Honestly, that seems like it was excessive for that property even back in 1984.
VanderleunFebruary 19, 2020, 1:56 PM
Well, it was new then but since then it has been overrun by owners and renters who were not, shall I say, of the first water.
Schill McGuffinFebruary 19, 2020, 2:27 PM
That certainly doesn’t help. But just the size and postage-stamp plot would have kind of limited the value. Of course, I live in suburban Philadelphia, where that price would have probably gotten a second story and a third of an acre back then. I suspect California prices, much less Oakland’s, have been pretty out of control for a long time. The 21st century is just stretching to redefine absurdity.
BillHFebruary 19, 2020, 2:43 PM
My ignorant, knuckle-draggin’ town in the deep south demolishes stuff like that, either with owner’s consent or using public domain.
ghostsniperFebruary 19, 2020, 5:44 PM
BillH is right. That thing is not saleable and is in violation of numerous codes, several pages worth, at least. It’s up to 92k views now, at 8:30pm.
I looked the address up on the map. Holy fuck. How do people live that way? Lab rats! All clustered together like that. One breaths out so that the next can breath in and nobody gets to breath at the same time. I zoomed out, and out, and out, and no matter it was all the same – a pacific of people, stacked up like cord wood. What mental condition brings people to that point?
MissyFebruary 19, 2020, 6:56 PM
Here, in the Pennsylvania hustings, this would be considered a property “demolition by neglect” worthy. And torn down.
VanderleunFebruary 19, 2020, 8:15 PM
I know what you mean, ghost. I couple of months back I drove from Laguna to Chico up, for the most part, the coast road. But then I decided to avoid the Bay Area and its congestion by cutting back behind the mountains thrugh the far side of what used to be the town of Walnut Creek. I soon discovered that the cancerous growth of the Bay Area had metastasized over the hills surrounding the west of SF bay and flowed thickly out BEYOND Walnut Creek. A pacific of people indeed.
WillFebruary 20, 2020, 7:15 AM
I think you mean the hills East of SF Bay out towards Walnut Creek. Which used to be a nice town back 10-15 years ago but traffic and draconian parking regs have made it unliveable. I avoid it like the plague. Further east is Concord, a town of over 120,000 and the largest in the East Bay. Traffic in general in the East Bay has gotten worse every year and with BART continuing to be a disaster many are forced to commute via car. 680 is generally a parking lot during rush hour. There are a few nice places to live in the East Bay but I’m not telling…too many people already.
Sam L.February 20, 2020, 8:56 AM
Can you say “That’s INSANE”, boys and girls? Yes, I KNEW you could.
Snakepit KansasFebruary 20, 2020, 6:38 PM
Quarter million bucks would buy you a pretty nice place on a private golf course in Kansas. Closest neighbor to the west across two fairways is well over 200 yards. Architects made it so that houses on either side of my perimeter have their back decks out of view from one another, using offsets and angles. Very clever. Sunsets are so spectacular that words would not do them justice. The weather here is very nice two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
— WH Auden
TWAIN IN TESLA’S LABORATORY
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The painter stood Before her work She looked around every where She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air Green to green Red to red Yellow to yellow In the light Black to black When the evening comes Blue to blue In the night
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
Contemplation of the Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Ferreya
ARTIST: GIBSON
Edwin Deakin, American
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
![The Illustrated Desolation Row [See "Streets of Phildelphia" Below]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/slumonwater-2-150x150.jpg "The Illustrated Desolation Row [See \"Streets of Phildelphia\" Below]")
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
Honestly, that seems like it was excessive for that property even back in 1984.
Well, it was new then but since then it has been overrun by owners and renters who were not, shall I say, of the first water.
That certainly doesn’t help. But just the size and postage-stamp plot would have kind of limited the value. Of course, I live in suburban Philadelphia, where that price would have probably gotten a second story and a third of an acre back then. I suspect California prices, much less Oakland’s, have been pretty out of control for a long time. The 21st century is just stretching to redefine absurdity.
My ignorant, knuckle-draggin’ town in the deep south demolishes stuff like that, either with owner’s consent or using public domain.
BillH is right. That thing is not saleable and is in violation of numerous codes, several pages worth, at least. It’s up to 92k views now, at 8:30pm.
I looked the address up on the map. Holy fuck. How do people live that way? Lab rats! All clustered together like that. One breaths out so that the next can breath in and nobody gets to breath at the same time. I zoomed out, and out, and out, and no matter it was all the same – a pacific of people, stacked up like cord wood. What mental condition brings people to that point?
Here, in the Pennsylvania hustings, this would be considered a property “demolition by neglect” worthy. And torn down.
I know what you mean, ghost. I couple of months back I drove from Laguna to Chico up, for the most part, the coast road. But then I decided to avoid the Bay Area and its congestion by cutting back behind the mountains thrugh the far side of what used to be the town of Walnut Creek. I soon discovered that the cancerous growth of the Bay Area had metastasized over the hills surrounding the west of SF bay and flowed thickly out BEYOND Walnut Creek. A pacific of people indeed.
I think you mean the hills East of SF Bay out towards Walnut Creek. Which used to be a nice town back 10-15 years ago but traffic and draconian parking regs have made it unliveable. I avoid it like the plague. Further east is Concord, a town of over 120,000 and the largest in the East Bay. Traffic in general in the East Bay has gotten worse every year and with BART continuing to be a disaster many are forced to commute via car. 680 is generally a parking lot during rush hour. There are a few nice places to live in the East Bay but I’m not telling…too many people already.
Can you say “That’s INSANE”, boys and girls? Yes, I KNEW you could.
Quarter million bucks would buy you a pretty nice place on a private golf course in Kansas. Closest neighbor to the west across two fairways is well over 200 yards. Architects made it so that houses on either side of my perimeter have their back decks out of view from one another, using offsets and angles. Very clever. Sunsets are so spectacular that words would not do them justice. The weather here is very nice two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall.
Is life there as corny as Kansas in August?