Quick & Loud

when we were apartment shopping, the three of us stopped by 947 bush street to take a look at a two bedroom. there was nothing wrong with the place and i rather liked the main entrance doorknob-- which was a sort of steel sunburst-- but i had no intention of moving into a place just two blocks from my last apartment unless i simply found nothing else.

as you know, we did not move into that apartment. and i'm glad.

aside from the pathetic closeness to my last place, someone must not very much enjoy the tenants of 947 bush street. or at least someone was feeling very passionate and upset right as they passed the building.

though slightly ironic given a poor person will now have to clean this off for his rich boss. but, you know, whatever.

my job as a corporate concierge slave, losing valuable life and colored hairs over locating baby blue rolls royces and last minute hotels makes me want to agree with the above tagger.

but this message is a bit abridged and unfair. in my mind, it should have been something more like, "fuck rich people who either didn't work for their money, or don't recognize their luxury, and have forgotten what it's like to be poor."

but i suppose that would've required more paint and a larger wall. perhaps that odd apostrophe-shaped paint mark after "people" was meant as an asterisk for all of that and more.

i've mentioned several times before that the majority of the rich people i deal with are very intelligent and overly polite-- the exceptions are horrible but rare-- and my hatred of rich people has somewhat diminished in the same way that tour guiding helped me to open up to conservatives.

my friend, philosophical debater, and former co-worker, jim fremon, (i'm sure there were too many commas in that title) once asked me if i thought there was a difference between rich and poor people beyond the amount of money they possessed.

i went into an endless speech about values and what it's like eating a can of tuna with ketchup for dinner before he had a chance to cut me off and explain his mind.

and it was a very interesting thing.

he said the issue is not obtaining money, but maintaining money. anyone can fall into a load of cash but not everyone can keep it. "rich people" are either blessed with an innate ability of maintaining finances or they're not actually a "rich person" and are in the process of losing that great sum of money (i.e. city sightseeing, mel gibson.)

his argument was that those of us who will be poor our entire lives may have, at a time, been given $1 million and not had the ability to maintain it, thus becoming poor again. whereas true rich folk could.

the difference between rich people and poor people is not money-- it's who is better at keeping money.

this was, roughly, his theory.

i've strayed way off point-- if i had one to begin with-- but that's what happens after a large cup of prima fila's coffee (which is labeled "STRONG COFFEE" by the way)

anyway, if i were to really want to issue a "fuck you" to rich people via spray paint-- which i don't-- i'd have sprayed "i love rich people."

spray paint on your apartment building is already a "fuck you" and having it in writing is just unnecessary.

but the bigger truth is there's no need for a tag like that in the downtown area. rent may be high, but that does not mean the tenants are even close to rich. i managed to live at my bush and powell spot not because i was rich but because i was willing to sleep on a window sill for a year while my roommate crammed himself into a walk-in closet.

rich had nothing to do with it.

so maybe "fuck assumptions."