A long while back now, I signed a mortgage document for $63,000. I was one of those apparently now blameworthy lower middle-class folks who benefited from special programs for first time home buyers. I put about 7 percent down. A whole fucking $5K.

Hell, I bought my place from Freddie Mac, dealing with lawyers not people, because the title had a while before been repo’ed

I faced the same huge fucking ream of pieces of paper and wrist-twisting signing. Page after page of signing your name and promising and promising an promising you’ll pay for the four walls in which you’ve chosen to live. If all goes well, including my getting the cashiers check with many zeroes in the morning and getting it to the title company with the help of our agent, we’ll get the keys next week.

Fucking yikes. It’s still a cute little house, though.

I liked the old one, too. Even if I only owned the downstairs, and it was well over a hundred years old.

I’m sure it will work out just fine and dandy. M. and I will have a swell life.

And, I’ll have lemon trees to make lemonade and sell it in a little stand out front if we need some extra income. However, if I were prone to anxiety attacks, I would have been flat out shivering on the floor trying to reach for a fistful of whatever the cool kids are taking pharmacologically these days. All of my twitching, though, is rooted in theory.

When I sold the place that cost me five figures of dough in ’95, I made a good chunk of 6-digit cake in the currency of 2006. I took almost all of that money, slapped it into accounts and put it out of sight as some-day-house money. (Oh, and I went on some fun trips, like to Europe just for the hell of it, bought a friend some chips and curry in the old country, and spent the last couple of years shopping or doing whatever struck my fancy. I mean, shit, who wouldn’t with cash in pocket?)

Before the prior house sale, I had some money in the bank but not tons. I could move across the country and find the right job, but no doubt a job was a must have to live and eat.

Generally speaking I don’t have much loot just lying around. With almost a 20-year career in not-for-profit labor, a gigantic fallback portfolio of greenbacks simply ain’t in the cards. There really isn’t much difference in the way I live between your basic pink and blue bills…

…or your standard issue green with pink and other tinges.

Even though they were a windfall. Even though I didn’t use them. Even though I saved the bills for EXPRESSLY THIS PURPOSE. It’s kind of nerve racking to say goodbye. I think I need a board game to remind me that paper has no intrinsic value (apart from maybe to the originating tree).

Not to mention, this time, M.’s sharing the bills, and the news is reporting only darkness that makes a mortgage almost on par with Red-Sea parting.

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