Missoula Notebook

House-Buying Jitters, or Just the Coffee?

By Sutton Stokes, 2-05-08

	The sewer diagram: Oh, thanks, that clears it right up!

My brother sent me an email the other day advising me to give up coffee. “I was reading about caffeine and its influence on brain chemistry and its relationship to depression and anxiety,” he wrote, “and I feel like perhaps there might be something to it.”

“Yes,” I responded. “But now you’ll die of Parkinson’s Disease.”

My response was flippant (the medium really is the message), but my brother had chosen just the right word to reel me in, because I’m nothing if not an anxious person, often plagued by insomnia and bouts of a nameless, generalized worry that it’s all about to Go Wrong.

Could it really just be the coffee?

I wouldn’t be the first to point out that these are anxious-making times. I was tense before 9-11 (ask my wife: she’ll tell you about the now eerie-feeling conversation we had just a few weeks before 9-11 in which I wondered why America had so far mostly avoided the kind of terrorism that seemed so rampant in the rest of the world), and the panicked way our nation has been staggering around ever since, embarrassing itself like a drunk in a barroom brawl, hasn’t exactly helped me to lighten up. Every time I check CNN.com, I’m sort of half-holding my breath while the page loads, envisioning what the screaming headline will say if Something Big has finally happened.

My pessimism extends not just to world events and the future but also to the personal level and the here and now. I’m the kind of guy who reminds you, as you’re on your way out to swim in the reservoir, of the uniquely dangerous properties of deep, still bodies of water. Every time I get in a car, I can’t help but think that this is the activity most likely to kill someone my age (unless of course he lives in West Virginia). And I carry the unpredictabilities of the freelance lifestyle around in a little ball of constant tension in my gut.

That’s me: always able to remember the cloud that surrounds even the most silver of linings.

So, just to help me relax, we’re buying a house. We put in a bid two weeks ago, and, after a few anxiety-inducing days, we heard the news: we’re under contract, all set to take possession of our own little piece of Missoula on March 3rd.

Yesterday was the inspection, and if those aren’t good for the nerves, I don’t know what is. This is only our second purchased house, so Amy and I are not hugely familiar with What Can Go Wrong. Going into the inspection, we were just hoping to hear that the roof won’t need replacing this year (it won’t), the foundation looks sound (it does), and there’s nothing about the furnace/gas-line setup to suggest that the house is imminent danger of launching itself into low-earth orbit (it isn’t). But in what seems like a perfect metaphor for the very nature of anxiety itself, there are these little things, below the surface, that might or not be a problem.

For instance, the inspector was hardly in the door before he was showing us a photocopy of a weird little hand-written document from the 1950s, on file somewhere downtown, purporting to show that the house was hooked up to the city sewer line and not to an ominous-sounding “cesspool.” This was something we didn’t even know we needed to worry about, and, while it sounds like it’s no problem, the inspector said he’s going to do some more research just to make sure. I have to admit that the document didn’t look like the most official thing in the world, seeing as how the accompanying diagram looked more like something doodled absentmindedly during a phone call, rather than an engineer’s notes. So that’s one thing I’ll be worrying about at 2 a.m. some morning soon.

Then, as we poked around in the basement, he pointed out a little elbow of pipe and observed as how it might be lead and we might want to get the house’s water tested, although he hasn’t seen this crop up as a problem in very many Missoula residences. Still, as he told us, it’s only a $15 test to find out if the house might need thousands of dollars of plumbing work to prevent any possible progeny from turning out like Caligula. So we’re doing the test (DIY, $12.99 from Home Depot). I hope I can keep my heart from exploding while I wait for the stick to turn pink or whatever it does.

But, as they say, if that’s all you’ve got to worry about… The place looks good, overall, and we’re really excited about the neighborhood. The house is technically walkable and definitely bikeable from downtown, and it’s close to Westside Park, a place where I can envision the local residents actually walking around and getting to know each other, as opposed to the hide-behind-your-blinds type up here in the South Hills. I mean, has no one here ever heard of the tradition of walking over and introducing yourself when a new neighbor moves in? (A cake would be nice, too, but I don’t want to get grabby.) I know, there’s nothing stopping my wife and me from doing the same thing in reverse, except for the fact that at least a few of our neighbors up here will actually go so far as to make eye contact and then look away without saying anything. Did I forget to put pants on or something? Talk about anxiety.

But maybe my brother is right, and it is all just the coffee. Since the next month will now include preparing for a real-estate closing, packing and moving, not to mention starting work for a demanding new client, I must say the thought of a magic bullet to eliminate my night terrors is tempting. With all of the external sources of stress on the horizon, maybe I should give up coffee.

The only problem is that the mere thought makes me more anxious than everything else combined. I think I’ll go brew a fresh pot now.




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