C Choose Your Rump State The empire of Trebizond (Trabzon, in Turkey today) was a monarchy situate on the south shore of the Euxine Sea initially formed as a semi-autonomous client state of the Byzantine Empire. It survived the sack of Constantinople in 1453 by eight years; its offshoot, the Principality of Theodoro, located on …
Here is a text exchange between me and a tenant who lives in a POH in my park in northern New York. Her husband or boyfriend is the brother of a woman named Fatima, who I have written about before (Fatima is the woman who hit the jackpot when her husband tried to kill himself …
Last night, a call came in from a contractor named Adam who is doing some work on a home in my park in central New York while I was talking with my wife. I ignored it. After I finished speaking with the Boss, I noticed that he had not left a voice message, and so …
Hid Your Own Easter Eggs Here are two quotes from recent client interactions: You know my name. I came to this country when I was nine years old, I am a very successful business man, and my net worth is greater than a hundred million dollars. I am insulted that you would suggest that I …
(The following was written while I was on hold, waiting to speak with an ERAP operator.) “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you …
When Wall Street was in the shitter after 9-11, I worked at a celebrity divorce law firm for a few months. There, I acted as an advocate, fixer and therapist for some very rich people who had made stupid mistakes from the consequences of which they wanted us to help them hide. Our clients didn’t …
-I think lobotomies should be allowed in some cases. -Dad! -Really. -Like, who? -The guy who sucker-punched Mike. -He needs treatment. -Far away from Mike and the rest of his neighbors. -He is bipolar! -He is dangerous. That’s me and my son. He and his little sibling had just made a snarky reference to lobotomies. …
The names of many twentieth-century authors have morphed into shorthand for certain tropes shared by the educated middle class. You don’t even need to have read the applicable books to throw the names around, because they are more often used as performative speech acts than anything else. Kafka – bureaucracy. Beckett – absurdity. Behan – …
In the novel Dead Souls, Nicolai Gogol tells the story of a shady businessman who operates in pre-revolutionary Russia, before the emancipation of the serfs. At the time, land owners reckoned their wealth in the number of serfs, or “souls”, that they owned. A census was taken every ten years or so, which counted the …
In a perfect world, a mobile home park is a parking lot. The park owns the land; the tenants own their homes. The park maintains the roads and common spaces, and provides access to utilities like water, electricity, waste water removal, and, in certain cases, natural gas. In exchange, the tenants pay what is called …