A conspiracy of dunces

The resistance needs you, Comrade

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to Field Research, a weekly dark humor and satire publication written and produced by me,

Amran Gowani

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For five straight years the members of my Podunk condo association have tirelessly worked to drive me insane. Now, on this Third Day of March, in the Year Twenty-Twenty-Three, I exact merciless revenge.

Below the main story there’s some fun extras and a preview of coming attractions.

Enjoy!

Bob in 3E.

WELCOME!

Dear Neighbor,

Congratulations on purchasing your new home and welcome to Sunnyside Condominiums!

Centered in the heart of Chicago’s coveted Lincoln Park neighborhood, our fabulous location features convenient access to shopping, fine dining, entertainment, green spaces, and — most importantly — is inaccessible to plebes, minorities, and other undesirables.

These world-class amenities make Sunnyside one of the most sought after places to live in our wonderful, crime-laden, hellscape of a city!

A COLD WAR RAGES

As fellow Sunnyside residents we know settling into your new home can be an exciting, joyous, and anxiety-inducing time, and we wish you a smooth transition as you begin your new life.

Unfortunately, we must also warn you it’s not all kittens and rainbows at Sunnyside Condominiums.

And there’s a crucially important aspect of your home-buying journey which you may not truly understand.

See, you’re now a prisoner of the Sunnyside Condominium Homeowners Association (SCHOA), a dysfunctional bureaucracy plagued by internecine guerilla conflict and facing a fraught, perilous future.

Recently the SCHOA board was seized in a bloodless coup by two unit owners with a radical policy agenda.

Well, it wasn’t technically a coup since all six unit owners voted unanimously to approve these extremists as President and Treasurer. But seriously, you have no idea how infuriating it was dealing with these insatiable ballbusters, and honestly it’s just a lot easier letting these blowhards take over so they can pretend like they’re in charge.

Anyway, these democratically-elected terrorists have been agitating for a shocking transformation of SCHOA, and are pushing dangerous new ideas, including:

• Maintaining, upkeeping, and repairing common areas and elements

• Forecasting capital expenditures on a routine and predictable basis

• Enforcing communal rights and owner responsibilities

• Adequately funding SCHOA’s operating and reserve accounts

• Digitizing communications and enhancing financial transparency

Needless to say, we at Condo Conspiracy Club do not agree with this militant policy agenda, and we’ll do whatever it takes to derail these brazen attempts at so-called “progress.”

WHO WE ARE AND WHY WE MATTER

Condo Conspiracy Club believes in the absolute sanctity of individual rights and wholeheartedly rejects collectivist dogma, which leads to emotional enslavement and financial subjugation.

While it’s true we all bought condominiums — which are by definition communal and collectivist in nature — we only did so because our parents didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough to buy us single family homes in this area. Or, because the socialist welfare machine in Springfield unjustly taxed us into upper middle class oblivion.

To protect individual unit owners like us from the added horrors of SCHOA’s Marxist leviathan, we founded Condo Conspiracy Club and adopted the following core principles:

Evade, deflect, obfuscate

This three-step protocol has successfully led to the cancellation of numerous SCHOA quarterly meetings, prevented Condo Conspiracy Club members from incurring routine maintenance costs, and made it impossible to assess SCHOA’s financial condition. Have Condo Conspiracy Club members laundered money in the past? Maybe. Who knows?! We don’t keep adequate financial records.

If you see something, say nothing

The best way to prevent the Radical SCHOA Deep State from seizing the hard-earned money your parents send you every month is by pretending there’s never anything wrong with the building. Ever. See that water intrusion in the basement of the storage area? Me either!

Why put off until tomorrow what you can theoretically put off forever?

Condo Conspiracy Club members have backgrounds in banking, real-estate, and engineering. We’re super smart, and we know that waiting to address potentially problematic situations until they’re utterly FUBAR saves money in the long run. Something, something, net present value, or something, right? Anyway, Condo Conspiracy Club never spends $10,000 to fix something today when we can spend $25,000 to cover catastrophic damage and repairs tomorrow. Math rules.

Operate in bad faith, claim ignorance

Selectively enforcing SCHOA’s bylaws has helped Condo Conspiracy Club members avoid critical infrastructure investments while simultaneously passing on unit-specific costs to the entire Association. When insurgents have challenged these willfully inconsistent interpretations in the past we’ve credibly feigned ignorance. Luckily, in America, being a complete fucking moron isn’t a crime.

Condo Conspiracy Club’s commitment to these ideals has protected our unearned, inherited, and regressively taxed wealth from SCHOA overreach.

Now we must double down on our existing belief system to ensure SCHOA remains crippled and ineffective — like congress.

CONDO CONSPIRACY CLUB NEEDS YOU!

Comrade, at this critical juncture our very livelihood teeters on the precipice.

The previous owner of your unit was one of Condo Conspiracy Club’s most valuable associates. He brought a never before seen combination of apathy, cynicism, incompetence, and cowardice to our organization, and will be deeply missed.

Now, Condo Conspiracy Club cordially invites you to take up arms for our cause.

If you don’t step in and fill the void left by our prior champion — who justifiably moved to the suburbs so his children won’t be groomed by CRT — the radicals may garner enough support to force every owner to properly follow SCHOA’s bylaws.

Such belligerence promises to maintain and protect the integrity of our entire building, which is an asset we all collectively own, and which we have a social, moral, and legally binding financial responsibility to uphold.

Condo Conspiracy Club cannot — will not — be ruled by collectivist tyranny, Comrade.

Reject their distorted vision of progress.

Resist their socialist shackles.

Join us.

Sincerely yours,

Bob in 3E

President, Condo Conspiracy Club

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From the vault

Obviously, residing in our condo for five years has irreparably damaged my psyche. But this isn’t the first time I’ve gone thermonuclear on my neighbors.

This unhinged “children’s story” is one of my best ever riffs.

The tragic tale of the four little condo owners

This one’s very funny too, though it mixes in some of the more prosaic horrors of home ownership (note: paywalled).

How to stimulate the economy

TRIPLE DAMN R

If you’ve been reading my nonsense for a while you know the epic Telugu cinema action flick RRR altered the very fibers of my being. Watching this movie last Thanksgiving made me happier than the births of my children.

This Sunday afternoon I’ll transcend to an even higher plane of existence when I see RRR on the big screen, the way the gods intended.

The film’s being selectively re-released in advance of The Oscars. If it’s playing in a theater near you, do the right thing and go see it.

Also, for anyone keeping score at home, by Sunday night I’ll have seen both Predator and RRR in the theater this year.

Up next

Next Friday I’m announcing a small but significant update to my paid subscription model. It’s an exciting idea I’ve been kicking around for a while.

On the creative docket I’m planning a few stories which will likely be more “humor” than “satire.”

Hopefully they’ll elicit some laughs and might even soften my edge a little. Of course, I’ll remain a deeply unwell middle-aged dad, so no promises.

Likely pieces include a riff on my three-year-old son’s preschool progress report, reflections on using Twitter for a year, and a new entry in “The Talks.”

I’m also attending a writer’s conference at the end of March, where I’m sure to encounter several Unmedicated Neighbors, and I’m debating a pseudo-serious piece that would highlight inequity in the Chicago Public School system.

Finally, I’ve got a fancy letter exchange in the works with a writer who’s much more sophisticated than me, and whose presence will increase the classiness quotient of this publication by multiple orders of magnitude.

All this is to say: the “content” train should continue to chug along — without dumping metaphorical vinyl chloride everywhere — and I’m very excited about these upcoming pieces.

Ergo, my humble ask to all of you lovely people is to please take a moment and share Field Research with two other humans you think might enjoy it. (Or, if you prefer, despise it.)

Siblings. Parents. Roommates. College friends. Racist aunts and uncles. Your therapist. A clandestine lover. Whoever.

All you need to do is click that handsome little button 👆🏽👆🏽👆🏽, direct it to your victims of choice, and say, “Hey, this internet rando’s pretty funny and you should subscribe to his email newsletter!” or “Getta loada this lefty cuck! You should hate-subscribe to his stupid email newsletter.”

It’s a win-win for everyone.

Laughter’s the best medicine, all publicity's good publicity, and — allegedly — the bigger my audience grows, the more commercially attractive I’ll become to traditional publishers¹.

I truly, sincerely appreciate your support.

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Amran

1. I’m writing a contemporary fiction novel which did derail last fall and spilled metaphorical vinyl chloride everywhere. Luckily, I’ve cleaned up the mess and the story’s back on track.