Apart from the being-completely-indigent aspect, I know how he feels. The playing tunelessly part. Fuck it, man. And at least this guy isn't showing up to his post, playing for five minutes, and then reading Metafilter for 20 minutes. Maybe he should have my job.

More and more frequently I entertain this fantasy in which N and I buy a house in the middle of nowhere that has a yard and some woods and maybe even some stairs and a porch and the outside smells like flowers and wet soil. That's about as far as I've gotten. Maybe a hammock or a frisbee is involved; presumably there will be a fridge in the garage filled with beer.

Unfortunately, N and I are not independently wealthy, nor do we work in industries that exist outside of large metropolitan areas. I know what Maccers endured when she went looking for a mortgage, and I understand the absurdities of today's real estate market.

Thus, this leaves us with a choice of nothing.

Sometimes, for entertainment's sake, when I've exhausted all of the links on The Hun, I poke around on Realtor.com, searching zip codes upstate near where I grew up. See this? This house, about a mile from the house I grew up in, is literally 15 feet off of a heavily traveled county route, and sits just above the traintracks. The listing says it's 1,000 square feet. And I'm 5'9 and 115 lbs.

200K. The only thing that would make it worth 200K is if the septic sewer system were made of solid gold.

But I digress. The fun thing about poking around on Realtor.com is that it's allowed me to take a trip down memory lane. In the past year, I've known half the houses for sale in my hometown. One was the general store across the street from my house. I used to play with the mean little girl whose parents owned the store. Her father, who possessed the first pornography I ever saw, allegedly beat her older sister so bad that one time he had to build a bookshelf in the hallway where he'd made a giant hole after smashing her head into the wall. "Daddy's sad because you won't sit on his lap when you come over to play," she told me once. Yeah, no thanks.

Also for sale was the Hutchinson's house, a decrepit subdivided colonial with a defunct snowplow parked in the front yard. My mother disliked them because they had mean cats who would come over to our house and beat up our cat. I rode the bus with their daughter. She had feathered, mousy hair and wore thick black eyeliner and Ozzy t-shirts and stood outside the bus door until it was time to leave, smoking. Then she would pinch her cigarette out with her finger and deposit it back into the pack. She wasn't as mean as her cats, and was someone who, as my mother often said (about me), could have been pretty if she'd tried.

Then there was this house up on Angell Hill Road. It's kind of a modern-looking cabin-type place with cathedral ceilings and a wraparound deck. I went to several keggers at that house. And I so totally barfed off of that deck.

It's not true, what they say: You can go home again. Thank you, Realtor.com!