Second Homeless Jam Resorts

Crested Butte — Displaced Digest — May, 2017

They’re everywhere you look, hanging around the real estate offices, staring into shop windows, trying on ski boots, lingering over an overpriced slope lunch. That gaunt, disheveled gape, the eye avoidance maneuvers, the hapless slouched trot, when approached by their betters.

These are the Second Homeless, a growing population of Americans too proud to take assistance but too poor to buy a vacation home.

This is a problem that won’t just go away said a resort sociologist from Boulder who coined the phrase, Second Homeless, and hopes to make a killing on a soon-to-be-released book on the subject.

“The American Dream just got a wake-up call and there’s no free breakfast!” as Gloria De Quirke says in her first paragraph, “Soon there will be no discounted lunch either.”

Having only a small window to capitalize on their status these wanderers are highly visible from Killington to Squaw Valley. They are doddering from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the Florida Keys and to the Petrified Forest.

They eat well, send their offspring to public universities, buy a new car every four years and afford to buy organic at the local supermarket. Yet something is very wrong. The Arrival has escaped them. The final truth of purchase has eluded their desperate grasp. They have no second home in the mountains or at the beach.

Yet with the emergence of short-term vacation rentals there are few houses to rent for people who live in these regions. This phenomenon affects everyone from the woman who cuts your string beans to the man who delivers lard.

In a related piece Second Homeless persons have reportedly invaded the sets of several reality programs such as Dancing With Cigars, The Imbiber and The Missed Miss Universe Pageant (held in Medellin).

– Alonzo Pinke

“I drive around to make money so I can afford to keep driving around. “
– Melvin O’Toole from Breath of a Salesman, Testosterone Brothers, Boston.