Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs

It's demeaning to be so superficial and petty.

I know that and I know, further, that to demean someone based on their physical appearance is completely abhorrent. However, but, in this case, et al, I don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs.

To begin, it all started because I married a woman who had parents that had to declare bankruptcy. That in itself isn't really an issue; it was for them, all the heartache and recriminations, the "why us?" pleading almost anytime the subject was brought up. They had owned real estate on the east side of town, apartment dwellings that housed less than stellar tenants. And by less than stellar I am talking about people who would see their house as a hotel. A place for them to treat as a temporary residence. A transient lifestyle cordoned off by 4 walls and a roof. The "investment" that never quite was only proved to be a millstone around the necks of Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs, my in-laws. They couldn't keep up with the constant upkeep, the attention that had to be paid to it from the wear and tear that seemed accelerated based on its proximity from the epicenter of crime and shennanigans which didn't help real estate values.

I didn't pay attention to their constant harping about the conditions of the location where they had rental units to tend to on a nearly daily basis. To me, the equation seemed pretty simple: have a bad investment? Get rid of it. Don't bail out a sinking ship with a dixie cup, abandon ship with your life in tact.

They chose the dixie method.

I wish I could give a play by play about the slow financial death that Oompa-Loompa and Chubbs suffered along the way towards bankruptcy, it was a lot like that scene in Cyborg with Jean-Claude Van Damme when he's holding onto that barbed wire with his family dangling precariously over a certain death, only the muscles from Brussels making the difference which proved futile, his hands excreting thick streams of cinematic blood as he fails in the process. Oompa and Chubbs just slid as slowly as anyone could as they were pulled in by the bankrputcy tractor beam. Honestly, there was no escaping it. I was witness to every gripe and finger point about what brought them to their current state.

I tried to divest any interest in what happened to them. They made their bed, they should lie in it and I was there to be supportive in the capacity of the occasional, "Wow, I heard. Sorry about that." I didn't want to be involved, quite honestly. That was their business, not mine and, more to the point, I wasn't involved. Their investments with property, their credit card debt, their outrageously high mortgage payment and the fact that the only jobs Oompa and Chubbs had was to service their investments contributed to what was the easiest decision they could make.

It was only when they were clear through their own bankruptcy and asked my wife to help co-sign on a new American Express card that my own downfall was immenient.