We Cannot Trust Their Hands Upon the World

the fight between homes and those who own them

When Raechel spied the robins’ nest couched on a support beam up near the sagging roof, it was mid-April and the new landlord had already announced his intention to tear down the old garage. There was no timeline, though, and I was back in Catalunya packing up my old nest, so we crossed our fingers and did what we could, which was mostly to pay attention. She, to the flights of the parents bearing food and the cheeps of the chicks once they’d cracked their shells, and I, to the stories and pictures she sent my way.

When we came back together at the end of May, the landlord still hadn’t moved on the demolition, just like he hadn’t fixed the busted circuit on the lightless staircase or anything else that was broken. The robin chicks were still growing, safe for today, facing an uncertain tomorrow, same as a lot of us.

It had been a long time since I’d had a landlord, or rather, since I’d paid rent to one. I rented back in the Harrisonburg days, but I left that town in spring of 2006. Then I was effectively homeless for a year, and then I began squatting, and so for the past sixteen years landlords didn’t come close to wherever I was living without a police escort. It was a more honest relationship, because they had to admit that under every piece of paper that speaks of laws, there is a gun, or the paper is just paper.

But there isn’t the collective strength for squatting in Cleveland these days, which is another way of saying, people don’t realize there’s the collective strength for squatting, because in the end that’s all collective strength is: a group of people realizing they already have it.

In the early ‘80s squatting wasn’t possible in Catalunya, just like it’s not possible in Cleveland, and people just started doing it, and inevitably got evicted and arrested, just like they would here. But they kept doing it anyway, until it was possible. Traditions, cultures, possibilities; these don’t fall from the sky. They’re created.

In any case, the reality is that now I have landlords I have to be polite to, rather than throw rocks at. There’s sort of two of them, father and son. On paper, the owner of the property is the one we call Baby Landlord. He’s like 25, and daddy gave him a rental property to manage in order to teach him about the real world.

Let’s sit with that for a moment. A father gives his son other people’s homes, to manage and extract money from, as a way to learn about the real world. We have nothing in common with these people; existentially, we are at odds. If we realized our collective power, parents would be giving their children guns—or at least bows or sharpened sticks—and telling them, my child, here is something sad you must realize about the real world: there is an entire class of people who have created institutions to normalize and enforce their belief that they have a right to steal everything from us, including our future, and this will be a central feature of our lives until we overthrow and abolish them.

Unsurprisingly, Baby Landlord is incompetent, even at being a landlord. The only time things get done, it’s Daddy Landlord. When I meet him, I try to convince him to let me take over the front yard. I’ll plant native flowering perennials (have already started planting them, in fact), he won’t have to pay to get it mowed, he won’t have to worry about it.

I appeal to what I assume is the core value of his being, monetary self-interest, only to discover something deeper, scarier. He turns me down. He prefers American Nazi lawn, or whatever you call the norm of monocrop buzzcut green that sits at the heart of the white North American psyche of wannabe golfers and nuclear technicians, a people beyond parody. A carefully cultivated lawn of wildflowers looks messy, to him. He’ll pay to mow it. He’ll even come out and do it himself. My boneset and goldenrod get guillotined.

Somewhere in the conversation I learn that his previous income stream, before he turned to owning pieces of paper that signified people’s homes, was as a florist. He owned a flower shop.

Shortly before the garage was demolished, the robin chicks flew the coop. Raechel and I admired the nest they left behind. Expertly woven from twigs, string, dry grasses, and mud, wefts and warps somehow interchangeable along a curving axis, as though dancing.

We put it aside, but it got damaged when the landlord and his hired worker tore down the piece of crap garage that had been threatening collapse for over a year. They had given us and the other tenants a heads up to remove anything we wanted before the demolition, but then they strewed the mountain of debris all over the backyard, crushing the columbines I’d furtively planted there. They left the trash heap for over a week, and even when they cleaned it up, they considerately left a few dozen old nails scattered over the driveway.

The one thing in all of it they treated with any respect was an American flag that had been in the garage, placing it upright in a place of honor, surveying the devastation. Which is appropriate, and poetic, but we still made sure that fucker didn’t survive the 4^th of July.

What a way to move through the world. To take so little pride in your work, you could make such a shitty garage in the first place (to be clear, this is on the employers; if you’re working for money and being cheated out of a fair wage, it’s your duty to make something that will fall apart). To demolish a building without even noticing there’s a robin’s nest in there, not even asking yourself when the chicks will fly. To bury a yard in debris and not even ask what’s been planted. To hold ownership over a house, and entitle yourself to a third of the income of the tenants (medieval lords and bishops were bold to ask for a tenth; we are in many ways worse off than serfs).

What kind of person owns a flower shop and doesn’t recognize goldenrod? Probably the same kind who can pivot from being a florist to being a landlord as just another income stream. The kind of person who thinks there’s nothing more normal than turning life into money.

The columbines are growing back, and they look downright vibrant after these rains. The robins’ nest is all banged up, but we’ve given it a nice corner in the back garden to slowly decompose in. It’s done its work. A work of art, a work of love, a suitable starting place for new life.

The landlords haven’t come back in a while, and we’re grateful, even though the garage hasn’t been rebuilt, even though the light is still out on the back stair.

Maybe someday soon old accounts will get settled, and owning will no longer be an accepted mode of existence, and people like that won’t be around anymore. Maybe we’ll have to keep working and paying until the end of our days, just like all the generations before us going back to the edge of memory. Either way, we can choose to remember. We know who we are. And we know we cannot trust their hands upon the world.

The title is from a song lyric. Anyone recognize it?

Recs

I haven’t done much reading since the operation, but I’m enjoying Beef, the series coming from Lee Sung Jin. Nine Perfect Strangers was mostly really engaging, but I think we’ve been a bit too patient with Nicole Kidman and forthwith she should be prohibited from playing non-Australian characters. Her attempts to speak in a Russian accent are grating (part of the blame falls on the scriptwriters, though, who apparently didn’t take any time out to study diction and speech patterns); her attempts to utter Russian phrases are incoherent. But most of the other actors nail it, and the story is interesting. Lee Eisenberg’s and Gene Stupnitsky’s Jury Duty is hilarious so far.

A couple good movies: as the Marvel live action movies do their best to bankrupt Disney, I really enjoyed the non-MCU Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse. It’s one of the few superhero movies to actually ask the question, how can we produce a movie that pays homage to the comic book medium? whereas the MCU movies all ask the less interesting question, how many hundreds of millions of dollars can we sink into special effects and big name actors to cover up a fundamentally boring plot? Unfortunately, Spider-Man is also true to the original by being a fundamentally pro-cop story… as long as your cops stay at the friendly neighborhood level rather than uniting as a multiverse government, though that’s also a rightwing trope. Anywho, I got that taste out of my mouth by rewatching the first Matrix, which has a different take on cops…

Also saw Palm Springs for the first time, a hilarious take on a beloved 1993 movie, though if I tell you which one I’ll ruin a fun revelation that happens about five minutes in…

Anywho, I hope that by the next newsletter I’ll be more recovered from my surgery and from anxiety caused by internet bullies, and I’ll have fewer movie and TV recommendations to make cause I’ll actually be living a little.

In the meantime, endless thanks to R for all the love, care and support, love to my mom, my dad, and my brothers, for doing their best, love to S, C, R, H, E, C, K, M, H, T, S, N, B (in order of geographic proximity) as well as countless other people for all their support.

Let’s keep caring for one another as we do our best to tear down the structures that make life impossible.