An Open Letter to Former Housemates

You dressed mummies in a second floor bedroom . . .

You took calls in a fundraiser for Hell in the dining room lined in plastic . . .

You wired the living room for heart-popping beats when techno was still technical . . .

You were not too proud to sweat with 20 or so others in our rooms of barren plaster and no AC to watch countless season openers and closers of Star Trek . . . or flicks by Pedro Almodovar or Peter Greenaway or Andrei Tarkovsky.

How much would you pay now to own a piece of your post-college past?

It’s not just a piece we’re talking about. It’s the whole place.

Yes, now your old hippie group home can be yours for the ridiculously high price of just 300,000! Hardly a wall has been painted, a floor waxed, a bathroom mildew stain scrubbed since you left. Everything is just as you left it, but multiplied . . . no, exponentiated! A single washer dryer set in the basement has become two; a few unclaimed clothes strewn about have become heaps; that collapsing shed in the back has collapsed further like the body of some decaying animal once bloated by the gasses of bacterial digestion, but now slowly deflating while snakes and maggots scurry around it.

Act now while supplies last!

(Just please don’t kick us out or raise the rent. If 300,000 is too high for you to pay, name your own price. You might get laughed at now, but soon enough they’ll come around. As one housemate said, “We can live here until we die while the price is 300,000.)