Nouveau Pauvre

A new class in class-free America has emerged: The Nouveau Pauvre or New Poor. Unemployed, underemployed, those with rolled-back salaries, workers with forced, unpaid furlough days. The American Dream turns into the American Nightmare. Bedrock chipped away. Life savings diminish quickly. Personal net-worth is a joke with plummeted home values, decreased stock portfolios, personal property and collectibles at Craig’s List worth… even the bank passbook savings account yields are just slightly better than cash under the mattress. America’s New Poor are stuck, shafted, and trapped in a box. Very little wiggle room. Disenfranchised Nouveau Pauvre are everywhere… eyes down, shoulders rounded, wearing the same clothes, tapping into remnant 401k accounts to supplement weekly unemployment checks, and applying for the few jobs as collections agents, delinquent accounts reps, contract repo thieves, and clerical posts with bankruptcy law offices. Be proud all ye Nouveau Pauvre…your security, plans, and hope will continue to disappear, but your numbers will grow.

How to be Happy

Did you know there is a sizable bunch of comic strips you can follow online? O.K. maybe you knew that already, but I didn't until now. I guess I assumed that with the demise of newspapers that comic strips had... I don't know, sort of faded away. The nice thing about being online is that one can click back to previous strips if the story line is lost. That feature is good for the deep thinker, as well as those with attention spans of a gnat.

Show Me Kneck

Vampires. What’s the allure? Is the female neck that ignored that the thought of a guy – albeit a dead guy – staring longing at a woman’s neck become that much of a turn on? Could the regular breath-out-breath-in living push vampires off the I-get-tingles-just-thinking-about-it list if only they paid more attention to the female neck? Imagine men bypassing the sensual female curves and bee-lining it to the neck. Would you hear guys crudely yelling to women: “Hey baby, show me some neck?” Would turtleneck shirts take on a whole new level of modesty? Would parking and necking take on new meaning? I’m clearly not understanding something that’s visceral and fundamental to women with respect to this whole yearning to be seduced and bitten by a vampire. Could someone please wipe this thick-tongue, duh? look off my face by explaining what I don’t get.

Good Tunes

Your ears will thank you for Bean Hoy’s Get Lost: The Studio J Sessions. The music sounds like Mark Knopler of Dire Straits if he were dropped in the Caribbean with the mandate to record an album. What’s refreshing about the album are the song lyrics that are clever and learned. This is the third Bean Hoy CD and it features the current Milwaukee-based group lineup of bandleader Mike Starling with Jared Drake, Bob Mueller and Tom Plutshack. The first Bean Hoy CD is Boys Can't Be Trusted, features the La Crosse-based version of Bean Hoy and the second recording, Cool Music for a Big Dumb World, is mostly a Mike Starling solo effort. The Studio J in The Studio J Sessions refers to the band’s rehearsal space.

Beautiful Rain

ahhhhhhhh a wonderful rainy morn with just enough chill in the air. Woke this morning with a hankering for a raisin bran muffin. Slipped on pants -- commando -- and slipped on my slip-on shoes, sockless and Labowskied my way across the street to the lame-ass bakery with emo-girl who asked the same lame-ass question she always asks in her sullen voice: "Do you want anything?" Yep, I'd like a half-dozen Camus and a couple of those Paul Sartres. She looked at me confused and then as though I had expectorated over my Irv the Workingman's Friend t-shirt (Irv's south side shop filled with work clothes and guy sundries, all at reasonable prices, has long closed). I pointed to the one, lone brown muffin among the happy lemon puffs and blueberry explosions and said I'd take it before it's shellacked and becomes someone's paperweight. Another confused look from miss pierced face. Oh, that's right... there are no things as paperweights in her Facebook-text-messaging world. She drops the brown muffin into the brown bag and charges me $1.89. I shuffle back home to hot coffee and open the window enough to hear the comforting sound of traffic through rain-puddled water.

Patriotic Post

According to the German-American Journal (vol 57, no 3) our American flags aren't truly red, white and blue all American. We imported $5.2 million of U.S. flags from communist China. Hopefully, you'll appreciate the irony the next time you're cut off by a jerk-face driving a pick up or SUV with an American flag waving proudly. You could catch up and yell "Buy American!" to get an affirming, "You bet!"

Boxed in

Stuck in a box not of our own choosing seems to describe most of us in America. We didn’t ask mortgage lenders to make risky loans. We didn’t ask credit card companies to hike the rates up to 24% or higher. We didn’t ask health insurers to deny claims until we verify each time that we do not have duplicate coverage. We didn’t ask the Big 3 automakers to make gas guzzling SUVs and trucks. We didn’t ask oil companies to make historic profits while jerking us around with historic high fuel prices. We didn’t ask for all of our investments and savings to take a dive. We didn’t ask for forced unpaid time off, salary cuts, and layoffs. We didn’t ask that bailout money be heaped on privileged corporate and financial investor criminals. We didn’t ask for any of it. No we did not.