I spent most of the weekend curled up in a ball praying for death or at least a hatchet to my face. I have an abscessed tooth. I came back to Ruth’s last night after spending the weekend housesitting for Ms. J. I was clutching the right side of my face in pain.

“What’s wrong” asked Ruth

“Abscessed tooth. I think my cheekbone is going to break”

“I’ll take you to the emergency room”

“Don’t bother till I’m near death. They won’t do anything if I’m just in excruciating pain. I have to be nearly dead.”

“What about those low income dental clinics?”

“Oh they can get me in in like 6 months or so. Long after I’m actually dead. But if you’ve got an exacto knife, I’m up for some AT-Home dentistry!”

Ruth did not have an exacto knife. Instead I’ve spent a lot of time holding scalding salt water in my mouth and then spitting it out again. This seems to be working to draw the infection out some.

Now when we take over the world, dental is definitely going to be in the universal health care package.

Giving $700 billion to a bunch of blackmailing banksters didn’t shore up the economy? You mean Wall Street is still falling?

Go figure.

I bet we would have had better luck dumping $700 billion into a giant pile and starting a bonfire to whichever gods and goddesses control prosperity.

I should start taking bets on how much the blackmail payout is going to be next time. I’m gonna aim high and say $2 trillion.

I too feel like stabbing my ears with glass.

Go read

Doesn’t mean our congress critters won’t pass it.

In fact, the house just passed the bailout bill.

So I am going to go drink some hot cocoa, curl up in a ball, and cry about the kleptocracy that I currently live in.

The Mommy Fetish was in fine form last night during the debate.

Palin was all “But I’m a mom!” through many of her answers. And you all know just how much I hate that.

Lots of people are moms. I can pretty much say that a majority of women in the world have been or will at some point be a mom. Truth is, it’s a hard job but it’s not actually my only qualification for ANY job, let alone the executive branch. And Joe Biden, I gotta say, pushed the curtain back on Palin’s hockey mom fantasy a bit having been a single parent himself for a while.

I always admired that about Hillary. She’s a mom, but she never had to fall back on her years of diaper changing experience to fluff up her resume. Being a mom qualifies you for one thing, being a mom. Being a dad qualifies you for exactly the same thing, btw. Anyone with half a lick of sense might use parenthood and it’s universal struggles as a way to find deeper insight into the problems of struggling families, and I think that is what Biden tried to explain (albeit a bit inarticulately), or they can be Palin, oblivious to the struggles of families except her own.

Obliviousness is not a qualification for the executive branch. Contrary to the popular opinion of the tiny handful of remaining Bush supporters.

I think I’ve figured out something.

There are people who really, truly think that we can avert all economic badness if we give into the bankster’s blackmail demands and pay for this bailout.

They don’t understand that this crash is a long time in coming and that it is unstoppable. It might be delayed by a few months, maybe even through one entire presidential term with constant and careful finagling of the system. But it is a system with inherent flaws. And it is crashing soon.

And by giving into to the bankster’s now, we may postpone for a very brief period the complete freezing of the credit markets. But we will just leave ourselves open to a bigger payment demand from them later. If it worked once, then it will certainly work again.

“But but but, if we don’t pay them now then the whole system will collapse.”

The system is collapsing in a zillion different ways. Peak oil is here, inflation is climbing because of it. The casino economy means more to the world than the real economy, and it will tear down the homes and jobs and businesses of real people before it gives up one smidge of profit margin. Inequity is growing and with that comes real increased violence as more people crowd the bottom for fight over scraps. More wars for oil and other vital resources. More rioting for food and water. More violence in our own streets as the idea of a job that pays the bills seems as unrealistic as winning the lottery. The country will all look like New Orleans after Katrina, but we won’t need a hurricane to blow the people out of their homes. We have the financial sector to do that for us.

The system IS collapsing. We will not put that off by paying the blackmailers to keep our secrets.

I feel weird about thanking people I haven’t seen. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the hell out of them. It’s that I don’t know how to express how gushily grateful I am without sounding fake.

So I think I shall do what I always do and just tell you all straight up how things are going with me. And then tell you all thank you so you know just how sincere I am.

My entire income for the month of September was $155. All but $30 of that came from donations. Several of you give $20 or $25 on a regular basis. This money has kept us fed and washed our hair and paid for bus fare. It means everything to us.

I am back at work, but in the long string of never ending work badness, I won’t get my first check until October 31. So someone, who knows who she is and how much I love her, sent us $50 to buy toothpaste.

We are inching by on tiny amounts of money and I cannot thank you all enough. We would be absolutely lost with out it. From the bottom of our hearts, the Kid and I thank you.

RQ and Kid

Fr the record- my super social safety net plan ended up with a budget surplus well past 2070.

I grew up in and around Lake Tahoe. Everybody works in some way or another for the casinos there. My mother was an accountant for the Visitor’s Authority, the people who come up with those shiny “Come to Lake Tahoe” ads.

She had some close friends, Uncle Bruce and Aunt Deb. Bruce was a bartender at one of the swankiest casino bars, Deb was an office manager for a vacation property business. Bruce was also a gambling addict, and while he was doing well their marriage was fine. He won the money for a down payment on a house. Then for a swimming pool. Then an Audi and a big new truck. New living room furniture. Then a boob job for Aunt Deb.

Then he started losing. Deb had an affair with her boss, then with one of my boyfriends. Then some crazy spiritual guru type. Turns out the boob job was because Bruce had been drinking so much he couldn’t get it up, but blamed his lack virility on Deb’s flat chest. Deb went a bit crazy with humiliating Bruce in every possible way after that. She could ignore the consequences of Bruce’s gambling and alcohol problems as long as he was bringing in big wins.

Seeing close up what gambling does to people, I’ve never been a gambler. I will spend exactly one dollar on the lottery when the prize climbs over 100 million, and I once gambled $4 on the ponies.

Our entire economy is like Bruce and Deb’s marriage, built on winning streaks and crashing on losing ones. It is not an economy based on the real things, like productivity and output. I remember during the heady Clinton economy, when I made a middle wage income, paid taxes, had a little house that the rent was always paid on time, and a car that I paid the loan off early. Back in those days, the stock market used to DROP when the new unemployment numbers came out, because the unemployment number was low. Too low to drive down wages. To low to cut benefits.

And economic system that celebrates high unemployment and mourns low unemployment is broken.

And now we have this huge financial crisis not based on anything real. We have a game of financial chicken where banksters are saying give us money or we will crash the whole system. It’s like Bruce and Deb. “gimme more money or we will crash and burn this marriage”.

The thing is, Bruce and Deb got divorced. Bruce got help. Stopped drinking and gambling. Deb moved away and stopped sleeping with boys her daughter’s age. They were better apart than they were together.

It is time for a divorce from the casino economy. It is time to go back to valuing companies for what they produce over what their latest stock price is. It is time to value homes as a place where people live and can pass onto their children instead of as a commodity to be sliced and diced and repackaged so that every last drop of profit can be squeezed out of it by people who not only don’t live in it, but don’t even know the address.

Fuck you Senators! Fuck each and every one of you.

That is all.