Perhaps this is a short-term issue.  Now now, mother says, you can’t just expect things to fall into place at once, I mean, she perhaps holds back a tear and lies to your face, Rome wasn’t built in a day honey.  Father has stopped talking.  He sits in the corner, reading his paper or iWhateverthefuck, slowing losing moisture and becoming more weak, thin, as tissue or the color and the texture of cheap dime novels, brittle and dog-eared.  “Is this real life?” You ask.  Is this forever, you plead with your boss, your bank, your creditors and sundry other wee beasties that feed off of your living carcass.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, you fan yourself, understanding that this short-term-nearsightedness must end and you need to take the long road.  One day, you know, despite having lost everything, mobile apps will be monetized.

Is “monetized” even a word,  you ask, dabbing sweat from your brow while you watch iBook stock slowly, painfully, tank, until your investment would have been better made as fish futures or dropped into a 15th Century Medici codpiece collection.  You adjust yourself in public more often these days.  Don’t worry, little person, the iPeople will figure out how to monetize the mobile apps, just they will do it long after your money is all gone.  At least you can say you were there with all the cool kids, the kids who now decorate the same homeless feeding station as you do since they lost money on the First Internet Bubble, the Housing Bubble, and the Second Internet Bubble (social media and education).

As we enter the New Normal, a petty nation of kleptocrats and Heroic Beings(tm Rand Corp.) who know nothing but their own desires and needs, who push their spermandeggs out into private schools and boutique academies and fake public schools with difficult admissions and complex “catchments” we see that society is not entirely breaking down, the financial system not collapsing, but still we suffer these thousand little blows… or was that four hundred? -, and come to rest not in a state of frigorific being, but a state of stillness.  The rest of one on a slow conveyor belt that brings us further and further into the bowels of: a) some animal b) trash or something smelly such as trash c) whatever metaphor you have for just being slowly fucked rather than fucked all at once.  We move ahead, day by day, not poorer for it but only slightly so, a penny in value from this and that transaction, the ocean rises slow about our feet as it enters.  We flick at the water.  Knowing that our financial situation is but momentary before we strike it rich, we laugh as our bills pile up and chide our lazy neighbors.  I mean, if they knew what they were doing, little Zoezachcloedamion would be going to a good pre-school in order to afford the path that leads to a very tight grave, but because little Zoesachcloesamion did well in life, s/he/it’s way into the grave is buttered with so much tallow as to allow hefty little Jr. to drop down mother earth’s poop chute and certain followers or the tribe of eunuchs bought as discount foreign adoptions are able to leave certain grave goods so that s/h/e/it may have plenty of afterlife whatever with whomever in whatever hole the holy one bestows upon those children who: Cor. 5:11 Got into Good Schools, preferably Stuyvesant (praise Allah) or the 92nd Street Y (hail Yahweh) [or Satin/ Buddha, a Buddha-Satin hybrid or Manbearpig or Mohammad in a Bear Suit].  And so, we continue another day, being pecked to death by the grains of sand falling from the glass.

And this, today, another story of bankrupt company X which paid Y $X(32) for nothing while the masses got paid -$X and taxpayers or “investors” (read, idiots) are on the hook.  Accountability, such a term in social services and certainly in the halls of education, are not found in finance, and certainly not found among the new American ruling class, a Bastard class of International Netizens that take any conspiracy involving Illuminati or Freemasons or Lizard people and just fucks the shit out of it.  I mean, is it more wondrous that George Bush Jr. [sic] was a lizard from cunting outer-space or that he was born of that midget with the white hair and despite being half-[developmentally impaired] managed to hold/rob the highest office in the post-SOVIET world and then start two wars, one needlessly (The Iraq) on real countries and one war on a state of mind (Terror)?  Really, truth, perhaps, as always is stranger than fiction and conspiracy are the modern myths that we tell each other to make sense of a world we don’t understand and cannot fathom.  Much as our ancestors made up myths for the moon and the sun we have to invent shit because that shit seems more plausible than believing that retards in our government would cook up a story of mobile labs manufacturing weapons of mass destruction in a country which had trouble keeping electricity on for more than a few hours a day.  It is more possible for us to believe that Jewish-Space-Alien-Homosexual-Midget-Pope-Worshiping-CIA Agents planted bombs within the towers and then used state-of-the-art guidance systems to track airplanes into the Twin Towers in order to launch a trillions of dollar war and strip us of our rights than it is to believe that the Twin Towers were build like pieces of shit and couldn’t withstand being struck by two aluminum tubes filled with fuel that burns quicker than but not too much hotter than K1 kerosene and managed to collapse exactly straight down and within moments or each other without damaging other structures because they were built like Khrushchev cracker-boxes?  Do we need to invent the Lizard People because we can’t believe a group of Ayn Randian-worshiping Neo-Conservatives had been working in plain sight on a philosophy of Spreading Democracy(tm) for close to thirty years?   Do we need the Illuminati to explain that people take advantage of situations for personal or group gain?  Do we need Nazi UFOs to explain that 9/11 was used by people already in power in order to launch two wars, one of which was useless (Afghanistan/Iraq) and the third war on a state of mind (Terror) justified by a hair-brained philosophical idea that takes its tenets from the Western Canon and the Western Gunsmoke? (Google it yourself)?

If it makes you feel better to believe that there are evil geniuses out there – go for it.  It is frightening to think that evil dumb is out there.  That it isn’t even evil.  It’s just dumb.

On the ground, things just plod along.  The circus was back in town at Fort Mudge.  It was a hot slow day, it seemed as if the entire village was deserted.  Considering that thirty years ago the place had 6,000 souls and now had 1200, it was vacant.  Umbrage Mills stood on the banks of Dogear Creek as half-finished condos, the conversion just bringing the structure to a new state of disrepair as the roof hadn’t quite been buttoned up before the crash of 2008 and the investors lost their shirts.  The circus was again in town, but this time the animal rights activists had robbed the carnival of the domesticated cat tricks act, and the python and others had fled from heat and desperation to better lives at the YMCA or working a salt mine somewhere.  The dull-witted squatters of Fort Mudge had come out with their offspring, or that of their errant children who had whelped far before legal age.  The large masses of human sat baking on the stands, waiting for entertainment. Toothless men of 30 and corpulent grandmothers of…. 30 lined up with their charges.  The circus unfolded as a sad dirge to live entertainment.  I was reminded why we all played video games.  As the acts came to a conclusion, the shuffling masses trundled to their SUVs or pickup trucks and once again Fort Mudge became quiet.  Back on Main Street a car unloaded several Chinese workers who entered what had been the keystone village cafe for thirty years and now was being converted to a Chinese take-out place, the kind with the light up signs and which swears doesn’t use MSG but my, everything is so good.  I trundled in the stifling heat over to meet the new owners and inquire as to their opening day – “Not owner.  Worker” he laughed, “I just here work.”  I laughed too.  They scraped the last of the old name off, a name that had survived several previous owners back when there were people who cared enough to ask, can you keep the old gold letters?  The worker scraped away.  The owners are always far away and unaccountable for their actions.

Today, the price of Facebook went down.  It may go up, but that is highly unlikely.  Zuckerberg got his.  That dude who is now living in Singapore where there are no taxes got his.  Some others got theirs.  The game is up.  In eight years, Zuckerberg is a billionaire.  Eight years ago I was worth slightly more.  Today, slightly less.  And I am not alone in this mess, and in a way, we may not all be Zuckerberg, but we all are Fucked.  I mean, Zucked.