Homing in One of these days, I’m going to have to grow up and buy property BY ALAN OLIFSON

While kids don’t necessarily gaze out of classroom windows as they fantasize about closing escrow or getting a great floating-point mortgage, owning property is central to the American Dream. After all, we don’t grow up playing Two-Story Rental Unit With No Back Yard But A Lot Of Character.

And playing House doesn’t even satiate the need. Soon we move on to Monopoly, "The Property Trading Game." Our country’s most popular board game actually hinges on the concepts of titles, deeds, and mortgages — the trifecta of fun for ages eight and up.

Yet here I am, more than 20 years up from eight, and I can still hear my neighbors flush. I’ve rented apartments my entire adult (humor me) life. "Alan Olifson: More than 30 years of not owning property," that’s my motto. At least I have a motto, I guess. That’s a start. I can get it etched in one of those Olde Tyme lacquered wooden plaques with the faux burnt edges, hang it up on the front porch, pull up a rocking chair, and whittle for a spell.

Of course, this kind of unfocused thinking is one of the reasons I don’t own a house. Equity is not built on daydreams of whittling. Actual whittling, maybe, but I don’t have a front porch, so that’s out.

Suffice it to say, there’s a lot standing between me and home ownership. Money is just the half of it. First, there’s the aforementioned focus issue. Buying a house takes research. I’d have to educate myself about loans, price trends, market values, and basically every subject to which my natural response is, "Hey, look over there, something shiny." Every time I sit down to research mortgages, within five minutes I’m doing things like Googling "mort." I’m still not exactly sure what balloon payments are, but I know that Donald E. Grades is a 10th-generation member of the Mort family. And right now I’m probably just as likely to go to their upcoming reunion in Pierceton, Indiana, as I am to buy a house.

Then there’s the commitment issue. Buying a house is not simply a financial undertaking, it’s a geographic commitment. And I have this image of myself as someone who likes to just pick up and go. A free spirit. I don’t want a house tying me down to one neighborhood, one city, one country. I live on whim. Who knows where the wind will take me next. Sydney? London? The same apartment I’ve lived in for the last four years?

Okay, sure, that’s a good bet.

So, I’m an indecisive free spirit. I guess I’m not being carried by the wind so much as by a dust devil, spinning around the same area, picking up dirt, but never quite touching down. I’m not sure exactly what the dirt part means in this metaphor, but it seems appropriate. Especially if you look under my couch. Yikes. I don’t even eat Cheerios. Weird.

Anyway, while twirling around avoiding roots is consistent with the self-image I cultivated in college, I realize it’s no way to go through an entire life. Plus, "Hey, if we were living during the Enlightenment, I wouldn’t be able to vote" makes for bad party conversation.

So, as the years pass, I’m forced to admit there are powerful forces driving me away from the urban jungle toward the forbidden arms of the suburban mistress, the vile temptress of tract housing and side yards.

My neighbors, for one.

Nothing eats away at your love of humanity more than sharing walls with people you don’t know. In fact, it’s even affected my view of extraterrestrial life. While some people think our celestial neighbors will come bearing enlightenment and a big cake, I’m afraid they’ll just be annoying junior-level execs who like to get drunk and blast New Order on Tuesday nights.

My neighbors are challenging the very free-spirit persona that has kept me renting in the first place. I’m not supposed to be the kind of person who would hit the ceiling with a broom and yell, "Hey!" But that’s who I’ve become. In the last year alone I have not only banged on the ceiling with a broom, but banged on a wall, turned up my stereo to a flagrantly retaliatory volume, and actually trudged upstairs to say, "You know, other people live here." If I had enough hair, I’d probably be wearing curlers.

I can’t tell if I’m getting older or if people are getting ruder. The fact that I just wrote that last sentence makes me fear it’s the former. But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. By the sound of things, my upstairs neighbor drags furniture around her apartment wearing clogs and every once in a while wakes up in the middle of the night with the uncontrollable urge to hang pictures on the floor. She also has a Sunday-morning ritual of blasting "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" loud enough to hear in the shower — where she is probably making love out of nothing but a Swedish-massage shower head. I still can’t decide what about this I find more offensive, the volume or her lack of embarrassment about liking Air Supply.

Of course, my neighbors alone will not drive me to buy property. Real change comes from within, and I’ve noticed some disturbing internal mechanizations of late. Like an inexplicable yearning for new cookware. And an obsession with getting a proper bedroom set. Almost every time I sit down at the computer, usually to research mortgage rates, I end up looking at housewares. What the hell does a free spirit need with housewares?

Oh my God, I think I’m nesting.

Stop me before I start collecting anything ceramic.

This is how it starts, isn’t it? First, there’s the uncontrollable urge to get an ottoman, and next thing you know, all the restaurants in your neighborhood are indistinguishable save for the thematic qualifier they use to preface "Buffalo wings."

Maybe that’s what keeps me in apartments more than anything else, my fear that homeownership is just one more step down the slippery slope of "settling down." A path that always ends, in my head, at a table surrounded by singing waiters wearing "wacky" buttons as we celebrate my 40th birthday. Yes, I know, I have issues.

So, while I have recently begun to appreciate the allure of suburban living’s soothing hum — the large back yards; the wide, tree-lined streets with ample parking; neighbors neatly stowed away behind fences — I haven’t quite hit my tipping point.

Of course, if the woman upstairs moves on to "All Out of Love," all bets are off.

Air Supply fans can send their hate mail to Alan Olifson at alan@olifson.com