Stoneacre, Beauport, and the Nature of Want

Last night, I found myself looking through multi-million dollar real estate listings. The kind that are so fancy that they need their own, special website, as they are clearly too good to be mixed in with all those "normal people" homes. I was comparing and contrasting the different properties-- their locations, amenities, size-- with careful intent, determined to select the perfect one for my own. Waterfront seemed to be a priority for me, as well as a large number of bedrooms-- at LEAST four, because I'd be damned if I was going to spend millions of dollars on a home and not have a guest room-- but balanced by having a reasonable overall square footage. Anything over 4,000 seemed a bit much for my needs.

It was also important to keep the price somewhat reasonable-- I didn't give any thought at all to anything over five million, giving special preference to those in the 1.25 to 3 million dollar range. And this is an important point: for anyone who might be confused, I am not looking, in any actual way, to buy a multi-million dollar home. I am no where near in the income or wealth range to be able to afford it. I was, in fact, selecting a home for my fantasy life.

But, and here's the kicker: it's my attainable-feeling fantasy life. It's the fantasy life where I do something great, make several million dollars, and can afford a home in the one to three million dollar range. Maybe four or five. Anything more than that, however, kills the illusion.

It would seem that, at the age of 33 and 363 days, I still believe I will be a great, creative success. I still believe I will one day soon be able to afford the luxury home of my choosing. So long as I don't choose *too* much luxury.


In real life, Dan and I will soon be taking over my parent's house. We will be selling the house in Greene that we bought extremely cheaply-- a repo-- with most of the money from Dan's inheritance and former graduate school fund. We are hoping to make enough from the sale to pay back the loans we took out to fix it up, as well as giving my parent's a lump sum towards their home. The idea is that we will then only need to pay them back for a small portion of the value of the house, and then we will own it, mortgage-free. This is a huge deal for a millennial couple, nearly unheard of. This goal, this life, this one-day accomplishment is not something that deserves to be buried however many paragraphs down in a post about my picking my dream house off of a luxury homes website. This is the thing that I have been working towards for most of my adult life. Owning that home is what I wanted since I was a kid.

But it needs to be said that, when I was a child, I wanted only to own it, not live in it. I had assumed, all along, that given my clear intelligence and obvious future fame that I'd be able to buy it, and protect my memories, and visit it when I felt the need. Maybe let someone I cared about live in it and keep it up. But it would be one of the many houses I would own, in addition to, at the very least, a house that resembled one of the houses on the website.


Life goes on, and it beats you down, and it puts you in your place. And you see people around you who you respect, struggling just to get by, no hopes of anything so grand as home ownership on the horizon. And you see yourself, working day after day, making barely enough. And you manage to afford a few vacations, and you manage to have decent cars. You manage to afford a lot of the things you want if you buy a lot of them used on craigslist, and you manage to pay most of your bills on time. And the goal starts to shift, and now you're just more concerned with getting to a point where maybe you could set all of your bills on autopay and not have to think about them. Maybe you could pay off your credit cards and your medical debt. Maybe you could stay afloat until one of the kids isn't in day care anymore, and, hot damn, won't that be something? Won't it be something to NOT be paying a quarter of your income towards childcare just so you can work?

 That'll be the year you plan TWO vacations. That'll be the year you go out to eat without guilt.


For a long time, that kind of life was really all I thought about. For a long time, that kind of life felt like, maybe, enough.

But things change. For me, they changed. They changed back.

I met a guy a few years ago who woke me up creatively. A guy who believes in big things, and my ability to do big things, and OUR ability to do even bigger things, together. And I bought into it. And I believe. I believe we can do these big things, together.

Maybe I just have to believe. Maybe I'm heaving from the marathon drudgery that is modern life-- two parents working full-time jobs, and a one kid who just can't seem to be normal, and a baby taking up any spare attention. A house that can never really get clean and pets that are behind for their vaccinations and don't get played with a lot. And a bank account that never seems to grow, and the tiny things on the horizon to look forward to that are never enough-- the long weekend that's over before it begins, the vacation you look forward to and leaves you feeling empty when it's done.


So, alright. My real life is tough, and I need a fantasy house to buy with the income from my great, creative breakthrough. And yes, my time would be better spent making progress on that great, creative breakthrough. But you do what you're capable of doing, I suppose.


So I find this house, right, and it's damn near perfect. 2.7 million. Four bedrooms. On the water. Has a dock. Roof access with a helicopter pad that I'll clearly never use, because my fantasy gets real hard to believe in around the time that I can afford a helicopter. Frankly, it kinda seemed like too small a house to have one, but I let it go. The exterior is stone, so it has a castle quality to it-- that's a plus. But, there again, it's only 3,500 square feet. It's smallish. Practical-ish. It feels right.

I can't find any good shots of the entire exterior, however, and that bugs me. So I go looking for the home on google maps.

What I find it that the home itself is nestled between two much larger estates-- both of which have fancy names. It shares a wall with one of them, Beauport. Beauport is no longer a private home, but a historic home designed by a famous architect that operates as something of a museum. On the Beauport home-museum website, where you can look an hours and prices for tours, I find a shot of the two properties taken from the ocean: they look, in this shot, like the same building, separated by and build up to a stone wall that separates the Beauport Estates with the neighboring estate, equal in splendor.

As it turns out, MY house, MY fantasy, MY 2.7 million dollar dreamhouse on the water is, in it's entirety, actually a former gate house to the much larger estate that neighbors Beauport. Stoneacre.

Stoneacre itself-- the main house, that is-- is also for sale. 8.5 million. I didn't find it listed because it has it's own, seperate, branded website. It is, in fact, too fancy to be mixed in with all those "only kind of rich people" luxury homes.

The Stoneacre site is insane. The house is insane. Nearly 10,000 square feet. 9 PLUS bedrooms, whatever the plus means. 6 full baths and 3 half baths.


Here's the thing. I don't WANT Stoneacre. Even fantasy me doesn't want Stoneacre. I said it before-- I wasn't even looking at anything above five million. Who the fuck is going to keep 10,000 square feet clean for me? My fantasy servants? What am I, a fantasy elitist?

And, for all of that, it doesn't even have it's own helicopter pad anymore-- my neighbors would have have to get my permission to use it, because some short-sighted bazillionaire put it on the gatehouse, not thinking about the day in the future when some cheapskate would separate the two properties.

I don't want Beauport, either. It's a fucking a museum. But here's the thing: somehow, these two...monuments to decadence ruin my perfect "little" dream home for me.

Somehow, I don't want to be the person living in the quaint little multi-million dollar home between the museum and the main house of the Stoneacre Estate. On the one side, your neighbors are the people who own the home that used to be lived in by the people who built your house as...honestly, I don't even know what a gatehouse is? I assume that some manner of servants lived there. Me and my billionaire neighbors would be separated by this bizarre, super-rich casque system that was set in stone, literally, a hundred years before.

On the other side, we're practically attached to a fucking museum. Tourists on their way to Beauport would get lost and then be disappointed when they ended up at my place. And I, in turn, would develop a complex about all the camera-carrying New Yorkers frowning up at my beautiful home as I walked out to explain that they needed to be on the other side of the fence.

The fact that no one shows up to take a tour of my home is not something I ever felt the need to feel bad about before. Why would I want to add that to my list of insecurities in a fantasy future? Who needs it?

But this whole thing speaks volumes about the nature of....want, I suppose. There is no doubt whatsoever that the home I like-- the "little", unnamed former gatehouse-- is far beyond the home I am working towards moving into in nearly every way. It's larger, better located, in better condition. If I compare my fantasy home to the real home I will move into soon, the fantasy home beats it in nearly every category, with the exception of, like, tax burden. It is beautiful and luxurious and all I could ever want in so many ways.

But when I find myself comparing it to the neighboring properties, suddenly it is flawed. Through no fault of it's own, it falls in ranking. It comes with an inferiority complex. It makes me uncomfortable.


My parent's house, which will soon by mine, is superior to the home I am in now in many ways. The location is better: closer to town, on a nice street, no insane neighbors. It is larger, and it is, mostly, in better shape. There is work to be done, and we are doing it. We are doing it as part of the marathon drudgery of our modern life. We are making a house we can live in, and be comfortable in, and call home, perhaps for the rest of our lives. And I am happy to call it home.

Except that I am readying myself to leave it, one day. I am readying myself for the creative success, and the riches, and the dream home. I am readying myself for a better future, because, somehow, I can't stop and spend any time wanting what's laying right before me. Somehow, I must dream of more, lest I drown in what I have already.

Such is the nature of want, I suppose.

On with it.

Bukowski Cool.

There’s that moment. When you’re outside, digging around in your car, looking for your lost keys, and you’re stoned. Because you’re always stoned, now. There’s work, then there’s stoned. But that’s an aside— to be addressed later. And you’re digging around your car, trying to find your keys so for once, you can just be the person who has their shit together, you can just be the person who knows where their keys are and makes the time to look for them when they’re lost, and everything is always lost, including this sentence, because, apparently, this is going to be some stream of consciousness shit?

No. You’re better than that. Get your shit together.

So you’re in your car, digging around for the keys, and you’re wearing headphones. You’re wearing headphones because the little list you made for yourself told you to put on headphones.

And, all at once, onto those headphones comes the sound of the song. The song that perfectly encapsulates everything you’re trying not to think about in this moment. Except you can’t be avoiding it entirely because, come to think of it, you chose that song. It feels like divine intervention because, have I mentioned? You’re stoned. You’re always stoned.

But it’s not divine intervention. (What is this? Beat poetry? Who do you think you are, Charles Fucking Bukowski?) It’s you, it’s a gift from you to you, letting you feel this moment. Letting you take a moment to stop denying everything you’ve been denying.

But, I mean...not for, like, a long time. It’s not like you’ve been getting all headshots in this war to pretend you’re better than this shit. The last time you let yourself think about it was all of maybe four hours ago. So maybe don’t pat yourself on the back too much. You’re pitiful, you’re never going to find your keys, and you’re stoned. You’re always stoned.

And you’re listening to this same song on repeat to preserve the mood, even though it keeps wanting to go to the next song in this playlist.

The “Not Pretty Enough” playlist. I shit you not. This is how fucking pitiful I am, for any of you out there who were about to mistake me for Bukowski. 

I mean, maybe that's not the right comparison, to demonstrate that I'm not cool. Maybe "cool" is a guy reading a book of Bukowski through this Ferris Bueller sunglasses at a coffee shop on a San Diego beach. That’s...that’s what’s cool about Bukowski, you know. But I get the sense that the guy himself was probably pretty fucking pitiful in his own way, just not in the Kasey Chambers way. Which, honestly, her expression of pain, however pop-y, is just as valid. Honestly, this assumption that Bukowski is necessarily cooler just feels like sexism.

Fuck you, Bukowski. You fucking misogynist.

For the record, the first song, the song that started it all, was not “Not Pretty Enough.” That is actually the second song in the playlist of the same name. The third, which is currently playing, is “Silver Spring” by Fleetwood Mac.

Which is fantastic. But I’m never gonna get this shit written if I don’t go back to looping that first song. 

When you were here before...

And god, now it’s on again, now you’re falling back into that moment. That moment when, from the driver’s seat of your car, you listen to the song and stare out towards your house, past the spot in the driveway where you and he sat last week. 

Couldn’t look you in the eye...

You sat in his car, stoned (you’re always stoned) and listened to music. It was the middle of the night, and he was driving you home, and now he was singing. 

You’re just like an angel...

He asked you to come out and last minute on a Saturday night, and you dropped everything to meet him. And you stayed out too late even though he wasn’t in a great mood, and you drank too much, and he offered to drive you home. 

Your skin makes me cry...

And now you’re sitting together, stoned, listening to music, and he starts to sing, and he’s so self conscious, and he’s so beautiful, and you can’t remember the last time you felt like this. Except that was then, not now. Now you’re sitting in a dirty car, which may or may not contain your keys, and you’re staring over at the spot where the car was parked Saturday night. Sunday morning. 

You float like a feather...

You’re staring at that spot, and you’re listening to that song, and you’re in that moment. And on one level, you can’t stop thinking about him, you never stop thinking about him, you’re always stoned. But on another level, you’re just thinking of how you, in this moment, would be the perfect character for a female-directed indie movie with vaguely coming-of-age themes.

In a beautiful world...

Will our heroine come to accept herself? Will she triumph over her crippling self-doubt and addiction to love and rejection? Or will the plot swerve towards some weird, meta resolution?

I wish I were special...

Will she realize that for all her doubt, for all her self-consciousness, for all her need to vindicate herself by getting him to look at her, finally, to look at her, she was finding her way through out all along? Will she realize that for all the fake, desperate charade she puts on for him— the pounds lost, the lines written, the show staged— it is here where she finds her true self?

You’re so fucking special...

Is it here, where she lays herself bare to the world, where she opens up and looks you dead in the eye and says, this, THIS is what I am...is is here that she finds redemption? Is it you, the reader, the anonymous masses who can delve into this and never have to admit that you did...are you the ones who will accept me fully for what I am, and finally, finally let me believe in myself, and stop getting stoned all the time, and find my keys, and stop looping to this damn song?

Maybe...

But I’m a creep.
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.

...on the other hand, I didn’t fucking plan that, but that worked out crazy well. It’s Bukowski-level cool, at least. Whatever that is.

It’s time to stop this looping. It’s time to get my shit together. It’s time to find my keys and do the other shit on my list, and stop picturing this whole thing in my head some kind of pretentious but endearing (?) short film, with every word I write as a voiceover to the image of the disaffected face, staring out of the car window.

Weird, though. I don’t think it’s even my voice.

In the film version, in the story where I fight this moment, and this song, and the stone bearing down on top of me— I’m always stoned— will I play myself? 

No. But why not?

Am I not pretty enough?
Is my heart too broken?
Do I cry too much?
Am I too outspoken?

On with it. 

Just Stand Up

You have to decide.

Do you want to live your life?

Do you want to lay here?

Do you want to overcome, or do you want to be overcome?

Your first step is to decide.

I know part of you only wants to drown. I know that. I know how peaceful it sounds.

But it’s not peaceful for the ones you left on shore. It’s not peaceful for the families of those who get swept away.

There are people who would form search parties for you. There are people who would drag the river praying not to find your body.

You want to drown for you. But you have to fight the current for them. 

There are bodies that are never found.  There are people who lost the fight. There is a child in the Androscoggin River tonight who will never make it back to his family, because he was not strong enough to fight.

But you, you are stronger than this. And you have your own children. And they have a mother. 

And she is broken. And she does not want to swim. Not for herself.

But she owes it to them.

You’ve decided before that you weren’t living for yourself. You can do it again. You’ve made commitments. There are people on the shore.

Swim back to them. 

Your first step is to decide. 

On with it. 

Food, Sex, and the Changing Tide of Self-Destruction.

The problem with being smart and self-destructive is that you know what your doing is self-destructive. You know your reasons are bad. You know you should change your course. You know that what you're doing is ruining you, and that you could, at any moment, totally combust.

But your reasons are still your reasons. So you stay the course.

We're all motivated by the same basic factors: Food. Money. Sex. Maybe love, if you're some kind of fucking idealist.

Me, right now? I'm not.

So it's basically food, money and sex. And the things that facilitate food, money and sex.

But when those things are in direct competition, which one wins?

It seems like I have the ability to starve myself for weeks on end to feel attractive. It seems like I have the ability to put on airs to strangers about the great, health-conscious reasons that I have for the decisions that I've made. And when it comes to fat and health, people will eat that bullshit right up, while they applaud you for not eating anything.

The truth is, I do not believe that hype that everyone else seems to buy into that being overweight is the worst thing you can do for your health. That being overweight or even mildly or moderately obese is all that bad for you. The reality is that the studies are unclear on this: for some things, there are clear negative correlations. For other factors, it may be healthier to be heavier.

What's not unclear is that it's bad for one's body to have a constantly fluctuating weight, and that some fucking enormous percentage of people who lose significant weight will gain it all back within 3-5 years. So there's a good argument to be made for making healthier decisions while staying fat.

When I started the diet program I'm in now, it was discovered that I am (was?) pre-diabetic. This diet-- a medically supervised "Very Low Calorie Diet"-- is supposed to be a very effective way to derail diabetes, maybe permanently. Maybe, because I made this choice, I will never become diabetic, like my father and his mother before him. And my other grandmother. And several cousins. And a second cousin who died of it, which is, like, something you NEVER hear about.

Maybe something genuinely healthy will come from my decision, and on some level, I won't have been bullshitting everyone around me. But the truth, when you get right down to this, is that that is not my reason.

I'm doing this because I wanted someone who didn't want me back.

The truth is, I didn't have the wherewithal to be body positive in the face of abject rejection. The truth is, I looked in the mirror, and I didn't find myself attractive anymore, either. And without that, I can't find anything in life sexy at all.

So sex trumped food for me, this time. And it's been trumping it for like ten weeks straight, now.

And that would be FINE. My reasons are my reasons. If all this was was an poorly motivated crash diet, well, at least I'm doing it the right way. At least I'm going through a doctor. At least I'm not popping random pills.

But that's not the whole story.

See, there's something about this fucking diet that's messing with my head. Badly. Something about blood sugar lows and highs, and not being able to keep it steady because I'm not eating enough in the course of the day. I thought it was lows, but in the midst of one of my episodes-- a moment where I feel suddenly, inconsolably self-destructive to the point of fearing for my own safety-- I happened to be near my parent's house. I had Dan, who was with me at the time, drop me off so I could test my sugar.

It wasn't low. It was high. I hadn't had more than 10 carbs in a meal for weeks on end, and I hadn't had any at all that day so far. But my blood sugar was high.

I obviously should have called my doctor pretty soon after that. But I've been overwhelmed by the complicated nature of my life, being all the more complicated by scheduling doctors visits and paying for labs and trying to figure out what it and is not covered by my insurance. Trying to figure out how to afford all of this while paying some huge portion of our income every week towards two kids in day care. Trying to figure out how to make time for it when I have none. And the feeling of...overwhelm? (There's a word a need, but, god, this blood sugar shit makes me stupid some times. I'm getting, like, REALLY bad at word searches, and this deeply disturbs me somehow.)  The feeling is compounded by the fact that...oh. I just made this point. The blood sugar stuff makes me stupid, therefore it's all harder.

See? I can't even write. I mean, I can write. I can write better than you fucking can, whoever you are. But I should be able to write MUCH better than you. So now you see the problem.

So I'm on a diet for bad reasons, and I can't get off of it for bad reasons which I am still smart enough to be aware are bad reasons, but not I'm not smart enough to just get off the diet. And maybe I would be-- smart enough that is-- if the diet didn't make me so stupid.

But probably not. Because we're motivated by food, and money, and sex. And maybe hate, if you're not an idealist.

And me? Right now? I'm not.

I think I might just hate myself.

I think I might just hate the fat bitch who looks back at me in the mirror with her bulbous nose and her soon-to-be-sagging skin. Her tiny eyes that sit back in her head like she's, I don't know, a cartoon rendered by an artist who draws all his characters as kind of fat and plain-looking.

The Far Side seems too mean, even for me, even for now. But is there a female equivalent of Ziggy? But less happy?

I think I might hate the woman who goes to work every day and despairs that she's going to have to keep going to work every day, forever, for the rest of her life with no real end in sight. I think I might hate the woman who comes home from the job she hates to her two children, and can't muster any joy from being with them. I think I might hate the person who lost her dog, god, almost two years ago now, and never sat down to write a post here to grieve him. And went out to replace him too quickly, and now can't bring herself to love the new one. And now-- whether it's the cause or effect-- no longer finds dogs cute, or endearing, or appealing. Or babies. Or...anything, really.

When you stop taking joy in the things you once took joy in, when you stop having any reaction to things that are supposed to invoke some basic, instinctual human emotion, that's when you know it's getting bad. And, truth be told, that particular light started dimming for me a long time before I ever started this diet.

I think I might hate the person who doesn't want to speak to her friends because they wouldn't understand, who resents them for being happy and doesn't want to be in their space. I think I might hate the person who makes calculated decisions about her self-destruction-- texting some near-stranger in the middle of the night, for instance, confessing that she's out of her fucking mind and sitting in the parking lot of a newly-opened Dominos for no apparent reason except because she just had to leave her house and her husband with no explanation and go (a totally random example, I swear)-- because that's the best she can do. Because having some guy who knows me from The Thread Theater think I'm crazy is better than ramming my car into a tree or going for a walk at night on a dark path with no lights and risk being mugged or beaten or worse.

I told him, maybe I'll just go into Dominos and get some fucking cheesy bread, because that was just self-defeating, as opposed to dangerous. And because, fuck this diet, anyway. He told me that was a good idea.

So I went into the Dominos. It had just opened today, I think, and it was going to be open till midnight. And I smelled that delicious pizza smell, and I let myself imagine what it would be like to just say screw it all and get the cheesy bread I so desperately wanted.

And then I ordered wings. Plain wings. The sauce would have too many carbs.

It was the choice that was just self-flagellating enough. Just enough punishment for the fat bitch in the mirror. But calculated, nonetheless: I needed to eat something I needed to even out my blood sugar.

Somewhere, somewhere in there, I'm there. I'm fighting for myself. I'm fighting for what's left of me.

All 200 fucking pounds of it.

You know what? Scratch that. I'm clearly only fighting for about 170 of that.


It occurs to me now that maybe, somehow, that's the problem. I have declared war on part of myself. I want part of myself to stop existing. I have defeated something like 25 pounds of it so far, and I'm waging war on the rest, despite the civilian causalities piling up.

This is getting too meandering, even for my taste. I left the Dominos ten minutes before it closed because there's enough of me left to feel like it's not right to inconvenience the employees as I sit plucking away on the laptop I somehow happened to have with me while picking at the two wings I had left. I am sitting, now, in a nearby laundromat. It's open twenty-four hours a day, and I've found myself here often over the course of my life, when things were bad and I couldn't sleep and there was no where else to go. There's something comforting about it, I guess.

And I'm here. In this space in my mind where I am when I'm situated in front of a computer. I'm plucking away at my laptop trying to find what's left of me in the one place that's always somehow safe, the one place where I find myself when I am no where to be found. I'm here, on suedecaramel.blogspot.com, because this is the work of my life, no matter how far I wander from it. I'm here because this is all I really am.

Sooooo....that's super.

I put on headphones to drown out the sound of Jimmy Fallon's show, which the other patron of the laundromat seemed to by watching. Maybe he works here. I don't know. I bought a box of tide from the machine so I could claim to be a paying customer, just in case.

Matchbox Twenty has come on the google play station that I am listening to, and that's as close to home as I'm likely going to get. So maybe it's time to actually go home.

Dan has not texted to see where I went, and he's likely in bed by now. He does this thing, sometimes, where he just doesn't worry. I don't love it. Worry is the way so many of the people in my life express caring, from my parents to my chosen obsessions to the Thread Theater guy who recommended the cheesey bread. He may be more worried than Dan.

There's a post that needs to happen where I start to break down my motivations, my compulsions, the way I use love and rejection like a drug, and the way I've started to use drugs like a drug, as well. There's a post that needs to happen where I put the effort into coming back to visit myself here. In this space, in this place where I always somehow find myself.

Not the laundromat, though. Homey though it may be.

There are posts that need to happen where I reconnect with the pieces I've lost, where I draw the lines between the love and the hate and the self-preservation and the poor decisions. The diets and the reasons and Matchbox Twenty songs, and now it's Counting Crows and MY GOD I love these songs, this emo shit from the nineties.

Where did she go? That girl who always wrote, and listened to stuff like this? Has she just been waiting here for me the whole time?

She must have bought a lot of Tide.

On with it.