Putting the HO in HOA
I live my life by one hard and fast rule: Please don’t make me be an asshole.
I’ve said this a million times, and I think even a few instances on here—I live my life by one hard and fast rule:
Please don’t make me be an asshole.
That’s it. That’s the whole rule. I can work around almost everything else.
As I’ve aged, I’ve found great peace and strength in proclaiming, “That sounds like none of my business.” Having been the world’s hall monitor for forty-plus years, I’ve recently discovered the freedom of not trying to assert my rightness in every single situation. (I get a lot more reading done this way.) I sort of feel like Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon.
Point is, I don’t go trolling for fights. Well… not specifically.
I admit that I’m quick to escalate when someone says something dumb on one of the Facebook resellers’ groups I follow. If you’re going to prattle on about something I can document is untrue (e.g., “Goodwill is a greedy, for-profit corporation”), I will respond with facts, not feelings.
In our last video, I mentioned a dummy in one of my groups who keeps crowing about her new penchant for buying pre-owned Gucci and Chanel. Does she buy the beautiful couture items, like tailored jackets with wrapped seams, woven in fine silks and tweeds, with buttons so perfect they could be a museum display? No. She purchases cheesy logo t-shirts that are too tight and dirty ball caps in bad condition. There is no taste. There is no style. There is no appreciation for quiet luxury, yet that is her right, because her choices are none of my business.
However, her caveat on that post where she included TWENTY-FIVE awkward selfies of her new, ill-fitting gains, was that she only wants to buy from people who truly love designer goods like she loves them, and not those loser resellers who find items at thrift stores, as though these two entities are mutually exclusive.
This is where her post became my business.
First of all, I’ve been reselling long enough that all I have to do is run my hand along the sleeves of a rack to, say, pick out the Peter Millars in the men’s shirts. I can spot quality at ten paces. I can feel artistry blindfolded. And I know that the Venn Diagram of craftsmanship and price don’t always overlap. (For example, Reformation is garbage. Don’t @ me.) Reselling is a skill, one that I’ve worked hard to hone. I’ve studied, I’ve put in the legwork. I do it because I love being around beautiful things, and it turns a profit. Because of my efforts, I’ve built a solid business entirely outside of the realm of writing. I am proud of what I do, as are many of my fellow resellers.
What set me off was, this bitch came to a resellers’ group to complain about resellers having no taste and then expected everyone to agree with her. That’d be like going to Klan meeting and being surprised to find it full of racists. (I’m sorry, who did you think would be under the pillowcase, Bubba? Maya Angelou?) Then she got even more officious to discover that people were getting mad at her for coming uninvited into our collective living room and complaining about our drapes. That’s when I jumped into the fray, which I explained on the video.
Because I am truly conflict-averse, I never start fights.
Because I am also an asshole, I always finish them.
Every couple of days, she returns to the group and brags about another one of her wonderful Gucci finds. Nine times out of ten, she buys a replica because she can’t tell the difference between Canal Street and a true vintage Jackie bag and then she gets panicky that she can’t get a refund. (Spoiler alert: the real ones don’t go for $59, you nimrod. And I know this because it is my business.) However, at this point, I’ve stopped responding because the whole thing is starting to feel like performance art. No one could be that wrong that often.
That brings us to today.
Last week, I received a letter from the HOA’s management company. This one was addressed to Resident, so I actually opened it. Before I continue, I must share this background. Because we’re renting, it took us more than a year of stamping the HOA’s letters Return to Sender, after my having explained again and again that we can’t open the owner’s mail, and that if improvements are needed, letters should go to those responsible for making those decisions. If there’s an assessment, if there’s news, the letter must go to either the owner’s home or the management company in charge of this place (different from the one employed by the HOA). I have the capacity to make only so many phone calls about the same damn thing before they have to figure shit out for themselves. Still, regardless of my best efforts, for nine months—the time it takes to incubate a human life—the HOA’s management company would take those returned letters and STUFF THEM IN A NEW ENVELOPE before sending them back to us in bulk.
Again, I have to wonder how many things in my life are actually performance art.
But this time, because the letter was addressed to Resident, I assumed the contents were for me. I opened it to find a Courtesy Violation Notice. The HOA’s management company told us that we were guilty of dumping grass on the the banks of the retention pond behind our home and that we had ten days to clean it up before fines were assessed. They also included a black and white Xerox copy of what could have been anything from the surface of the moon to a microscopic view of mitochondria, for its levels of detail.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Meet the Mess to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.