I've Got a Plan

I haven't had much to say lately for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I haven't had anything to say. Literally. I'm just sort of shocked by the world. I'm thrilled beyond words that Obama won the election, even though I know he's inherited an ungodly mess that will take decades to straighten out and will almost certainly make him the political scapegoat for the upcoming unpleasantness.

And the unpleasantness will certainly be unpleasant. As we've been told repeatedly over the last few weeks, it'll get worse before it gets better.

Worse before it gets better? For whom? Not for Bear-Stearns, or AIG, or Citigroup. At the merest hint of "worse"...it got better! Huh! If it was that easy to make "worse" into "better", why not do it for the rest of us, too?

So here we sit in a house we like, on property we love, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Not even because our own personal worse-ness is coming home to roost, but because our landlord's financial house of cards is collapsing, and we're going down with it.

He's a nice guy with a wallet problem...he can't close it. So for the last couple of years he's run up a fortune in consumer debt, bought an enormous mansion on a hill surrounded by five bucolic acres with a subprime balloon mortgage, and generally lived above his means in the way typical Americans have been living above their means for the last 30 years. Unfortunately, now he's been downsized out of a job, since no one can afford high-end motorcycles in a credit crunch. The balloon mortgage has ballooned, the creditors would like some money please, and the mansion's on the block.

Which would all be fine, except that in the event that someone actually buys that overpriced white elephant, guess where landlord plans to live? As he succinctly put it on Sunday, "Well...we've got to live somewhere."

You guessed it: somewhere is here, in our modest little Nowhere, IL. And as far as I know, he's not planning to live penitently in the wicker room at the end of the hall, contemplating his financial shortsightedness and determined not to let his stupidity screw up our lives. I'm pretty sure that he's planning to live in the whole house, which will make it uncomfortably snug for our families.

Plus, they're slobs...and that'll piss off Lori to no end.

So it appears that we'll be moving sometime in the next year or so. Besides the fact that this will be a pain in the ass for us, it is a pretty good snapshot of the economy. Even if you're not the one that's leveraged up to the eyeballs, you may end up being the one to pay the price.

So I'm putting together a package to present to the White House for a bailout of my family. I'm tentatively planning to ask for the government to guarantee 90% of our debts, plus shore up our shaky housing situation to avoid undermining our confidence in the market. In exchange, I'll forego my executive compensation package that I was planning to give myself from the kid's savings, and instead take an undisclosed lump sum buyout from the Treasury Department.

I want you taxpayers to understand how hard it is for me to accept this government handout, but it's the right thing to do to get me back on my feet. I also want to assure you all that the lessons of these hard times haven't been lost on us. Our next house of cards will be built with the face cards instead of the cards with numbers on them. Additionally, we plan to rearrange the deck chairs, and put lipstick on the pig. I feel confident that that will prevent any future problems with our cash flow. Thank you.