Last week I blogged for the first time in months, and as I do, made a huge deal out of it. Then, in an accidental attempt to make myself look silly, I didn't blog for over a week. A blogger blogs, that’s the rule. But a girl gets busy. A girl goes to Vegas. A girl has to sit by the TV and wait for Hillary to win Pennsylvania. Tonight, this girl went for a drive in her Mini. For reasons I can't even explain, I had yet to take a drive out to the ocean, except for that one time when I turned left on Santa Monica when I should have turned right. Forty-five minutes later, ocean, and I was late for an appointment.
As I was driving tonight, I listened to Ryan Adams, "When the Stars Go Blue." The chorus refrain is "Where do you go when the stars go blue." While he's not talking about the economy and our recession, it made me think of that, nonetheless. It's like when my boss talks about ROI and I start thinking about lunch, or when George W. Bush talks about Iraq and I think about this girl I knew in college who was a cutter. Everyone I know is afraid of losing their job these days, especially the people I work with. Our revenues are, at last count, 30% off. One could blame marketing, but then one would have to blame me, so when I'm not thinking about lunch, I blame our sales guy who says things like, "do you want to get something to nosh on while we have a dialogue?" He can't just say something straightforward and simple, unlike George W. who can only only utter one syllable words, unless he's butchering those large words like "terrorists" or "nuclear," or "apology," as in, "I owe this country an apology for my arrogant ways."
Instead of thinking how lovely the sun looked at it set tonight, all fat and orange at the end of the ocean, or how the jackass in the BMW was tailing me too close, I was thinking about how this Ryan Adams song could be a metaphor for the economy---granted, only another Ryan Adams fan might feel that way (and no, he is not the one who did, “Cuts Like a Knife.”). People are hunkering down, hoarding rice, staying home and watching TV in the dark. Instead of summer coming, it feels like winter. Earlier today, I spoke to a friend who had been laid off and I asked what he was doing to get by. “I don’t spend money,” he said. “I walk instead of drive, I eat pancakes three times a day [the new rice] and I watch a lot of TV for entertainment.”
All this makes me think of another Ryan Adams song, albeit from his “Whiskeytown” days. “The situation has me drinking every day and night. . . The situation ain’t so right. So excuse me if I break my own heart tonight. After all it is mine. . .”
Okay, actually, for a lot of homeowners, their heart belongs to the bank that just foreclosed on their house.
