IN THIS ECONOMY?
This paper says both these acres are mine even if I don’t believe land is a thing you can fold up and put in your pocket. I’m overwintering my bones to the warmth of static electricity. Maybe I can save on both the cable and electric bill if we watch the news through the neighbor’s window. They call it the boob tube, but I think it should known as the rage cage. Boobs at least give sustenance but the rage in my heart pounds on the bars of my ribs when I watch the news it’s like I’m rattling a tin cup against them, demanding something other than beige gruel. Western society lives on rage, it’s what diminishes the appetite so that we’re easily satisfied with laugh-tracks and Kardashians, so we can savor our poverty on a saltine cracker while blaming other poor people as the TV tries to make sense of interest rates going up or down to save us from thinking because that can be costly and we can’t spare the spoons. Makes my eyeballs go square. I could eat my polka dot blouse and pretend it’s a cake with sprinkles. Which makes as much sense as the Fed raising the interest rate to lower inflation. It’s all a game of make-believe with imaginary numbers. As if limiting our buying power is the sensible answer to everything. When the question is why we print our own money but it’s never enough. If we printed more, it would still never be enough. The design is one big flaw, the system works by being bottom heavy like a pyramid scheme, weighted down by the proletariat walking around holding lead balloons of debt because the banks are constructed on quicksand, not piles of gold or silver. Diamonds are also imaginary. We make up their preciousness because of their supposed rareness. But grow them in a lab and they’re still worth more than meteorites, more than stars. Isn’t that absurd? Some people would trade me in for a diamond even though I know my worth. Where did we all agree on where things derive their value? When did we sign the collective contract to be enumerated? A star in the sky is a dime a dozen but a star on television is something golden, something making billions of imaginary dollars for someone yelling through a phone in Hollywood. Imagine our sun being worthless, being gone? I’ve worked with stars, and you can’t tell them apart from you or me, we’re all the same on the inside to the medics standing by waiting to resuscitate. TV stars are as boring and neurotic as your uncle Steve. Hungry for compliments, hoping to be the exception, also living on saltines but for different reasons. The American populace is a capitalist’s wet dream; we’d rather starve than be called freeloader to a State making Big Business off our poverty. Maybe gambling is a sound retirement plan after all. You can gamble on the bet that in 29 years the sea level rise won’t wash away your house or that temperatures won’t turn your once-fertile backyard into a sandbox. The next dustbowl won’t be something the Fed will be able to negotiate with the temperature gauge. Everything is a gamble, they don’t prepare you for that in college, that you some day may have to pour ketchup on your diploma and eat it or throw it in the fireplace to warm your baby’s toes. But paying taxes warms you twice. The first time when you’re shoveling shit down in the coal mine. And the second time when your brow sweats as you open your tax bill. To pass the time until the next recession I’d lay on the floor and look at the stars, but the air is very stratified. It’s the coldest at the very bottom but also at the top. And laying on the cold ground I can bet that there are more seeds on my land than stars in the whole galaxy. And we’ve already discussed their worth and I think that makes me pretty rich for a poor person.