The brother of one of my Dad’s friends died last week and so I spent yesterday helping my Dad’s friend and his daughter clean out their dead brother / uncle’s place. It was surreal, I’ve never seen such a disconnect between a man’s wealth and how he chose to live. The guy apparently had investments worth over a million dollars but he’d been living for over thirty years in this cheap one bedroom rathole apartment in Hawthorne that didn’t even have air conditioning. The place was a fucking disaster and it was pretty clear that he’d been clinically depressed for a very long time. It was so goddamned sad.

My main contribution was just confirming to the daughter of my Dad’s friend that she and her Dad didn’t owe the landlord jack shit by way of cleaning the place up. “They’ve been profiting off your uncle for decades, so fuck them” was my position. They were only in town for four days and didn’t call us down for help until the last day so the whole thing was going to be a shit show no matter what and it was time to recognize the futility in the situation. So we just did one final check for anything of potential value, put some of the more egregious piles of trash into bags to make it look a little less horrid and took them out for some very good Mexican food.