Yes, of grain. Which is certainly part of the problem. But not the part I want to expand upon.

When I came here twenty years ago, the cost of putting a roof over one’s head was a third of what it is now. My apartment was $575 and now the same space in the same place is $1700, and it’s not just here. It’s everywhere.

I say I’m not smart about money and that’s fact. But early on I accidentally did one thing right. Instead of pissing away six hundred a month to the shithead landlord, I started pissing it away into a mortgage.

Where the rent has tripled, the mortgage has stayed the same. In fact I even have a little equity, on top of the fact that the ‘property’ is now worth twice as much, were I to flip it, which amounts to a modest amount of … more equity.

In the short term I’m trapped here by those facts, but I’m very, very lucky compared to most. Seventeen hundred is more than I make in a month by itself, and out beyond, all the other essentials like food and electric and gas cost two or three times as much besides.

So I have a way to live. It’s not all that cozy or pretty, but it is at least a mostly viable way, and I do what I can to make it better in small cheap ways every day.

When the drain clogs, and I start scheming about how to fix it myself, you look on and call me brave.

Bravery has fuck-all to do with it, dear.

Calling a plumber would mean going deeper in debt to pay one. Deeper into enslavement. So I watch plumbing videos, and try to figure shit out, instead.

You say: But wouldn’t you rather have a new truck?

The answer is no in any case. Again I find myself saying: just watch the god damned video and you will know the answer.

But either way, and despite your bias toward shiny new things, your question sucks, because a new truck is not an option in the real world. They cost fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars now, as much as this whole house did all those years ago, and it doesn’t effing matter, now does it, what I would rather have.

I don’t get druthers in your dear decent Joe’s America; See?

And you would not either, except you married up that one time, and I didn’t.

God bless Tricare I guess, and all the rest of the fringe benefits that come with …

I was about to digress, but I caught myself this time.

***

So.

Today I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot in that lovely rattletrap old pickup, eating a guilty pleasure meal of questionable meatloaf with my hands, and watching the many wasted people hovering in the nearby shade of a broken motel, or giving each other grief of various sorts, and bumming change and cigarettes from shoppers.

I started thinking.

For quite some time now it’s been dawning on me that there are a number of pretty good things about this little nowhere town, things I never noticed before.

At the very same time, every place in the territory of this society, even this place, is steadily getting worse and worse.

Generally speaking, the cost of living is more than what they humorously call a living wage, and very often a lot more.

Our vaunted freedoms are eroded at an accelerating pace by this fact and many others.

If you can even scratch together the $1700 a month in the first place, you’ll keep hoping and keep looking, because paying the minimum doesn’t get you adequate space in a ‘safe’ neighborhood–everyone else in that poorer one is just as stressed and desperate as you are.

Thus every place is getting worse in terms of mental health too.

Thus every place is eventually getting worse in terms of physical health, for the same reasons and lots of other reasons besides, mostly having to do with the profit motive. Your gut, your very blood, is crammed with microplastics even if you do your best to eat well.

I have to wonder who you think is responsible for all this.

I have to wonder why none of this seems to scare the shit out of you, but the clown prince named Donald Trump, oh yeah he definitely does and it’s etched in the barking strain dwelling underneath your otherwise mellifluous voice.

I have to wonder who it is, who wants to foster twisted paradoxes like that in the deepest chambers of your beating heart.

And what interesting things you will do, if any things, when it finally dawns on you who they really and actually were and are.

I sing the perceptible amber waves my doves

of being happier than I ever have been in my life.

Amber barely visible waves

of the deep sadness

of this world,

yours and mine,

our one our only world.