Displacement

We have to move in two months and myself, my partner, and both dogs are trying not to fill our apartment with the collective anxiety that has been accumulating since we got the notice earlier this week. We've known for a little over a year that this was a likely outcome, since, in the midst of the wildfires that swept LA last January, we got an email from our landlord announcing they would be selling our building and we had to show potential buyers around the home we'd built here over the past 6+ years. The folks who ended up buying it were very complimentary on our cozy little apt, but of course I also overheard them talking about converting our walk-in closet into a bathroom, so this doesn't really come as a huge shock.

Still, part of me had hoped that it would be too costly, too complicated, perhaps even too illegal for them to get around to forcing us out, but here we are in February March of 2026, scanning Craigslist and Apartments Dot Com and commiserating over the fact that we're going to be spending 30% more monthly on what's likely to be 30% less square footage than we currently have. That's on top of the Herculean task of paring down our considerable menagerie of stuff, shoving the remainders in every appropriate sized box we can find, and physically transporting it to our new digs.

The real knife in the heart is the process of trying to find a new place. Both my partner and I hate having to justify our lives via the application process, and neither of us have much credit history to speak of, because neither of us likes going into debt, so we pay cash for our cars and have minimal bank lines of credit open. We both have good rental histories, and are financially comfortable enough to not be freaking out about the added extra cost, but it's distressing to answer all these ads that specify credit scores we don't have and likely never will.

Then there's the dogs. It's difficult to tell from the ads we're responding to exactly what the pet policies are, unless they firmly state "no pets" which we usually try to filter for. Still, will they accept our two dogs? Our larger (but still medium sized) dog? Will they want $50 extra per month, per pet, as some places we've seen require? It's a mystery, and it's turning my stomach in knots and killing my appetite while it remains unsolved.

And that's the main thing about all of this, I think: the sense of displacement. The sense of unease around the uncertainty of the future, which seems almost quaint on a weekend where I woke up to news of another incredibly stupid act of war that makes the world feel like it's spinning on the index finger of some cosmic Harlem Globetrotter as "Sweet Georgia Brown" plays at 2x speed. I don't know. It sucks. Everything kinda sucks.

And yet...I am buoyed as always by Edgar's observation from King Lear:

And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst.”

There's always further downhill to go. I don't know why I always find it comforting to think of, but there's a dark joy in the realization that as bad as things are they can always break worse. Sure, we all might be consumed in the atomic fire born of a catastrophically ill-considered adventure in Regime Change Redux, but in that case at least we won't be wandering the broken landscape slowly dying of radiation poisoning and drinking tainted water from still, black pools in the vain hope of surviving just a bit longer, with everything and everyone we've ever known and loved ripped away and destroyed forever. With that in mind, the difficulties of trying to find a place to hang my many hats is a little less daunting.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, trying desperately not to think about Matt Groening getting a foot massage from a trafficked teen on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane.