thispresentsojourn

On the other side of the hermitage from the quiet kin’s quarters sits an infant house, all pompous and smug. When I first moved to the neighborhood, its lot was in ruins, but only two months into our stay the construction-work-chaos was restored to a flamboyant structure in the Spanish tradition.

Among the community of Wilshire Heights and her highly-esteemed older sister, the M Streets, it has become an expectation that a marauding, loot-loving developer [See "Real-Estate-Ricky"] will invade the territory, demolish a sentimentally valuable [valuably sentimental] house, and prepare on its tiny lot a financially-fierce multi-tiered space embellished to whichever extent his wallet’s capacity serves. In doing so, he looses Dallas piece-by-piece of its heritage, all from the sinister motive that a return might beg his emptied wallet to burst at the seams.

During the third month of my stay here, this particular variety in that trend became occupied. Unlike the majority of bustling houses at the perimeter of my home, I have seen in the past six months only a hand’s-full of individuals exit or enter this one. And similar to the household only two doors down, all hypotheses regarding its inhabitants I must draw exclusively from the vehicles by which they are represented.

Either the house offices some sort of financially astute [and wholly suspicious] business, it is the shared space of multiple car dealers, or the owners simply have some sort of emotional investment in late eighties Mercedes turbo-diesels. Although the last of the list is an emotion foreign to me, I musn’t deny the possibility that it is both real and affective to some.