Gray Day Money Blues

The marine layer is two thousand feet thick today if it’s a foot. Dull gray sky overhead since early this morning, not even the weakest hint of sunshine, a perfect day to put three new shoes on our Ford – although this unexpected expense led my sweetheart to painful ruminations about money, or more accurately, our lack of jack.

We had a small nest egg, the result of a legal settlement Terry was involved in. When the case wrapped, Terry’s attorney pulled down more dough than she did, though for Terry the issue was always the principal involved in the case, not the money at the end of it. But for a couple that has never had much of a cushion, the money was a welcome relief from constant financial worries.

We don’t have extravagant tastes, so for the most part the money has been sitting in our active assets account, earning modest interest. We never ran out with the dough burning holes in our pockets and bought large dollar items. We have the same junker second car, a blue 1983 Honda Civic, nicknamed the Blue Zephyr; the same Magnavox television set; the same washer and dryer; the same computer. We do own a new digital camera and video recorder. Last summer Terry and I made a short trip to Phoenix, and earlier this year, we took a family trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As I said, nothing extravagant and yet, today we have about half the amount we started with and tax liabilities of around $1400 due on April 15.

Damn it all to Hell, poverty stinks, particularly when you live in a place like Santa Barbara where even salespeople at Nordstrom boast a net worth of two and a half million and make real estate deals in the employee lounge. OK, maybe that’s exaggerating a little, but you get my drift. We are surrounded by wealth and sophistication but can’t seem to corner any for ourselves.

It’s a bitch being stuck in the working-class. How does one get on the fast-track to becoming a card-carrying member of GW Bush’s “ownership society?”

Sweet Jesus, I’m doomed to a tangent now that I’ve mentioned that nitwit’s name. I saw the evil weasel on CNN the other night, in the bar of the Hilton Burbank, where I had no dominion over the remote. When I’m home and Bush’s mug appears on the tube I immediately change the channel. Better to watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island than to get annoyed listening to Bush…Anyway, there I was, nursing a Heineken when Bush appears in front of some hand-picked crowd, every person rigidly screened to weed out any ideological deviants or potential malcontent that might leap up suddenly and scream, “You lying bastard!,” to pitch his half-baked plan to fix the Social Security system. The President tried to control his trademark rich kid’s sneer but couldn’t quite pull it off. You could see the disdain in his face when he said the words, “social safety net,” as if a government program designed to insure that senior citizens don’t wind up starving on America’s streets is a terrible thing. I felt my BP shooting skyward and I wished for the balls to hurl my beer bottle through the TV. Or to at least demand that the barkeep turn the fucking thing off.

It’s a double whammy for me, with Dubya in DC and Arnold in Sacramento, both of them singing from the same twisted privatization songbook:

“We will starve the public sector to feed the private sector,
We will destroy the unions and roll the law back to 1899,
We will protect our friends, punish our enemies, and leave no CEO or right-wing millionaire behind.
We are the right, the glorious and righteous right, hear our song and heed our call.”

Amen. Arnold is racing around the nation raising cash with both hands at lavish dinner parties where wealthy sycophants cough up $50,000 for a chance at a photograph with the action star turned politician. Arnold has the PR moment down cold, and makes his money pitch with the detached cool of a professional madam. “Can you imagine,” the Austrian-born actor says, warming up for his stump speech, “the audacity of these union workers, these special interests, demanding decent pensions and working conditions. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous? I will terminate these special interests and blow up all their comfortable boxes!”

We are locked, as Hunter S. Thompson said, in a “Downward Spiral of Dumbness,” and it doesn’t look like the ride will stop any time soon. I wish I could pull the cord and get off at the next stop, long before the bus careens off the bridge and plunges into the Abyss.