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Author Topic: "So you want to be a landlord"?  (Read 1010 times)

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Online Pandora

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"So you want to be a landlord"?
« on: February 12, 2012, 11:04:01 AM »
This is going to sound outrageous, but here goes: I've seen a lot worse.

A lot worse than this bathroom?!  Good grief!

Quote
I renovated things of one sort or another for a living for a long time.  That rental house was no picnic, don't get me wrong, but there were no corpses left in it for a while. You never forget that smell, no matter how long you live, believe you me.

I've painted apartments that were occupied by people who did nothing but smoke cigarettes for thirty years, never cleaned. We had to scrape and peel the resin off the walls with a drywall knife. It peeled off in big sheets, like nicotine wallpaper. I've seen animals slaughtered for a ritual and thrown under a bed. Straight-up hoarders barely merit a mention. Neatly stacked newsprint and egg cartons are a breeze to lug out, no matter how much of it there is.

Back to the subject at hand. It's plenty bad. Why would anyone act like that?

I'm going to rule out "crazy." The term is entirely misused these days. I'll accept that the person in the house was "acting crazy," but acting crazy isn't the same as being crazy. You'll notice that the person was obviously fastidious about their own clothes, hanging neatly in the closet. They were fussy about what they were eating, after a fashion. A truly insane person would eat sand or the shrubs, and be as likely to wear a trash bag as a turtleneck. They'd listen to the moonmen through their molar fillings, not watch cable TV. The person in the house was acting badly, and knew it, but didn't care anymore. We call any kid that fidgets in class autistic nowadays, so I'm sure there will be a lot of takers to explain that house as mental illness, but like I said: I'm not buying.

The person went feral. Back into a state of nature. It's the hunter-gatherer Eden ruined by Western Civilization that we're told we need to go back to that's on display here. She was living off the land. When the land is covered with stripmalls, pizza and Diet Pepsi represents the nuts and berries. She grazed, and discarded the hulls right where she stood, just like all our neolithic ancestors might. Slept in a nest. Pooped in one spot. When finally challenged for possession of her particular midden, located by the sylvan glade of Pizza Hut and the 7-11, by a member of a more prominent tribe -- the landlords -- she went off to make a nest somewhere else.

She wasn't crazy. The landlord's crazy. He could be put in jail for allowing his tenants to live in squalor. His jailer would pay that woman to live like that. The world is like that now.

She knew someone else would have to clean it up, and that she'd move on to a new paradise. This is civilization, when the veneer is stripped off, and the particle board shows.


Vid at link.

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Offline IronDioPriest

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #1 on: February 12, 2012, 11:48:45 AM »
Dude seems remarkably calm for someone whose property has been utterly destroyed.

All that's missing is Dr. Zazio, the 1-800-GET-JUNK fellas, and a few relatives willing to berate their mentally ill relative for the cameras.
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Offline Libertas

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #2 on: February 12, 2012, 12:16:08 PM »
Just burn it down and take the loss.  No way in hell would I go in there, no freaking way.
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Online Pandora

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #3 on: February 12, 2012, 12:22:56 PM »
Quote from: IronDioPriest on February 12, 2012, 11:48:45 AM
Dude seems remarkably calm for someone whose property has been utterly destroyed.

All that's missing is Dr. Zazio, the 1-800-GET-JUNK fellas, and a few relatives willing to berate their mentally ill relative for the cameras.

I'd have lost it over the bathroom alone.

"Sippican Cottage" tends not to believe in the mental illness part of it; I can't say if it is or isn't.  (Living like that would make me mentally ill.)  I do know that on "Hoarders", there's always a head-shrinker type willing to "enable" that part of it by focusing on "loss", in effect giving the hoarder an excuse for going feral.
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Offline AlanS

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #4 on: February 12, 2012, 02:16:02 PM »
Quote from: Pandora on February 12, 2012, 12:22:56 PM
I'd have lost it over the bathroom alone.

I almost hurled when I saw the bathroom. ::puke:: I agree with Libertas. Burn it and start over.
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Offline IronDioPriest

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #5 on: February 12, 2012, 04:06:13 PM »
Idunno Pan. If living like that is not mentally ill, then what is? Who in their right mind could think that's even in the same universe as "OK"?

Living in amongst your own feces; storing your urine; eating rotten maggot-infested meat; allowing trash and discarded food scraps to accumulate until you're on top of it four/five/six/seven feet deep no matter where you go in your house; living with the stench of dead and decaying animals right next to where you sleep... and then railing against those who want to "take away your things" when they come to help you clean? It doesn't seem to me that such behavior could exist outside of mental illness.

It sure seems to me that each and every one of the people who does this is exhibiting mental illness long before the docs arrive, not to mention the fact that in a majority of the cases, there seems to be a pattern of behavior that - if I were to apply my layman's understanding - would be classified as "clinical" behavior - as in identifiable previously documented traits that offer a reference to some consistency in behavior from one patient to the next.

But whaddoIknow. I'm no mental health doc either.

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #6 on: February 12, 2012, 04:33:30 PM »
Maybe they all have the toxoplasmosis virus in their brains.   ::whatgives::
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"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"

Offline IronDioPriest

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Re: "So you want to be a landlord"?
« Reply #7 on: February 12, 2012, 06:22:04 PM »
Quote from: Pandora on February 12, 2012, 04:33:30 PM
Maybe they all have the toxoplasmosis virus in their brains.   ::whatgives::

Wouldn't THAT put a heckuva twist on the whole dang thing!
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"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson
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