To Buy or To Rent

Maybe there’s this little place you have your heart set on. Maybe it’s a retreat in the woods. Maybe it’s near an ocean or a lake. Maybe it’s near a ski slope. Maybe you can afford it. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you could buy it. Or rent it. Or buy it and rent it out to help you with the cost. Maybe it’s something one of you loves but the other one tolerates. Or maybe, like in Sam and Shellie’s case, it was deeded to you in a will. Whatever (or if you’re a millennial, whatevs).

I know of a couple who bought a beach house, spent a lot to fix it up, and then started renting it to help with the costs. I know because they rented to my family. But, after a few summers, the owners’ family loved it so much they stopped renting it out to us.

I have a good friend who bought a vacation home, and his family uses it some, but they treat it mostly as a way to earn rental income. That’s terrific in the income department. And what could go wrong? Not much, except for the random canoe paddle making a hole in the sheetrock. Or a leak. Or electrical failure. Or air conditioning failure, or they rent to a Mets fan (me) and don’t have the Mets cable channel as part of their tv and internet bundle. Shame on them! But not to worry. Everything is available. At a surcharge.

If my wife and I were fortunate to own a vacation home, I don’t think we’d rent it out. I can imagine sitting at home on a cold winter night, cozy in our sweats or pj’s, fireplace logs crackling away (okay, so we don’t have a fireplace but it sounded good). Suddenly the phone rings at 11 pm and the renter says, “Hi, I can’t get the heat to switch on and it’s getting chilly in here.” I imagine myself saying something soothing like, “Whaddya want me to do about it at 11 pm? Throw on an extra blanket and quit bitching. I’ll call someone in the morning.” And that would ruin my nice, cozy night with our imaginary fireplace.

The other comic plays directly into the careers John and I had for almost 40 years apiece. Advertising products and services. Which I define as making something look and sound better than it actually is. Example: “No other pain reliever gets to the pain faster than … fill in the blank. (Advil, Motrin, Aleve, Tylenol, etc.) The point is, they all get to the pain at exactly the same speed, but none of them work faster. Another trick is putting a question mark at the end of a statement. “The best coffee maker ever?” Well actually it isn’t, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. This constant need to lie about stuff is part of what drove us both out of advertising. The other part was the unwritten rule that people in their 60’s cannot work in an ad agency unless they own the place. The business also changed dramatically (like every other business). Instead of writing commercials and shooting them with big stars and big-name directors, it became planning “events that go viral,” or creating “a virtual town hall,” or stuff like that. And don’t forget algorithms. Towards the end of my career I was working on a project when, thanks to data mining (probably the wrong term) I was told that “We’ve learned that people who like this product like the color yellow, so try to work that in visually, verbally, and make sure there’s lots of yellow on the set.” At that point I knew it was time to skedaddle.

That’s it for this week. And whether you buy, rent or buy and rent out, have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Sending holiday wishes, love and kisses,

Andy and John

Both Ends of the Life Cycle 5/7/21

That’s convenient, now isn’t it? My daughter just had a baby a month ago and now Al’s daughter has one! Imagine the coincidence. Is it art imitating life? No, it’s just a damn good storyline. But unlike Al’s daughter, mine actually revealed her baby’s gender (a girl, Charlotte) as soon as she found out from the doctor. But John and I felt a gender reveal party was just too juicy to pass up. It’s the kind of thing that has made its way into the cultural zeitgeist, and most of us 60+ year-olds have heard of it but actually have no idea what it means. John and I actually called our daughters to get the lowdown. The bottom line is this: some people want to know the gender of their baby before it comes out, some want it to be a surprise and some want to make it an excuse for a party, or in the lexicon of today, an event. As my children used to say “In real true life,” one of these parties had a couple setting off fireworks, which led to a massive wildfire destroying thousands of acres of California. Another in Mexico just last month had a small plane flying over Mexico, set to reveal the baby’s gender. The only problem was it crashed and the result wasn’t pretty. We promise a gender reveal party somewhere down the road where nobody dies or even gets injured. But don’t ask us what the baby’s gender is because we ain’t tellin’!

The second strip is something a lot of us in this age group has gone through or is going through. It involves selling your parents’ house because either they’ve moved into an assisted living home or they passed away. Gosh this blog is very morbid today, isn’t it? John and I have both been through some form of this and everybody tells you the same thing, “Don’t get emotional. Whatever the buyer want to do with the house is up to them. It’s no longer the home you grew up in. It’s now their home.” You can nod along in agreement to this very rational piece of advice, but when the moment comes, all reason flies out the window. Marv’s interior dialogue goes something like this: “That was MY room damnit! And if I say it’s a great boy’s room, then that’s what you should use it for. I don’t care that you don’t have kids. Keep your freakin’ loom outta here and put up some posters of Jacob deGrom, okay?!” (By the way, that last piece of punctuation - ?! - is called an interrobang. John taught me that from a book about cartooning, written by Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey). At any rate, Instead of that angry interior rant, Marv just says, “Or a loom, a loom would be perfect in here.” This type of debate between the internal dialogue and what actually pours from our characters’ mouths is the type of discussion we have every week. If you know us it would come as no surprise that I would be the type to say the internal dialogue out loud whereas John would go for the second, more politic way of speaking. Since you’ve already read the comic, I guess you can figure out who won the debate for what Marv actually does say.

So that’s it for this week. Next week we’ve got another series coming up. We’ll be checking in on Sam, as he deals with the demands of being a new dad in his 60’s. The fun begins.

Have a safe, covid-free weekend and thanks for staying with us

Andy and John