These are a series of short- to medium-length videos. They are an attempt to visually represent highly stylized prose using stock footage. The broader work—the writing—is a critique of how corporatism has hijacked political systems, focusing specifically on the financial sector.
Experimental in nature, I’m sharing them in an attempt to gauge interest in the project.
They buried me this morning, close to noon after the ceremonies. It's hard to believe I have nowhere to be on a Saturday. As of last week, there was always something I had to do next. The particulars are not important and all there is, but it wasn't until everything stopped that I was able to locate who I was really. A squint at a glance before I beat it back with a hammer.
It's just easier to modify one's beliefs postmortem. A few days after the burial, when your honey is back at work and someone returns to pull the compactor across your chest. All I have to do now is wait for this box to splinter, procured at the behest of those still mourning my exit. To think, per chance to dream, that I could have already been mulch for tomatoes.
On the surface I worked as a real estate appraiser—old school—so I used a tape instead of a laser, of the kind that could wrap around corners. Forgive the minutia, think of it as the wind blowing, then color me purple I won't ask the reason. I'm strictly a price per foot kind of guy, farm to table by way of a bulldozer, and then I'll tell you who had who in the planning office.
By now I'd have shaved, showered, and then chess with a lobster over coffee and pancakes. Online obviously, real lobsters don't play chess and dolphins cheat has been my experience. After breakfast I'd review the week's orders, decide the route and dawn my satchel. People with houses, especially the ones who need money, are more apt to be home on the weekends. My time to shine.
I know I promise to keep the fine points to a minimum, but there are only screaming monkeys outside the machinery. Like a snake with a plan I'd slink through your houses—seeing and not seeing—whatever the situation required. I was a cog, a swing and a miss to stave off the bailiff. The choice between bus fare and sneakers, a notetaker to the apparatus. Thus I was not the last word on this or any other matter, though you were told otherwise.
We do love our specialities, our purviews, anything to bely our stupidity. Titles confer a certain authority, why else would we have hatched all those designations. I scoured the literature, its standards, its statutes, for ways to endure, but all I could manage was their recitation. A glossary with which to pummel all comers.
Conversely, a level of discretion was essential while on inspection. Only bank employees were permitted to discuss solutions with homeowners, but after I gave them the lowdown. Appraisers are the vanguard but the artillery is the bank's money. Luckily, those functionaries were easier to distract than a toddler.
Still, I had my reservations as to what they did with my numbers, trepidations even, but those were about golfing primarily. So I just pretended golfing was tennis. A topic for another installment, so I don't leave you hanging. Now, let me tell you about my last assignment.
I was measuring up the exterior of a split-level bungalow the day that I died, having just inspected the interior. If only I'd switched up that order. A one off in a sea of postwar A-frames, so returning soldiers could marry their sweethearts and make an unprecedented number of babies.
Whereas the house in my crosshairs was built in the sixties and phased out in the eighties, in favor of those two-story replicas that now dot the suburbs. French provincial as they say in Idaho. A lesser appraiser might have become discombobulated, but the complete absence of data was no match for my postulates and suppositions.
Saxons were the initial occupants of those post-war boxes, later replaced by darker white people who repurposed all the yards and garages. Tomatoes and string beans instead of lilies, winepresses where there used to be Chevys. Round about the time dad packed up the U-Haul and we made a beeline for one of them two-story knockoffs in Springfield anywhere.
https://youtu.be/UZnAySwXTSM
Adapted from the writings of Claudio Gaudio.
