A different kind of snob

As I mentioned in my previous post, my wife and I are trying to buy a new house. This impending transaction has lead us to have many conversations about what we both want from the place that we eventually chose to live in. Do we really need a four bedroom split-level with a formal dining room or will a three bedroom ranch house with a pool and spa be more to our liking?

Honestly, I don’t really care what’s inside the house. As far as I’m concerned, if I’ve got at least one room that I can play my Xbox in and blare my music without causing my families ears to bleed then everything’s golden. The rest of the home could be covered in frosted glass and wood paneling and I wouldn’t mind it one bit. It’s the outside that really concerns me.

I’m a big believer that people should define themselves by what’s inside of themselves and not what kind of neighborhood that they live in. Too often at work, I’ve had to listen to some person with the social skills of a middle-schooler trying to impress me with tales of how bitchin’ their neighborhood is. It’s always the same. They love to talk up the merits of their HOA (until they themselves get fined for something) or tell some immature story about a block-party that turned scandalous after Tom’s wife, Betty had a little too much White Zinfandel and spilled her potato salad all over Cynthia’s Ralph Lauren jeans.

To me, this kind of talk all sounds so shallow and boring that I usually just tune out as soon as most people mention anything about their neighborhoods. It’s a topic that’s almost always designed to make you feel bad about yourself. Extremely ethnocentric, it’s essentially a clan mentality that says, “We live here and you live somewhere else. We’re better than you because we are a part of this community. You can validate us and be in awe of us, but remember… you live somewhere else.”

With that in mind, I seem to have gone in the other direction when considering what I want from our new house. I’ve somehow allowed myself to become a neighborhood snob and there are certain things about the communities that we visit when looking at homes that I consider to be non-negotiable deal killers. They are so ingrained in my subconscious that I’ve only recently become aware of them but, in no particular order, here’s a list of what I’ve slowly realized are the things that I cannot tolerate in my new neighborhood.

1. Garages with neon beer signs or banners for sports teams hanging in or around them.
   
   To me, this just reeks of a bunch of middle aged dumbass. As far as I’m concerned, I run into far too many people that are my age who have yet to get over the fact that their college days are behind them. I’m fine with you liking sports and beer but advertising your affiliation for Bud Lite and the Texas Longhorns seems a little juvenile.
   
   
2. Status cars.
   
   If every house has a Mercedes, BMW or a Charger parked out front, there’s obviously some kind of pissing contest going on that I want no part of.
   
   
3. Jet Skis, Dirt Bikes or 4-Wheelers parked in the driveway.
   
   I know right? You probably read that and your mind immediately leapt to some sitcom image of a redneck drinking a can of Keystone and wearing overalls but around here, nothing could be further from the truth. These loud-assed machines are the accoutrements of upper-middleclass weekend warriors and 40 year old men who’ve yet to be told that despite their many successes, they still most likely have several different kinds of learning disabilities.
   
   
4. Crocs or Flip-flops.
   
   If I see too many people wearing them, the neighborhood is out of the question for me.
   
   
5. Community bulletin boards and HOA newsletters.
   
   Whoever the person was who first decided that everyone living within a few blocks of one another had to be constantly stuck up each other’s asses was probably a very awful person. I’m all for getting to know your neighbor and expecting them to keep up with their shit but a community that actively polices everyone via a citizen committee seems like a wormy little ‘Lord of the Flies’ type of situation.
   

I’m sure that there are other prejudices of mine that I’ve yet to identify but these are the main ones. The existence of any single one of them (except the flip-flops) doesn’t rule anything out entirely but if they are all present then my interest in the place is over. Last night, I was trying to explain this to Dana (who I thankfully discovered also feels this way) and I said that I just don’t want to live in the Uncanny Valley.

There is a theory that as robots and computer generated facsimiles of the human form become more and more realistic, our emotional responses to them will be increasingly empathetic… right up until the point that the representation crosses the line into the realm of revulsion. For instance, the Akibot is cute but the Repliee is creepy as fuck. As technology develops to a degree at which we can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is computerized, our opinions of the machines will once again swing towards the positive. That gap between creepy and indiscernible is called The Uncanny Valley.

I think of these planned communities a lot like I think about the Uncanny Valley. Sure, they seem like nice places and all but if the socialization is that structured and organized then there’s got to be a cog loose somewhere. Perhaps I’m being too hard on these Stepford subdivisions but still, they creep me out and they definitely are not a place where I would want to live. Like I said, I guess I’m just a different sort of neighborhood snob.

Asbestos

Does anyone else find it odd that the Baby Boomers were practically fed asbestos from birth up until their mid-thirties and yet all of them are still going to live forever? Seriously, the Greatest Generation put that stuff in everything. Looking back on history, it’s surprising that they weren’t inoculating their children with lead based asbestos-antifreeze vaccines to protect them against the Commie flu and the Red Death. In the 1950’s and 60’s even the trees were made of asbestos.

The material is not just some new WWII era product that was dreamed up in a Nazi lab by a monocled guy with a pencil thin mustache and a love for giving people too weak to call themselves members of the master race a pesky case of the cancer. No, asbestos has been used in the world for more than 2,000 years. In fact, its name is derived from the Ancient Greek word for inextinguishable.

In those days, slaves wove asbestos into the cloth that they made. They did so assuming that the material had magical properties to prevent people from catching on fire all the time (an apparent problem for a people who’s Gods lived on a nearby mountaintop) and they were in awe of it. It was the space-age polymer of its day and to the Greeks, wine and asbestos were the ultimate shit to have lying around the house in order to impress their friends with.

Even then, asbestos and peoples internal organs didn’t agree. Piny the Elder wrote that many of the slaves succumbed to a “sickness of the lungs” while engaged in their labors but as long as the Greeks and Romans were able to do their dry cleaning by tossing a pile of clothes into a fire and waiting for them to turn white again, everyone was okay with it. In fact, the Romans were so OCD about their asbestos garments that they ironically named the fabric “amiantus” or “unpolluted”.

The material fell out of favor during the Middle Ages when people started wearing more crowns, wizard robes and armor but it soon took off again during the Industrial Revolution. In the late 1800’s it began to be used as insulation for steam engines when they were still being assembled in the Dickensonian factories and before they became Mark Twain metaphors. Pipes, kilns, boilers and ovens were all coated with a thick layer of asbestos and any health risk and cancerous cooties relating to the product were either forgotten or ignored. It wasn’t until the mid 1920’s that someone first thought to ask, “Why is it, that all these dead people have asbestos coated lungs?”

The case that got them thinking was of a woman who expired at 33 after having worked as an asbestos miner ever since the age of 13. A doctor in England, probably named Sir Obvious McNoshit, took one look at her body and then examined everyone else in the mine and said “You all have ‘asbestosis!’” Because of this, laws were passed in Great Britain requiring increased ventilation in the mines and which made “Dying of asbestos” an excuse for not coming into work. The United States followed suit ten years later.

Asbestos continued to be used all the way up until the mid-1980’s when men and women everywhere finally got tired of having to live around a bunch of poison everything all the time. Even today, it can still be found in currently manufactured roofing tiles, brake pads and vinyl flooring. It’s a really good insulator and an absorber of sound and, as of the late 90's (the last time the regulation was reviewed) it was still worth dying for in some cases.

I’m thinking about all of this right now because asbestos has been on my mind a lot here lately. I don’t normally ponder Don Dellilo type scenarios where mass produced consumer goods slowly attack our bodies to death but these days, that’s about all I’ve been thinking of. You see, there’s asbestos in America’s ceilings. It’s right there above our heads, hiding in the form of spray-on popcorn goobers which won’t kill you outright but if you try to remove them they will get inside of your lungs like some self-protecting organism and make you all warty with cancer.

Like I said, this wouldn’t be something that I would normally worry about. I’ve got popcorn ass-beads up on the ceiling of the house that I live in now but I couldn’t really give a shit about them. I don’t intend to do anything with them and their existence doesn’t affect me one way or the other as a person. We live in peace, the popcorn and I. What bugs me now is their presence inside of the house that my wife and I want.

You see, both Dana and I have been looking at the same house since June of last year. It was the one that prompted us to put our own up for sale and ultimately it lit the fire beneath us to try to move ourselves up about a half an inch in status within the world. It’s not the best home on the market but we both like it. It’s actually been delisted twice since the time that we started watching it and now, it’s finally available for a price that we both can live with.

But can we really ‘live’ with this house?

It’s got those goddamned popcorn ceilings and, while I may not care about them being in my current piece of shit home, I don’t really desire them in this one. I mean, if you think that the height of American engineering was the T-top then I’m sure that the blasted ceiling look is totally boss to you. My wife and I though, we want to go for a more modern aesthetic. We’re hoping to live in this place for a while so it’d be nice to not have to be vomiting all over the place at the thought of what’s sitting there right above our heads every single second that we’re in there.

I’m not a big fan of home remodeling but I’m not afraid of it either. My attitude is that if it doesn’t kill me then if I think that I can make it look a little better I’m going to try and fuck it up using some tools and some drywall. The problem is I can’t remove this ceiling without it killing everyone.

Personally, I grew up in a major, industrialized town so I’m not really too concerned about the introduction of even more chemicals into my body. I feel that what’s there is there and anything else is just spice to make my already toxic arteries glow even brighter when they’re placed underneath a black light. It’s my wife and my daughter that I worry about. I don’t want them to become a glowing mutant like me.

If I remove the popcorn, then I’m putting my family at risk. If I leave it, then it’s an eyesore. Of course, I could cover it over with planks, but that might be expensive. I’m not sure what to do about it all.

I guess that we could just walk away from this house (again) and hope that something perfect comes along. Whatever may happen, I really don’t want to corrupt the decision with any biases that I may have. My wife is the one who has the most specific needs in regards to a new home and ultimately, I want this to be her decision. If she’s okay with working around this, then so am I. If she’s not, then we have to keep looking. More than anything else I want her to be happy with where she lives.

My only problem is that I’ve been thinking a lot about asbestos and how my life would be great right about now if it just wasn’t for those goddamned fascist popcorn ceilings.