For the first time since I started this blog I am unable to write my usual lead in of “[BLANK] days remain until my house is foreclosed upon.”  Whew.  I was getting so sick of trying to find ways to freshen up that statement for every entry.  Yesterday, January 4^th, my house was scheduled to go up for public auction on the Los Angeles County Courthouse steps.  This time around I did not find the usual 30-day postponement of the event on my lender’s website that I’ve grown accustomed to receiving each month since September.  In fact, I found nothing.  There’s no longer any information about any sale date past, present or future for my house.  Weird, I know.  I spent the morning peeking out the front curtains and clutching a convincing-looking fake shotgun I made from cardboard moving boxes.  I fully expect a sneak attack at any moment from some sort of process server.  I really don’t know what to think at this point.  Unless they switched up my TSN # without telling me (which is entirely possible), it doesn’t look as though my house went to public auction.  As far as I know that’s the only way to legally wrestle this hunk of upside down realty from my clammy, alive hands in California.  So where exactly does my house stand in the grand scheme of foreclosure?  I have no idea now and I just really don't care... in a good way.  This debacle of foreclosure has consumed my life and soured me on too many occasions for too many months so from this day forward I choose to not give a crap.

I tried to forget about foreclosure through the holidays.  I tried to put it out of my mind with an early surprise visit home to my family in the Pacific Northwest for their annual cookie-baking marathon the Sunday before Christmas.  Within a few hours of folding butter into flour my mind began wandering around between thoughts of “where will you go when the house is gone?” and “how many cups of sugar did you just dump into the bowl?  Damnit!”   I simply don’t know where I’m sleeping next month and so I don’t sleep well at night which makes me do lots of stupid things during the day.  At least that’s how I narrate it to myself.   I looked around at the well-rested faces of brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and my parents and realized they all know where they’ll be sleeping next month.  They probably even know where they’ll be sleeping next year.  Bastards!  Just for that I substituted salt for sugar and baking powder for flour in all my batches of cookies.  Ha!  I’ll show them what a little chaos tastes like, literally.  Instead I showed a lack of prowess for baking.  This, of course, is rivaled only by a lack of prowess for keeping up with my hefty mortgage payments.

I tried going to Walmart for a little distraction and to load up on cheap goods made by small children from developing countries.  This is the only time of the year Walmart can defend its practice of exploiting overseas child labor by claiming they simply thought these small workers were elves… assembling sweat suits… in Santa’s factory… in Southeast Asia.  Bad idea, a guy like me in my state of mind going to Walmart during the holidays.  If you want to depress yourself into oblivion I suggest wandering the aisles of one of these mega stores with an empty shopping cart and an emptier head.  Do not ask yourself if a particular item is necessary or adds any value to your life or a loved one’s.  Simply confirm it is on Super Sale and buy the damn thing along with anything else that strikes your fancy.  Just make sure every item in your cart is on sale because as we all know, finding a bargain is the modern version of triumph.  That’s how we wind up with goodies like an all-in-one salsa bowl and tortilla chip holder disguised as a porcelain sombrero.  Not only is this monstrosity of partyware festive, it’s useful.  Nobody likes expending the extra energy it takes to transport a tortilla chip all the way over to a separate bowl just to dip it in salsa.  It’s this type of holiday hosting faux pas that leads to dislocated shoulders and subsequent lawsuits.  That’s not fun for anybody… but a porcelain sombrero holding chips and salsa apparently is. 

At least the crap I’ve blown my money on over the past few years is actually useful, like the $300 ice cream maker collecting dust in the kitchen cupboard.  Nothing warms a person up on a chilly winter day more than a bowl of homemade ice cream.  And then there’s the $2,000 pool heater made for a swimming pool the size of Rhode Island.  My pool is small but knowing I can heat it up like a hot tub in less than a day’s time is just the extra security I need to sleep at night.  It’s especially fun when I accidentally leave it on and a $500 gas bill shows up at the end of the month reminding me I should turn it off.  Smooth moves like that may or may not have something to do with why I’m in foreclosure.  In the four years I’ve lived in this house the weekly pool cleaning/maintenance has cost me upwards of $7,000 dollars.  I’ve probably swum in that pool on less than 10 occasions.  Stupid rich people spend money on… well… stupid things but paying $700 per swim is in a brainless class unto its own.  I’m starting to wish I’d peed in the pool every time I swam just to get my money’s worth.  I have similar feelings about my second bathroom.  This is the one I added on to the house during the remodel of yesteryear because one bathroom just didn’t feel like enough.  As a single guy who lives alone this glass-tiled sanctuary really comes in handy… as a storage unit.  I offered it to my cat but he’d rather incessantly claw at the sand in his litter bunker during the wee hours of the morning just to annoy me.  He doesn’t realize I don’t sleep much these days so I’m the one having the last laugh… I think.

Being surrounded by people who make sound decisions with the big stuff in their lives is really hard for someone who prides himself on bungling something as simple as arriving at the airport at least 45 minutes before the airplane that is supposed to carry me and my toiletry bag full of liquids over 3 ounces takes off.  By the time Christmas Day rolled around I’d permanently tattooed all of the things I could’ve and should’ve done differently in the past few years onto the surface of my brain.  They made me so miserable I wanted to change my Christmas wish list to the following:

• Self-sharpening razor blades
• Book titled “101 Ways to Tie Your Own Noose”
• Costco-sized bottle of gingerbread-flavored sleeping pills
• Tall skyscraper with slippery ledges and no windows
• A long walk off a short pier… preferably over the Grand Canyon

 Alas, my revised request was too late.  Santa had already finished his shopping for the season.  I know this because my dad is Santa – literally.  During the holidays he dresses the part of Saint Nick and perpetuates the myth… for a price.  Can’t afford his fee for your holiday function?  Negotiate it with his agent.  I’m not kidding.  

As is tradition in my family Christmas day consists of my mother and father visiting each family’s home to exchange gifts with siblings, siblings’ significant others and their children.  I usually go along for the ride because I’m the only non Pacific Northwest resident in the family who also happens to lack offspring (I think).  One of my sisters and her husband don’t have human children but they have children nonetheless.  They are in possession of two illegitimate Jack Russel terriers they treat like humans and oftentimes better.  I envy those damn dogs.  My sister pimped one of them out this year for Dr. Phil’s Special Holiday episode by putting it into a Santa Claus outfit, snapping a picture and humiliating the little beast in front of millions of viewers.  I was utterly jealous that this stupid cur managed to accomplish greater things in the first year of its life than I have in several of mine.  Jealousy turned to sympathy when I realized the hefty Dog Whisperer fees she’ll pay in the years to come when the animal freaks out over its fleeting brush with fame.  I tried pointing out that the stray nuggets of dog poop littering the yard and the dog’s incessant need to jump up on my lap and lick my face just after it’s just licked its butt were clear indicators of “child/puppy actor syndrome” but she wouldn’t listen.  Cesar will make her listen, yes he will… eventually.

By the time we made the final Christmas stop at my brother's house night had fallen and I decided it was time to take my blundering decision-making skills to new heights with a 14-mile run back to my parent’s home, the place where I spent the entirety of my childhood dreaming of becoming a professional foreclosee.  Just one week prior whilst out on a night run I narrowly escaped a proper Southern California creaming when a driver on their cell phone ran a stop sign.  The freaky leap and contortion of my body into what I believe is similar to a balloon giraffe shape kept me from becoming a thin-crust road pizza.  Apparently the experience didn’t learn me.  Icy running paths and dimly lit streets with no shoulders or sidewalks were not hazards, they were Christmas gifts to myself along with some sloppily drunken driver who lay in wait to show my numb skull the holiday courtesy of their SUV’s front grill.  That would be almost as good a gift as the chips and salsa porcelain sombrero-serving platter… almost.

Despite my somber disposition I wanted to get from Point A to Point B rather than from Point A to The Point of No Return so I took certain precautions like donning a goofy LED headlamp and blindingly reflective outerwear.  Let’s face it, statistically speaking motorists are less likely to mow down a coal miner posing as an astronaut.  Per my usual routine before runs such as this I attached a note to myself that read, “My name is [BLANK].  If found please call [BLANK] at the following phone number.”  It never occurs to me in these pre-run moments that attaching such a note to one’s person before embarking on an activity should somehow illuminate the lunacy of that activity and therefore inspire any logical human being to avoid it… entirely.  What is the matter with me?  I’m not sure but sometimes I like to inject a little morbid humor into these notes like, “I’m a ligament donor.  If found please round up all scattered appendages and put on ice immediately.  DO NOT mix with rubber bands please.  BTW, I have a highly contagious blood disease called Rage so use caution.”  My personal favorite note to write is, “If you think you’re shocked to find my body on the side of the road, imagine how the person on the other end of the phone number below is going to react when you call them.  Good luck!”  C’mon, who wouldn’t get a kick out of that?  I always attach a $20 bill to the note as compensation just in case the person who suffers trauma by stumbling upon my trauma has no sense of humor.  What can I say, I’m a big spender when it comes to the humorless.  Fast forward an hour and forty-five minutes later and I ended the excursion at my parents’ front door proving once but not for all that driving a car is simply the faster way to get around.  My frostbitten fingers told me it’s also safer. 

Over the holidays I tried everything from partying to movies to games of Rock Band to running mile after mile in crisp, clean air to seeing a burlesque show filled with beautiful, talented women of all shapes, sizes and age to catching up with old friends to an impromptu six hour drive to Northern California for a silly New Year’s Eve kiss by a girl I hardly knew to golfing in sunny-and-seventy-five-degree winter weather to unplugging completely from the internet and finally, to shrugging off a plethora of overdue work projects by saying to myself, “Forget about that, it’s the holidays.”  Needless to say, forgetting about that compelled me to think about this: foreclosure.  Avoiding foreclosure news and blogging at all costs didn’t work either.  I might be the only person I know who lost weight through the holiday season.  Talk about dumb luck.  Now I look like Super Dork in skinny jeans that are baggy.  I’ve lost my shorts on this house so ditching another item of clothing is meaningless at this point.  Besides, the thought of traipsing around town in nothing but my skivvies, an LED headlamp and reflective gear is beginning to look kind of fun.

I settled back into my house over the past week to once again face foreclosure along with its friend, imminent eviction, and soon came to the realization that this is my life for better or worse.  It’s time to get used to being in foreclosure.  It’s time to embrace the situation and claim it as my own.  This is not my lender’s life.  This is not my neighbor’s life.  This is not my family or friends’ life.  It is mine… all mine.  I am fortunate to lead it however I see fit or seem unfit.  The mistakes and adventures in picking up the pieces thereafter will be all mine as well.  And I intend to embrace them – or most of them.  The unpleasant ones I intend to blame on everyone else.  This is the first step toward Zen and the Art of Foreclosure.  I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to arrive but I wouldn’t change the journey for all the mortgage-backed securities in the world.  Then again, nobody else would either.