Dropping Bombs On Your Mom

. . . But so what? Everything is fucked. Still, today the intorwebby is all aflutter with the nymag article about condo firesales over on the Williamsburg waterfront. The neighborhood has gone apeshit along with the rest of the nation over the last decade. Williamsburg boomed like all of the other tough places turned sexy; quirky working class strongholds that saw their asses blown out by textbook gentrification. If you’re from Seattle just think of Ballard, if you’re from Sydney just think of Newtown, if you aren’t from either of those places you surely have a neighborhood like that in your town. Young adults from upper middle class Ohio families bought or rented lofts with family money, all the while pretending that they paid for their lifestyles with the dough they made working at the record store part time. Now they mope along Bedford Ave. in small jeans and big hair, their souls haunted by the possibility of having to pay their own rent. The yuppies that flooded into the new condo developments are now holding back, most sites are over 50% unsold, many of the rest exist only as renderings on brochures or the placards around their empty lots.

The shadenfreude is thick, it tastes just like one of those beautiful steaks you get at the Strip House—perfectly cooked and just a bit bloody. Out here, for us little folk at least, the recession has been a hoot; the only tangible effect is another $400 off that outrageous fucking rent we pay. The bankers are still making money but at least they aren’t throwing it in our faces like they used to. All in all, we’re yukking it up . . . while the rest of the country teeters on the brink of depression. To hear the reports you’d think that everybody west of the Hudson has begun raising rabbits in backyard hutches, trading their precious meat and skins for goods and services;   families are living in the hollowed out shells of abandoned tract homes—shit, according to the newspapers everybody in the Midwest is mere months away from riding around in biodiesel-fueled Plymouth Dusters and shooting each other for scraps of food. I hear the new haircuts will be fierce, and that’s no small consolation, post apocalyptic America will be a mean, sexy place.

Don’t worry Real America, our check is in the post. As soon as the magnitude of the CRE bust becomes apparent and second wave of ARM recasts goes rolling through the heartland we’ll be feeling your pain. Hedgies will be begging for the opportunity to work on your rabbit farms as our streets once again start to reek of piss and rape. The soft-pawwed trust fund hipsters who loudly pine for the days when this town was “tough,” people who use terms like “Disney-fication,” dudes that think things are too safe—they’ll finally have the opportunity to get mugged. We’ll all be in the government cheese line together, pointing in glee, shaming one another for the unchecked avarice that got us into this spot to begin with; content with watching our own houses burn as long as Those Bastards get fucked too.