Absurdity
Man Spends One Weekend at Friend's Lake House and Renounces Socialism
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
LAKE PLACID, NY. Derek Foust, a warehouse logistics coordinator and self-described democratic socialist, has reportedly abandoned twelve years of ideological conviction after spending approximately fifty-three hours at his college friend Marcus Heller's family vacation home on Lake Placid, New York.
Foust arrived Friday with a tote bag, a rehearsed speech about the commodification of leisure, and strong opinions about Airbnb destroying local housing markets. He left Sunday with a Bluetooth speaker, a sunburn, and a new theory that maybe property ownership is actually 'pretty based.'
The Heller property, which has been in Marcus's family since 1987, sits on roughly two acres of waterfront and includes a four-bedroom main house, a guest cottage, a motorboat named 'The Heller-Bent,' and what Marcus's father Gary casually refers to as 'the lower lawn,' as though lawns have a class system, which, as it turns out, they do.
'I'm not saying I changed my views,' Foust told reporters while aggressively Googling lakefront property values in the Adirondacks. 'I'm saying I hadn't considered all the variables.'
The variables, according to witnesses, included a gas firepit that lit with a single button, a screened porch with no mosquitoes whatsoever, a refrigerator in the garage designated exclusively for beer, and a kayak that was 'just there, leaning against the shed, for anyone to use.'
Marcus Heller, 34, a financial analyst who has never once described himself as anything, reportedly watched Foust's ideological collapse with the patient calm of someone who always knew this would happen.
'Derek kept saying the whole drive up that we needed to 'interrogate our relationship to private space,'' Heller said. 'By Saturday morning he was asking my dad how the septic system worked and whether the county had restrictions on expanding the dock.'
Gary Heller, 67, a retired orthodontist who has described himself as 'not really political,' gave Foust a full tour of the property Saturday morning that lasted two and a half hours. Sources say Foust asked follow-up questions.
Foust spent eleven years organizing with two different tenants' rights groups in Buffalo. He has been arrested at protests on four separate occasions. He owns a button that reads 'Housing Is A Human Right,' which was last seen clipped to the tote bag he left in the guest cottage, unpinned.
By Saturday afternoon, Foust was piloting the motorboat with an ease that troubled everyone present. By Saturday evening, he had used the phrase 'you just can't get this anywhere else' six times, each time gesturing broadly at the lake.
Asked whether the weekend had given him any pause about his political commitments, Foust said he needed to 'sit with it.'
He is currently sitting with it in a $34,000 debt-financed Adirondack chair he ordered from a Vermont artisan catalog on Sunday night.
The tenants' rights group Foust helped found, the Western New York Housing Equity Coalition, released a statement saying they were 'aware of the situation' and wished Derek 'clarity in this period.'
Foust has since texted Marcus three times asking about the off-season rental market on the lake. Marcus has not responded. Gary has.
The story we are making fun of: https://reductress.com/post/one-hour-at-friends-vacation-home-undoes-lifetime-of-class-consciousness/