peaknix

I found it difficult to drive home on my commute yesterday, was crying freakish cognitive dissonance tears, nauseating trills of fear mixed with free floating anxieties from work (am simply submerged with deadlines) and the market dive at the end of the day. Also, am feeling involuntary shockwaves of similar emotions since I learned that my mother’s entire nest egg which my dad worked himself to the bone to provide before he died – its now down to $0.00 because of the market.

I was crying while driving because I was listening to Romanian poet and editor of the Exquisite Corpse Andrei Codrescu‘s tremendous Post Carbon Screed on NPR called “After The Bailout“. (that link will take you to the text and a button to listen to it in Prof. Codrescu’s wonderful accented reading)

In it he says things like:

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of ‘em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I’m fixin’ to make the thing run on plum brandy. I’ve got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

Then it got more brutal.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I’m a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

“What did you do wrong?” I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

“Nothing,” he said. “We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn’t turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In.”

Go read the whole thing!

This man is simply fantastic, he never fails to jolt me from my spot. He is my nihilist muse, perhaps I was Romanian in some prior reality.