4 people. Mortgage-2nd mortgage, heat-lights-water, two very-good but economical cars & one good used one for the son who’s trying to fathom it on his own, telephone-cell phones-Ethernet, HEALTH INSURANCE, medical co-pays, auto-homeowners insurance, basic satellite service, education costs, gas-food-tools/miscellany; such a small paragraph of modest living expenses for an American family to be just at the poverty line ...for the sum total monthly outlay of roughly four-thousand dollars. 4K!! JUST to scrape in this country today. 4 THOU and I am quite positive we are living frugally compared to the Jonses, the Peters, Pauls, & the Marys, ..maybe not the Smiths, but certainly the Wessons.

HOW is it possible that we’ve allowed the pooh-pooh upper 2% to get so fat that their personal draw on ALL our remainder pocket books (the Public Purse as they growl it in the Shire) is dismantling what was once happening about us? If it ain’t dire ..then YOU are a major bread winner without your portion of a million dollars in medical bills, no, not Buffalo Bills for godsakes, that’d be the straw. But I digress here in the Wiling West. I’m not complaining, per say, as we’ve lived 22 years on this side of the poverty line smiling & having a reasonable good time but we can smell her there beside us creepin over to lend us a clammy hand into the abyss while one of us is just above hospitalized & proactive in everything to become a full-on-macking-breaker of girlie-girl bod & Betty Boop energies & Lois Lane impetus again (because she is) and the other is at the daily maintenance end of her protocol wondering what ever happened to his service clients & her sales clients & the days of yore where the muddled middleclass was not a right to have but a privilege to maintain if you were budgeted and diligent and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FUCKING inexplicably unexpected happened to yank the rug out from under that which has not quite yet fallen through the cracks. Imagine that.

Imagine that. …Sorry, son, what was en vogue for so long ..is old-hat now.

We, the people of these undone united states, must live to figure it out.

Otherwise the stain'll be on every street corner ..& in your house too.

_ Odes to Joy & Procreation,

The Hoi Polloi