quasify

A little something I learned today about being a landlord. Particularly appropriate with the opening of I Want to Believe tonight.

Chapter 93: Section 114. Real estate transactions; disclosure; psychologically impacted property

Section 114. The fact or suspicion that real property may be or is psychologically impacted shall not be deemed to be a material fact required to be disclosed in a real estate transaction. “Psychologically impacted” shall mean an impact being the result of facts or suspicions including, but not limited to, the following:

(a) that an occupant of real property is now or has been suspected to be infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or any other disease which reasonable medical evidence suggests to be highly unlikely to be transmitted through the occupying of a dwelling;

(b) that the real property was the site of a felony, suicide or homicide; and

(c) that the real property has been the site of an alleged parapsychological or supernatural phenomenon.

No cause of action shall arise or be maintained against a seller or lessor of real property or a real estate broker or salesman, by statute or at common law, for failure to disclose to a buyer or tenant that the real property is or was psychologically impacted.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the provisions of this section shall not authorize a seller, lessor or real estate broker or salesman to make a misrepresentation of fact or false statement.

Good to know!

I’ve been wandering around Boston since the kuidaore extravaganza in somewhat of an altered state. On Sunday, not being of sound mind, I partook in a breach of habit the result of which left me without wallet, without car, without my most precious charlie card. I literally had only a single quarter-poor change dish on my ledger. It’s an interesting perspective to adopt temporarily, this complete & utter non-participation in the financial or retail world, with no debit or credit card playing backstop to simple daily decision-making. The flawed logic of my regular protestation that due to vague unspecified monetary concerns I couldn’t do this or that was laid out as fiction. In the actual physical reality, I can do pretty much whatever I want. Yesterday & today though, no food, no coffee, no bus or train home. Dinner invite across town? Not possible to accept. Nothing to be done but walking here and there to work, sweating, thinking, watching the cars trains and aeroplanes pass me by.

So fast forwarding to the present. My television, long part of the San Fran Plan vis-à-vis auction block elimination, is gone and I’m thoroughly re-liquid. My wallet, reacquired, thanks largely to the honesty of the mechanic who found it. In the space of 30 minutes I’ve transitioned back from having a legitimate strategy session about forcibly crashing through the back door of the 66 down on Huntington Ave to rolling flush. And while I can’t and won’t say I prefer the former, I certainly can say there’s a greater immediacy and acute awareness to being piss broke that I’d like to recommend to everyone who otherwise wouldn’t have cause to be. A suggestion – some weekend, leave the house with ~$1.34 in small change, just to see where what and how it is.

Speaking of San Francisco, I finally got around to watching The Bridge, an Eric Steel documentary about the suicidal people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 2004. Going in, I knew this was going to be depressing (it was) and not particularly edifying (it wasn’t) but I at least thought from the trailer that it would be more beautiful than it turned out to be. The whole thing is cut throughout with some of the most awkward, static, multi-person interviews with families and witnesses that just go on and on to no particular end, interrupting and contradicting each other, only demonstrating the vagueness of their memories and inability to say anything insightful about those who succeeded in killing themselves. If anyone ever shows up with a camera to interview you about some departed loved one, please for the love of all that’s decent try to be dynamic, engaging, fluent in the art of spoken English. Or be convincingly rustic and folksy, or over-the-top bombastic, whatever. Just not bored and disengaged.