“I am not going to fucking Denny’s.
I am not going to fucking Kevin’s!”

This was the very literal Word On The Street, south Texas Street to be precise, that greeted me on my return to my dwelling on that very same south Texas Street just a few minutes ago this evening.

They were spoken by a young man in a loud tone. All I know about him is that he was poor, and agitated, and spoke Spanish too. He was yelling the English words at his girlfriend, who was driving alongside him as he strode furiously uphill, trying to coax him back into her battered old car with dubious promises of agreeing to not take him to either Denny’s, which is a restaurant that poor people eat at, or to Kevin’s either. (I have no god damned clue who Kevin is, but I am reasonably certain that the girlfriend’s name was Christa. This is a sort of weird private joke that you will eventually decode after watching a video I post later).

I was standing in my temporary driveway, next to my truck, which I had just backed in and turned off. So I wasn’t well-lighted. I might have been invisible even if the young man and his girlfriend were not so assiduously focused on each other, on fury and wheedling respectively. The Denny’s and Kevin’s discussion unfolded a few feet from my quiet face, and I had nothing meaningful or coherent to add to the conversation, at least not in the moment, so I remained silent, and hidden, the perfect witness to the crime.

The crime is called capitalism, or something like that–the society it inevitably breeds anyway. Among the poors. Myself included.

One other little thing that may not matter at all is that the scene took place in a thick fog that enveloped this town and the whole area around it for miles, driving in from my trip.

A hundred or so miles before, in a different town across the state line on my way in, the words on the street were different. Almost the very minute I pulled into the town’s official state rest area, a very different, or not so different young man spoke different words to me:

“Hey man. Do you know where I can buy any meth?”

I assured him that I did not, and I was not particularly polite about it either–perhaps tangibly surly, even. Even tangibly to a badly jonesing meth head.

Now. If I were very good at my job, which is “belletrist”, I would leave it there. If I were an earnest Hemingway, I would tell the story simply, in words comprehensible to someone who reads at an eighth grade level, and I would let you the reader draw your own conclusions about what it all means in the grand scheme of things.

But honestly I’m a pretty half-ass belletrist, and not even a very good reporter either. So I’m going to beat you over the head with the moral of the story.

Things out here in the real world are really started to look more and more fucked up. Far away, in other words, from the well-appointed corporate conference rooms (I am also of late newly unemployable), from the tree-lined campuses, from the Tiny Home Expo in Scottsdale, Arizona, from the gated communities and the precious suburbs with skyrocketing property values, from the ski areas and the jazzercise studios and the better sorts of day spa, from the kayak shops and the Lambo dealers, far away from Ibiza and Martha’s Vineyard, things are … not good. Not good at all.

I don’t know how it is where you are. Maybe the comfortable, diverse but still mostly white world is suffering too; maybe the co-workers or the kids or the lady who manages your local Starbucks are showing signs of going a little nuts as well.

But here in Flyover with the poors, nuts is becoming a more than daily occurrence, maybe more like an omnipresent new normal.

While you and I fret over whether Elon is evil or heroic, while we do our level best to ignore what Blue MAGA is doing to Julian Assange or some rando railworkers, the capitalism we’ve always counted on to be there for us economically and spiritually is dying an ugly, brutal, and pointless death. The civilized democratic values that we hold so dear are meaning less and less to anyone who can’t afford to eat at Pappadeux’s or maybe even Del Taco except on Taco Tuesday, or put enough gas in the car to get to their shitty alienating thirteen-buck-an-hour job.

I think there may be some cause for concern, and I’m not even sure that voting for the Democrat is going to help for too much longer.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be alarmist. I know there’s enough stress in your life already without the spectre of imminent social collapse being flung in your face like a unhelpful handful of Jelly Bellies.

I just thought you should know. The results of my careful peripatetic research are indicating a Situation may be brewing.

Maybe we should do something well in advance of the chickens coming home to roost or whatever

it is

they say.