The Housing Market:
a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world
In Joseph Reich’s most recent social and cultural, contemporary satire
of suburbia entitled, “The Housing market: a comfortable place to jump
off the end of the world,” the author addresses the absurd, postmodern
elements of what it means, or for that matter not, to try and cope and
function, and survive and thrive, or live and die in the repetitive and
existential, futile and self-destructive, homogenized, monochromatic
landscape of a brutal and bland, collective unconscious, which can
spiritually result in a gradual wasting away and erosion of the senses
or conflict and crisis of a desperate, disproportionate ‘situational
depression,’ triggering and leading the narrator to feel constantly
abandoned and stranded, more concretely or proverbially spoken,
“the eternal stranger,” where when caught between the fight or
flight psychological phenomena, naturally repels him and causes
him to flee and return without him even knowing it into the wild,
while by sudden circumstance and coincidence discovers it
surrounds the illusory-like circumference of these selfsame
Monopoly board cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Most specifically,
what can happen to a solitary, thoughtful, and independent
thinker when being stagnated in the triangulation of a cookie-
cutter, oppressive culture of a homeowner’s association; A
memoir all written in critical and didactic, poetic stanzas
and passages, and out of desperation, when freedom and
control get taken, what he is forced to do in the illusion
of ‘free will and volition,’ something like the derivative
art of a smart and ironic and social and cultural satire.
