Here's a picture of a backyard jacuzzi somewhere in Thunderbird Hills, a neighborhood near where I work where I've been taking inspirational and constitutional walks recently.
Let me say it looks a bit funky. Squarish, seating about 4. I was thinking more about having a round jacuzzi. I have memories of one like that... Or maybe just one memory of a time that didn't lead me anywhere interesting.
I grew up in a house with an actual kidney shaped swimming pool, 35 feet long, 9 foot max depth, diving board, real flagstone decking and rock mountain powered fountain. Amazing, I could hardly imagine such a thing now. It was all custom work, my mother designed it all from her imagination and hired a small independent pool builder to build it. Such builders were everywhere in the Los Angeles of the 1960's. I didn't think we were rich (and in terms of cash flow, we definitely weren't). But I could certainly not afford to buy the house in LA back now, even with the recent fall in prices. The house originally cost $20,000 and we spent another $15,000 or so on improvements (my mother loved planning and making improvements, she would look at houses and say they "had potential" as her ultimate compliment). We sold the house for a steal for around $40,000 in 1974. Most of that went to pay off my mother's ever growing list of creditors. I had gone off to private college, with most costs actually paid by scholarships. I figured that when I graduated and ultimately became a medical doctor, I could buy a real house in someplace nice like Palos Verdes. Didn't quite work out that way; I only got a BA and it was years before I could buy a house at all and for most of that I didn't think I ever would, and when I actually did it was pretty funky. Last I checked, in 2008, the house my mother sold for $40,000 was valued at $850,000, though maybe down to about $500,000 now. My house in San Antonio has assessed value of $55,000, so a $500,000 house seems like an unimaginable stretch.
But you know what, after the first few years, that custom pool wasn't really so great. Yes I had great fun with friends at age 5 (when we first moved in). But after about age 8 or so, my pool buddy moved away, and I hardly ever did any swimming any more. It seemed like such a bore. By age 12 I preferred to obsess about uninterested girls in Junior High and later High School, or occasionally hang out with friends at their bigger houses (and sometimes pools) and just watch TV. It was my assigned chore to take care of the pool, and I never did. It turned deep opaque green from neglect. I never realized that a clean pool could, under the right circumstances, be a girl magnet. I couldn't think of anything about our house as interesting. Even the great views of the San Fernando Valley.
I also envied a friend who had a Self-Cleaning Pool.
I mainly felt I was a poor kid because we were south of the boulevard (Ventura Blvd) and didn't have air conditioning. Air conditioning was what I perceived as the ultimate luxury, it seemed about as expensive in my imagination as a whole house. I stayed in one house my mother was baby sitting in once, near Mullholland Dr and the San Diego Fwy. It had air conditioning turned down to about 65 degrees. Now that was the life I aspired to!
Well, FWIW, here in Texas I do have Air Conditioning, would be hard to live without it. So I guess you could say I got what I wanted as a kid. Now I envy what I had as a kid (though I'm not really sure I want it anyway).
So seeing that empty jacuzzi makes me wonder. Just another "exercise machine" to be neglected, like I neglected the pool I grew up with?
And what really matters anyway? And why am I writing this?
Desire is definitely something that interests me. I'm not willing to dismiss it like Buddhists. I think it's interesting, I try to satisfy my desires when I can, when the cost isn't too great. So I've ended up mostly satisfying my desires in hifi equipment. Those things (which seemed nearly inacessible when I was a kid) are now easily satisfied because I don't need todays megabuck equipment, yesterdays at dime on the dollar is OK.
Now thinking back, there are only a few things about the LA house I grew up in that I continue to desire.
1) The views of The Valley from the backyard and the family room (converted garage). Strangely the builder hadn't seen it fit to design the house around the incredible views that were available. But my mother had the right idea.
2) The covered patio, extending the length of the house.
3) My sister's cool bedroom, which mother extended and gave a private sliding glass door to the patio. That was also the only room of the house which originally had a valley view. My sister actually lived there only about 4 years before moving to college, then the bedroom became a museum, and junk room, and then was only briefly rented out. So the best room in the house...was barely used.
4) The high priced inaccessibility of it now. But that's the kind of thing you can never really have. Something that's inaccessible is desired simply because it is inaccessible. Once you can access it, the desire goes away.
The pool, perhaps the single most inacessible feature, I still don't really care about. If I wanted to swim, I'd want to use a community pool that someone else takes care of, and that attracts girls I may not have already met.
Now the covered patio vision, that is definitely something I've wanted to achieve in my current house. A large covered patio is cool. I currently have a postage stamp 8x8 patio with a leaky cover which doesn't shade very well either, and gives privacy only through the application of cloth privacy screens.
View I can't really do anything about, unless I win the lottery or something and move somewhere else. Here where I am I do have nice view of neighborhood trees (along with funky but improving houses).
And the Jacuzzi, I never experienced that as a kid, but as a young adult it seemed like every party house had one of those, and at the end of a long party, I could enjoy the Jacuzzi with others, particularly of course the good looking and bathing suit clad (or nude!) women. There was one party house in particular, actually a very small house in Van Nuys nicknamed "the dorm" by the resident renters, which had the essential ingredients of round elevated jacuzzi you could walk around before getting in (not actually covered to the sky), a large adjacent covered patio, and a pool house with shower you could actually live in (and someone did, a Texan no less, coming from some strange and far away place called Austin). It also had an actual pool, 15x35 or thereabouts, but I don't recall anyone ever actually using it at a party. The Jacuzzi was far more popular. Unfortunately, one of the resident women came to hate me for making too many advances, and I was ostracized (at least by her). A few years later I went back to take a look at the then vacant "dorm" and was amazed at how small it all was, but how many intense memories had been packed in there.
So skip the pool, which is just a maintenance money pit, and get the patio, jacuzzi, and pool house.
That has been the vision I've had for years, and that is still The Plan.
Desire is definitely something that interests me. I'm not willing to dismiss it like Buddhists. I think it's interesting, I try to satisfy my desires when I can, when the cost isn't too great. So I've ended up mostly satisfying my desires in hifi equipment. Those things (which seemed nearly inacessible when I was a kid) are now easily satisfied because I don't need todays megabuck equipment, yesterdays at dime on the dollar is OK.
Now thinking back, there are only a few things about the LA house I grew up in that I continue to desire.
1) The views of The Valley from the backyard and the family room (converted garage). Strangely the builder hadn't seen it fit to design the house around the incredible views that were available. But my mother had the right idea.
2) The covered patio, extending the length of the house.
3) My sister's cool bedroom, which mother extended and gave a private sliding glass door to the patio. That was also the only room of the house which originally had a valley view. My sister actually lived there only about 4 years before moving to college, then the bedroom became a museum, and junk room, and then was only briefly rented out. So the best room in the house...was barely used.
4) The high priced inaccessibility of it now. But that's the kind of thing you can never really have. Something that's inaccessible is desired simply because it is inaccessible. Once you can access it, the desire goes away.
The pool, perhaps the single most inacessible feature, I still don't really care about. If I wanted to swim, I'd want to use a community pool that someone else takes care of, and that attracts girls I may not have already met.
Now the covered patio vision, that is definitely something I've wanted to achieve in my current house. A large covered patio is cool. I currently have a postage stamp 8x8 patio with a leaky cover which doesn't shade very well either, and gives privacy only through the application of cloth privacy screens.
View I can't really do anything about, unless I win the lottery or something and move somewhere else. Here where I am I do have nice view of neighborhood trees (along with funky but improving houses).
And the Jacuzzi, I never experienced that as a kid, but as a young adult it seemed like every party house had one of those, and at the end of a long party, I could enjoy the Jacuzzi with others, particularly of course the good looking and bathing suit clad (or nude!) women. There was one party house in particular, actually a very small house in Van Nuys nicknamed "the dorm" by the resident renters, which had the essential ingredients of round elevated jacuzzi you could walk around before getting in (not actually covered to the sky), a large adjacent covered patio, and a pool house with shower you could actually live in (and someone did, a Texan no less, coming from some strange and far away place called Austin). It also had an actual pool, 15x35 or thereabouts, but I don't recall anyone ever actually using it at a party. The Jacuzzi was far more popular. Unfortunately, one of the resident women came to hate me for making too many advances, and I was ostracized (at least by her). A few years later I went back to take a look at the then vacant "dorm" and was amazed at how small it all was, but how many intense memories had been packed in there.
So skip the pool, which is just a maintenance money pit, and get the patio, jacuzzi, and pool house.
That has been the vision I've had for years, and that is still The Plan.
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