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Ohio RenFest

I'm seeing references to knights from sources as varied as my blog-buddy at The Archdruid Report to tonight's episode of House, so lest anybody think I'm all rant and no fun, here are my vids & pics from Ohio Renaissance Festival.  Huzzah!  Blogger is being finicky about letting me post more vids so I may have to add more music and jousting in separate posts.  Enjoy!

No More Tiers

So this is our grand-daughter, Logan.  It's our first time watching her for more than a few minutes for a run to the store.  She's a good baby, so I taught her to stick out her tongue.  She's not quite 4 weeks old.

Mommy's out doing foxy boxing tonight and it looks like Logan is, too.  Dynamite comes in small packages!

That's my size 10+ foot next to the biggest mushrooms I have ever seen.  Wish I was better educated in whether they are edible.  Too risky.

I spent a lot of time on the phone yesterday with different branches of Ohio Job & Family Services.  The first call I made was to unemployment.  Actually I had tried them on Monday and their outgoing message said that people with names that start with "P" should only call on Wednesday,  so being obedient and orderly and a former call-center drone, I called on Wednesday.  Sometimes the outgoing message says that call volume is too high, please call back at another time, this call is now ended, but I managed to get through.  The menu choices didn't fit what I wanted so I punched # and 0 until I got that sickeningly peppy light jazz hold music and I waited a very long time.

Finally a human answered the phone and I was able to ask my question.  I said that I had not received a benefit payment for several weeks and could not even file a weekly claim online so I assumed that I was one of that new class of people in today's economy called a 99er.  I had even logged in to the unemployment website and counted payments and it looked like I had used up my legally allotted 99 benefit weeks.  The reason for my call was that I had just received a direct-deposit payment after that gap of several weeks, and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate before I spent it, because I would not be able to repay it if it was a mistake.  The call center agent told me that it was indeed legit, that it was my 99th payment which just happened to get held up by that tug-of-war that had been going on in Congress.  So unless Congress passes a Tier V, it's the end of the line for my unemployment benefits.  I'm still applying for jobs though, so any phony statistic from the government or media that says that I have given up is just baloney.  There is a growing number of people like me who can now be left out of the official unemployment numbers and ignored, like a shadow army growing increasingly frustrated and desperate.

That bottle in the picture is a little experiment we're trying for the first time.  It's homemade blackberry wine!  And it turns out that blackberry wine is kind of a family tradition from back before my Mom was born, and it created repercussions with the Patriot Act, but that's a story for another post.

Targeted For Destruction

Serious stuff today, please don't tune away.  Alert readers may notice that I have revised the tagline for this blog.  I used to say "That Crashing Sound is the collapse of the American middle class.  Or maybe it's just me."  Today I changed "collapse" to "deliberate and systematic destruction."  We didn't just get wobbly and start dropping on our own.  On the contrary, our hamstrings are being cut and our legs kicked out from under us and a booted foot is planted on our necks to hold us down.

Get that false idea out of your head that says your wealth is being massively redistributed to illegal immigrants and welfare bums and Chinese factory workers.  Remember:  The RICH are geting RICHER.  That "divide and conquer" stuff has been used through the ages to make us dogs fight over scraps instead of biting our masters like we should.  We'll identify those masters and how they make us slaves in later posts.  Then maybe we'll commence to biting.

Not only have I reached this viewpoint through my own experiences of being outsourced, downsized, bankrupted, etc., but I have collected various reports of millions of people like me and read lots of analysis by smart people who have studied this socio-economic turmoil in which we find ourselves.  I hope we can tear our attention from the bread and circuses that the empire uses to distract us and wake up to what is being done to us and figure out what to do before it's too late.  First, check out this article from Yahoo Finance.  These are statistics with numbers and stuff so read one at a time and let it sink in before you try the next.  Hang in there.

The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it

Posted Jul 15, 2010 02:25pm EDT by Michael Snyder in Recession
Related: ^DJI, ^GSPC, SPY, MCD, WMT, XRT, DIA
From The Business Insider
Editor's note: Michael Snyder is editor of theeconomiccollapseblog.com

The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Giant Sucking Sound

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.

What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are "less attractive" than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.

So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.

What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.

Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.

But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.

The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

Witch's Salad

Eating wild foods is not for the ignorant.  You've seen my posts here about some delicious greens and fruits that I've enjoyed for free.  You gotta remember I've been studying this stuff on and off for about 35 years.  Here are some pics of stuff from the yard that might look tempting but which I WILL NOT EAT, at least not without further education.  And I wrote some song lyrics about it, too.  Let's call it "Witch's  Salad" for now.  Copyright 2010.

Times are so hard

Our gardener, se llama Brujo, rode the Big Gray Dog back to Mexico

Out in the yard

Once manicured and green, a strange new garden of Eden grows

No gas to get to the grocery store

And if it’s still there I’m not even sure

And I’ve never been so hungry before

My belly growls like a hateful hound

So I stuff it with a witch’s salad

Any weeds that spring from the broken ground

Mushrooms and nightshade and belladonna

Blind as a bat and the brain turns to bone

Thorn apple, moonflower, mad as a hatter

Hotter than hell and the heart runs alone

Mescalito with a red umbrella

Eyes shine with black and my tongue is like stone

My third eye sees better than ever

Hotter than hell and the heart runs alone

 

I see the flaming sword

Of the cherubim

At the eastern gate

Never let me in

My tortured mind sees eternal flame

It’s just the landfill burning off the methane

I see the tentacles

Of the mighty one

In a filthy pool

Gonna drag me in

My tortured mind sees Cthulhu squirm

It’s a reflection blowing in a windstorm

I see the gaping void

Of the black abyss

Cold nothingness

Inside all of us

My tortured mind sees what it sees

And the abyss is looking back at me

It’s looking back at me, it’s staring at me

It’s me!

Raptor Synchronicity

As I sit trying to title this post, Craig Ferguson is on TV holding up a picture of a barn owl.  That does it.  I gotta tell you a few things.  But I have no pictures of what I want to talk about, so look at my grand-daughter, Logan.

I just fed her about 3 ounces of a four ounce bottle.  She would normally consume the whole thing but I was so happy to see her I probably distracted her from it.

Happiness is a lapful of Loganberry.  Check out those feet!

So after that last post, "Blood On The Snow," I crashed on the couch as usual, beat.  I slept OK, but the minute I woke up I thought, "How could I have forgotten The Mole?"

My dad never was one of those lawn nuts who had to have a yard like a putting green.  But he always hated moles with a passion.  I've never know him to go hunting, except for moles.  If he saw their tunnels or mounds of dirt in the yard, he would stalk them with traps, spikes, shovels.  Never poison though.

Back when I was raising that baby hawk, Falcon Eddie, dad spotted a mole tunnel in process of being dug.  I had an idea!  I called dibs on the mole and got my trusty Crossman 761 pellet gun.  Dad flipped the mole out of his tunnel and I popped it with a pellet.  A good clean kill.

Moles are pretty weird looking, with that pointy nose and those digging claws they have.  I got my X-Acto knife and skinned it and then washed the skin and scraped the inner side fairly clean.  I pinned it fur side down to a piece of cardboard and covered the inner side with a mixture of salt and baking soda.  I let that do its thing for a couple of days and ended up with a nice dry mole skin.  I folded it up just so into a nice bundle the size and shape of a mouse and tied a piece of yarn onto it.  Bingo, a little tackling dummy for Falcon Eddie.  Since hawks are visual hunters like cats, they like to play with furry toys that wiggle.  That's how he knew how to nail the first mouse I got for him.  I can't believe I forgot about that, but glad my subconscious retrieved it.

Then last night was a fitful sleep, with phone ringing and kids coming and going.  We keep irregular hours here.  I gave up on sleep before 5 a.m. and got up to check email, do job apps and read blogs and such.  Then in mid-morning I was tired again so I laid down for a rest.  I dreamed.  I had been telling my new buddy Tommy over at Freedom Guerilla about urban homesteading so a chicken coop appeared in my dream.  But it didn't contain chickens.  First I saw what seemed similar to a rooster but it was longer and much slimmer and man it moved fast and sinuously, like a mongoose with golden feathers but obviously a bird.  Afterwards I thought maybe a phoenix.  And then I felt something pinching my right index finger and there was an owl with my finger in its beak, gently pinching when it could have taken it right off.  I was then jolted awake by the kids asking me to swap vehicles in the driveway so they could run an errand.  My finger still hurt slightly.

What do you make of that?  A phoenix that rises from the ashes, kept in a chicken coop along with the symbol of wisdom which bit my finger but not as hard as it maybe could have.

I love this picture, for obvious reasons.

Blood On The Snow

I heard the calls, unusual for this neighborhood, from the big maple out front.  She was a female redtail hawk, enjoying the sunset from her high roost.  I had seen her a few days ago carrying away another bird to be eaten, chased by the distressed mate.  Bird-on-bird violence, distressing indeed.  I don't have the optics for good pics at a distance so I pulled this set from my archives.

Only minutes before, a live pidgeon was wrapped around this kernel of corn.  A customer at our former business, The Cup & Saucer Cafe, had been sitting out on the side deck for a smoke and witnessed the whole thing.  He said the hawk hit the pidgeon like a living hammer.  Once he had his dinner on the ground he hunkered down and held it with his talon and shielded it with his wings while he ate it, like a guy in prison shields his cafeteria tray from the other prisoners.  The hawk was completely aware of his audience but not at all intimidated - he held his ground and finished his meal.

And finish he did, leaving only feathers and corn.  Not much use for corn, to a hawk.

I raised a baby hawk when I was a kid, some three decades ago.  It had fallen from its nest in the huge hickory tree in front of Mom & Dad's.  I kept my distance all day as the parents swooped and squawked and screeched.  I gave them every chance to get their baby back but they couldn't do it.  At the end of the day I couldn't just let some cat get it, so I picked it up from the yard and put it in a nest I had made for it in some old parakeet cage I had borrowed from Nannie and I kept it in my room.  Even a baby hawk has that fierce eye, and we just sat and looked at each other a lot.  I named him Falcon Eddie after a character on a TV miniseries that aired back then.

I fed him raw hamburger, and as days went by he got somewhat comfortable with me and would perch on my finger.  I carried him around and let him look at the world with his fierce little eyes.  Eventually he started trying out his wings so I had to put a piece of soft yarn on his leg as a leash.  As his wings grew stronger I lengthened the leash to give him a fair chance to practice.  Once, I made the mistake of letting him practice a bit too close to the hawthorne tree in the back yard and he decided to perch in the top of it instead of on my finger.  I was always a tree-climber, but the climb to the top of that thorny tree while untangling the snagging yarn leash, and winding it up without yanking or otherwise upsetting my little bird friend - well, it wasn't something I wanted to repeat.  He was ready.

Next day, I went to a pet shop and bought two white mice.  They came in a carton like Chinese food!  Back home, Falcon Eddie was perched in his cage, waiting for his usual raw hamburger.  Knowing that hawks hunt visually, I dangled the first mouse by the tail and swung it before his fierce gaze.  His eyes could have faced down Genghis Khan or Geronimo that night as the squirming mouse drew his total focus.  I opened the cage door and set the mouse down.  Eddie was on it instantly!  His little talon gripped the mouse by the neck and he tore into it with his little hooked beak.  I was transfixed by his total hawk-ness.

That night in my room, a young man on his mattress, a hawk in his cage, and a mouse in a carton.  I'm not sure if any of us slept.  When day came I talked with Falcon Eddie for the last time, looking into that fierce hawk eye that I had come to love so well.  I told him that it was time for him to fly off and be a hawk and eat mice, not live with humans and eat hamburger.  I told him I had one more mouse for him before he left because it might take some time to figure out how to find them, and I didn't want him to be too hungry.  I took him out on the front porch and gave him that second doomed mouse.  Falcon Eddie told he that he understood perfectly.  When he had finished eating I picked him up in my hands, carried him across the road to the big pasture that slopes down to the farm pond and the woods beyond, and tossed him into the air.  He flew away.  I saw him a few times later, larger.  I'm sure he did OK.

In Bleak Midwinter

Forget for the moment that the thermometer in the hall reads 87 degrees.  Forget, in fact that it's digital.  Forget that it's the middle of July.  Time ain't nothing.  I just sneaked over to the neighbors' yard and plucked a single holly leaf for inspiration, came back and put on one of my favorite recordings of "Christmas" music:  The Chieftains piece called "The Bells Of Dublin."

(The Holly and the Ivy, when they are both full grown

Of all the trees that are in the wood, the Holly bears the Crown)

Wolfie loves it!

Chillin'

Forgot to wrap the hose

When Thrift Stores Give Up

I can't stop thinking about the poor little guy.  We met him just a couple of weeks ago when the Valley Thrift store around the corner from our house displayed a sign that said they were permanently closed.  Our van was packed with a bunch of still-useful household goods, toys & games & such, things that we had decided that we no longer needed but which didn't make the cut for our own "indoor yard sale" which is coming up this Saturday.  We hate to throw away something that somebody else could use so we went on over to Colerain Avenue, where a new thrift store had opened in what had been a nice golf shop not long ago (for you local geezers, long ago it was a bar called TJ Mineshaft).  It's next door to the Graeter's ice cream shop kinda catty-corner from Northgate Mall.  The large printed sign just said "THRIFT STORE", black on white.

We walked in the open door and the place was like a bake-oven (as my Dad would say), just like our house, but the man behind the counter greeted us even more warmly.  He reminded me so much of Marcy's late father, George - that long nose, the sharp cheek bones, the brown eyes, hair white as I imagine George's would be if he lived still.  He welcomed us in a heavy accent that my ear knew was from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.  I quickly zeroed in on the books (mostly romances, no thanks) then circled around to find a couple of small boxes of my beloved vinyl LP records.  As I flipped expertly through the disks I half listened to their conversation.  "Isn't it hot?"  "I am used to it."  (Merle Haggard with a Dixieland band!).  "...Ladies shirts...drapes...bedspreads..." (Glenn Campbell, Tiajuana Brass, some nice Sixties & Seventies gems).  "Barry, bring those boxes in."  No money and no need to buy any records, I obediently toted in our donations to his cause.

I had to ask.  "Sir, where do you come from?"  "I come from the land of our lord, Jesus Christ.  Sixty two years ago I come to America, sixty two years, and I love this country, and love God and God loves me, he loves us all."  Ah, a Palestinian Christian I suppose.  We promised to return soon after we cleaned our house some more.  Well met and well parted.

And clean we did.  Basement.  Attic, both sides of it.  Sweeping, sweating, sorting.  The file cabinets, the bookshelves, the backroom where all the stuff gets dumped to be sorted.  Done, with lots of junk thrown out, some interesting things for our "indoor yard sale" (ahem, THIS SATURDAY) and the van once again full of stuff for our new thrift store buddy.  We tried to visit on the Saturday of the Independence Day weekend and found the store closed.  Probably the holiday, we thought.  We tried again the Tuesday after the holiday and found a sign on the door in his broken ("sixty two years I come...") English, something like "A lot have goning on, I be back in afternoon."  It was late afternoon, you know Marcy & I aren't exactly earlybirds.  We hoped everything was OK, but it didn't look good.  We waited another week and passed the time with still more cleaning and a little pricing of our for-sale goods and stopped in at the thrift store again today.

Our buddy was outside the open doors straightening the shopping carts and he greeted us happily as ever.  I skimmed past the romance paperbacks to check the records and again listened to the conversation between Marcy and her "Papa-Ganger", as I thought him.  The bad news came out right away.  He can't take donations because he is trying to sell everything and get out.  "Robbed, robbed by Dan Howell-Templin, a man I tried to help, a man I took under my wing and gave a job, gave him rides to Hamilton, Ohio.  Robbed of all of my gold, my silver, my jewelry, my gold and silver, my life savings.  He sold it all to pawn shops and I have not money to buy it back.  My son had a gun pointed at the man but could not pull the trigger to shoot him.  "I leave him to God to take care of him" my son said.  We must trust in God, we must all trust in God's love for us."

I can't stop thinking of the poor guy.  I'm gonna go back with a few bucks I got for my birthday and see if I can't find something I can use.  Maybe you can help too.  It's not far from our house.  You can go after our indoor yard sale.

Networking and Encouragement

So here it is going on midnight, it's 87 degrees in the house and I'm sucking on an orange ice pop with The Colbert Report on in the background.  I'm half afraid to play a record or it might melt.  I guess I could put on Pandora.com, maybe after Colbert.  Pandora is cool.  You can tell it what you like and it will play it for you, then it will try other music that it thinks you might like.  You give it a thumbs up or thumbs down and it learns what you like.  I have several channels set up, based on different starting suggestions:  one for my prog rock, one for bluegrass, one for jazz, one for baroque classical, so on.  Give it a try sometime.  But there's no substitute for picking a real vinyl record from the crate, blowing the dust off the disk, letting the needle drop, and hearing that little scritchy-scratch before that beloved music plays, my mind already stroking the memories of where I bought it, who I've enjoyed it with, live performances.  But that other room is so far away...

(thistle, not fireworks)

Dang, it's hot.  At least we have electric fans and the fridge, and water comes out the faucet when I turn it on, unlike at some other times and places in human existence.  Phone still works too, but the call I'm waiting for hasn't come yet.  Dylan left with his buddies hours ago to go check on Sarina.  She took Logan with her to some appointments for medical & WIC assistance.  But she's having some trouble with anemia, dizziness, and blood pressure so she is supposed to get checked out.

Speak of the devil...  Phone just rang and it was Dylan.  Her BP was around 150/100 (maybe we should do the DASH diet together) so they wrote her a prescription.  They called it in to a Walgreens down there where her Mom lives and they don't have the 15 bucks to pay for the meds.  He's trying to get the scrip transferred up to Colerain so he can bum the money here and get the meds.  My unemployment ran out weeks ago but I'm mature enough to manage my money and compassionate enough to buy Sarina's meds.  They've got a lot to learn.  I asked Dylan 2 or 3 times throughout the day to get the garbage to the curb but he blew me off and now he has this to deal with.  I went out to carry the cans and numerous bags and actually felt cooler doing that than sitting here at the computer.  He still owes me though.

(Troy lost his teeth again)

Marcy had another round today in the seeming endless struggle with the Leviathan system.  She went to her Social-Security-mandated mental evaluation and I tagged along of course.  The interview with the psychologist lasted 2 hours.  She told how she had been healthy and active, owned the cafe for just a month, had a stroke and all the plans flew out the window.  Her frustration with her decline in health, her struggle to care for her elderly mom who has her own issues (!), how my job was eliminated and we lost insurance, her continued decline in hyealth & finances leading to us closing the cafe, her crisis last fall with congestive heart failure & gastritis & pancreatitis, her stay at the hospital & nursing home with the mounting unpayable bills, the bankruptcy, the mostly-futile struggle with Social Security & Medicaid & Job & Family Services.  (Is everybody up to speed with us now?  Good.)  After the interview came a brief test.  Repeat increasingly longer number series.  Now do it backwards.  Some arithmetic problems.  Explain some common sayings like "Make hay while the sun shines."  I think that means Dylan should take the garbage out the first time Dad asks, when he has buddies around to help, because some kind of crap is always ready to hit the fan.  The psychologist asked the typical questions "Who is President now?" and of course Marcy knew it's Obama.  Then she asked who was President before Obama.  A pause...It was Clinton wasn't it?......no, it was that Bush!"  That was genuine, no fake, so precious.  So the psych said she'll send the report in and the deciders should have an answer around the end of August.  We'll see.  When we got home there was another letter from them telling Marcy to report to a physical exam on July 22.  At least they seem to be doing their jobs, not like some other agencies that shall remain un-named until we can nail them.

Oh, let me finish this post with what I titled it for.  Over in the right hand column you'll see a list of links, my favorite spots on the Internet, I hope you take a look at them now & then.  I decided I might as well reach out and contact them to let them know that I enjoy what they do, that they are having a positive effect, at least on me.  I got a very encouraging reply from Tommy over at Freedom Guerilla.  Check it out:

"-------- Original Message --------
Subject: kindred spirit
From: "Barry G. Price"
Date: Fri, July 02, 2010 9:08 pm

Hi Tommy! I enjoy your blog and publish one myself at http://thatcrashingsound.blogspot.com/
"That Crashing Sound is the collapse of the American middle class. Or maybe it's just me." I hope you can check it out, since I just put you at the top of my link list. Even though our life experiences may be different, I sense that we are questing for similar things. Best of luck to you in your quest, and feel free to keep in touch.
Barry

Hi Barry,

I gave you a shout out:
http://freedomguerrilla.com/frugal-living/that-crashing-sound/

I really like your writing. It's very poetic and has a certain melancholy/reflective appeal. I read several pages, and able to surmise that you owned a restaurant that went out of business?
I'll keep in touch if you promise to do the same. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help out.
Best Regards,

Tommy"

And if you follow the link (but you already did that, right?) you'll see that he posted this:

Freedom Guerrilla

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

That Crashing Sound
I get a lot of offline comments, thoughts, and shares emailed to me as a result of this site, but this one really struck me.

Check out thatcrashingsound.blogspot.com. Barry is an artist, and I find his writing and photography intriguing and important.

“That crashing sound that you hear just might be the collapse of the middle class. My cholesterol is higher than my credit score. I just found my first white chest hair. My teenage son is reading Nietzsche, so I am too. I think about lots of things I want to share with you. Sometimes I’ll share a picure or song or story or recipe. It’s late now and I’m sure I’m not impressing anyone, so I’ll get a few hours of sleep then get up and watch CBS Sunday Morning with my wife. Good times.”

Thanks for the email, Barry. We’re definitely kindred.

Good luck out there, Everyone. I am pulling for the best in us with all my might. "

 Did you see that?  Barry is an artist?  He finds my writing and photography intriguing and important?  WOW!  I was just getting comfortable thinking of myself as that guy who used to have a job and a business and now just takes pictures and writes to sort his thoughts out.  Now I have to live up to "artist" and "intriguing" and "important."  DOH!  Talking about coming down to earth...this insane heat just made the dog barf and I have to clean it up!  Gotta go, until next time, friends!

Happy Independence Day

My grand-daughter Logan is smiling in her sleep.  I still haven't got a real clear look at her eyes. 

Later that night, some of my neighbors had some pretty spectacular backyard fireworks displays.

I'm glad somebody in slumburbia still has plenty of money to waste.  Not all of my neighbors do though.  I'm seeing more vacant homes.  Two houses on my block are vacant and for sale because the elderly owners both died within a fairly short time period.  I haven't seen any of those neon door stickers in our little cross-street neighborhood.  However, just around the corner they are becoming more common, even appearing in clusters, like metastasizing cancer cells.  I finally stopped for a closer look.

I chatted with a neighbor who was sitting on his front porch watching the world go by.  He said the previous owner died and his surviving girlfriend became a crack whore and let it just go to hell.  He reported that she kept breaking in and squatting in the place so they disconnected water service, completely removed the meter, to make it even less attractive to her.  So far so good.  He said the place was listed for $24,000.  Neighborhood property values like that put my mortgage farther underwater than Atlantis, that is, there is a better chance of Atlantis rising from beneath the murky waves than of our selling our house for a price high enough to pay off the balance of the mortgage.  I crossed Pippin Road to see this on another house:

By the way, our local school district is putting up a couple of new buildings and consolidating into nice new digs.  They were to have auctioned off six old properties, though I still haven't found who bought them and what will become of them.  It will be weird for the kids in the neighborhood next winter when the best sledding hill within walking distance is somebody's private property.  Come to think of it, the nearby school was one of the selling points that were so important when we bought our house that are no longer the case.  Others were decent bus service at the entrance of our neighborhood and a thriving strip mall with an independent grocery, independent video store, a butcher shop, an Angelo's pizzeria.  All gone.  I stopped today and looked at a little RV parked by a repair shop with a "For Sale" sign on it, got the number to call.