Not to put too fine a point on it, escrow is HELL. Really. There are only TWO eternal states, Heaven and Hell, unless you count driving across Kansas. So anyway, since ESCROW NEVER ENDS, and since it sure as hell ain’t heaven, Escrow IS Hell.
This makes a certain sort of sense. A house is a black hole, sucking everything into its maw eternally, including money, time, and joy, not to mention paint, porcelain, copper and asbestos. Regarding the process of falling into a black hole:
From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon: and it appears to become redder and dimmer.
Consider: you may approach but never quite reach the end of escrow. As you attempt to approach, and indeed get closer and closer while never quite reaching it, you will note that your face gets redder and redder, while your putative escrow officer (actually spawn of Satan) becomes dimmer and dimmer, eventually becoming invisible and unreachable.
A house emits only a single thing, somewhat similar to Hawking radiation, known popularly as property taxes. As with Hawking radiation, there is no effect on those involved in the escrow process itself, as the radiation of property taxes totally bypasses those entering the black hole (eternally entering it, did I mention that?) and is the only direct evidence of the black hole in the universe outside the event horizon. Further, it appears that objects entering the black hole are destroyed in parts during the process, so that the Hawking radiation of property taxes simply re-emits energy stolen from the partially destroyed object trying to enter the black hole, otherwise known humorously as “the buyer.” This is only one of many paradoxes surrounding real estate black holes, since “the buyer” is required to pay taxes on a property not yet owned, one of the few confirmed instances of time travel in Creation. The energy of the emitted property taxes cannot be captured and put to any useful purpose, thus hastening the heat death of the Universe, which mathematical physicists assure us will happen before Escrow ever ends.
Similar observations regarding the Faustian bargain one strikes when entering any real estate related process have been made here regarding human sacrifice to the pyramid scheme of land subdivision.
One of the early Christian heresies, Depositism, was based on the theory that since nothing escapes escrow, if Jesus had gone into escrow instead of hell after dying on the cross then the Resurrection would never have happened, and Satan would have collected property taxes forever on real estate no one actually owned, otherwise known as the law of sin and death. Unlike believers in other heresies, Depositists were not burned at the stake; they were simply forced to enter escrow themselves.
Etymological analysis of the term “escrow” reveals that it is a degenerative form of the French term “excrowment,” which means exactly what you think it does (and was partly responsible for the tradition of French people sounding like they’re holding their noses), the term devolving in the British Isles after an early escrow officer, William the Conqueror, brought it across the Channel.
Post-modern approaches have denied that escrow even exists, since no one really owns anything anyway. Others have said that Escrow is not Hell, but merely Purgatory. However, since no one has ever been seen actually leaving Escrow, this seems a bit of wishful thinking, though the connection of purgation with excrowment seems clear enough. Well… maybe not THAT clear.
