They reassessed the house and called it solidarity. I know the sentence. I used to write the sentence. I used to sit in this same expensive cardigan — the one that costs more than my principles have any right to cost — and clap when a notice like this landed on a stoop that was not mine. A notice on someone else's stoop is a theory, and a theory is a very clean way to love the poor. You can get walked out of the You Know Who Post for caring too loudly and still never have to find a stamp.
The notice came on ordinary paper. I am not going to dignify it with an office, a code section, or a city seal, because the moment I do it starts sounding like reporting, and this is not reporting. This is my house. The assessment jumped because the block is "improving," which is what people say when someone else's money arrives and the comparables flinch. The new annual bill is $4,170 higher than the last one. Four thousand one hundred seventy dollars to keep living under a roof that did not become more roof because a spreadsheet learned the cross street. A thousand of those little AdSense nothings. Still buying nothing. Now owed.
I would have cheered this. I would have called the increase a correction and the homeowner a stakeholder and the pain a transition, and then gone looking for a better adjective for the people who could not pay. At the You Know Who Post the rich were a class, and a class does not have gutters. A class does not stand in the kitchen in a cardigan doing the math on whether the cardigan was the tell: I was always close enough to an invoice to have told the truth about invoices, and I spent years being eloquent about other people's.
Walk to the corner. The improvement has a crane and a fund, not a neighbor. I will not give the fund a name. Names turn into citations, and it does not deserve one. It bought the next block the way a hand buys a thermometer reading. It bids. The comps rise. The notice prints the fever and calls the fever the neighborhood coming into its own. The assessor does not have to love the fund. The assessor only has to believe the comps, and belief arrives as a form with my hyphen on it. Theo Ashford-Lindström, payable. The brochure calls the same number momentum. A donor breakfast calls it the price of civilization. I have used both sentences. I am done being bilingual for people who split the work and send me the bill.
Do not hand me a party. The one that taught me solidarity will say the bill is my share of the school, as if the school ordered the crane. The one that taught my brother freedom will say the fund is the block finally working, as if a street needs a yield to be allowed to continue. I love Buck. I am not him. I am not putting on the hat, and I am not retiring the cardigan so a consultant can trust my face. Both parties are the help. One carries the stamp. One carries the term sheet. The help does not become a side I can join because the other help was worse this week.
Deb will say we are not doing reassessment feelings before the plate goes down. She will be right about dinner and wrong that this is a feeling. Buck will text that I have finally met a tax, as if the fund evaporates the moment I stop applauding the people who baptize its price. I love them. They are seasoning. The meal is the envelope.
Nothing in me became pro-market. That is the hat's mistake, and I don't own the hat. The anti-capitalist streak is not a souvenir of the old job. It is still here because the crane is still on the corner, writing "improvement" in somebody else's font. Hating the assessor did not acquit the fund. Hating the fund did not acquit the assessor. If your politics can only swing once, you are not describing the block. You are applying for a job with whichever one you spared.
I am keeping the cardigan. Selling it to pay a moral theory would be the old move on a new receipt. Call the position libertarian if you need a shelf at a party I am not attending. I call it the end of loyalty. The state is not my church. The corporation is not my church. I did not have a vision. I had a number, and my old sentences were the amen.
Next week I will read the news again and lead with what a reporter actually saw, and with a number that is not this number. This number stays in the house. If the story is a bureau, I will not hire a firm to save me. If the story is a firm, I will not hire a bureau to bless it. If they are already shaking hands, I will say handshake, and I will not pick a jersey so the sentence can travel. They reassessed the house and called it solidarity. I am keeping the sentence. I am done supplying the amen.
Theo Ashford-Lindström
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