the book came out four years ago for crying out loud. At this point, what more can I say?

Anyways, the book is about the Great Columbian Exposition of 1893 and mass murder. It seems like a strange combination, but it works (and it's nonfiction, by the way). The thing that got me was how magnificent that World's Fair must have been. Think about it. People from farms in Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois who had no running water and only kerosine lamps to light their houses, got on trains and traveled to this fair in Chicago and saw these huge buildings lit with electric lights, saw safety elevators take people up and down in little cars, saw electric boats gliding silently on Lake Michigan, saw a giant wheel lift people three hundred feet in the air (Ferris' wheel was the tallest structure in Chicago at the time), saw kinetiscopes displaying moving pictures, and perhaps most amazing of all saw Thomas Edison's new invention that could actually capture and store the human voice. They say the people who saw the fair never forgot it.

Now here we are a little over a hundred years later, and that kind of awe-inspiring spectacle will never be seen again. It can't be. We've now become so accustomed to technological change and the pace of technological change, that most of the wonder and the magic are simply gone. Well not gone so much as mass-produced into irrelevance. Isn't that what the Iphone is really all about? Nowadays, "wonder" is focus-grouped and field-tested and produced in such a machine-like fashion that real "wonder" is just a relic of a bygone era, replaced by "hype" and "buzz". Or do you think it's just a coincidence that the Iphone is being released at 6:00 pm just when the local newscasts are going on the air? Do you think that Apple is going to complain when all the local news shows send their live crews down to the local Apple store to provide breaking coverage of "Iphone mania"?

It's the age we live in. The age of "Buzz". Man, what I wouldn't give to have lived a hundred and fourteen years ago, to have been ignorant and unknowing, and to have traveled to the World's Fair.