Last night on the short walk from the train stop to my apartment there was a young black kid wearing a black zip-up hoodie sweatshirt kicking a small plastic lid in front of the Chinese nail salon. A few steps later I saw a Puerto Rican man wearing a puffy Yankees jacket kicking a big piece of cardboard. His girlfriend was yelling at him not to forget something from the driver's side of a snazzy looking new SUV.
I started wondering how they afforded that SUV. It started me thinking that I can't, for the life of me, afford an SUV.
These two didn't seem like they had as good a job as me. He seemed pretty shady but not shady enough to be really shady and she just seemed super tacky in that "I am a loud Boricua woman" way. But then again that could just be my prejudices kicking in. Well I kind of naturally skipped over that serious thought in favor of the truly bewildering question of how anyone does anything.
I mean, how do people afford things at all?
How do people get through life affording things like SUV's?
When I think about the sheer impossibility of actually living life, I can't understand how people do it.
How do they pay for their kids and their pets and their cars and their food and their life?
Its all too far-fetched. I mean, I can't do anything satisfactory. I am a total shambles who can barely afford to pay rent on time and I am supposed to be on the up and up.
Maybe I am not expressing this right. Maybe the mystery of it all is not getting across. But how do you really explain a feeling that you have absolutely no grip on?
Don't tell my wife about this, it will worry her.
On Sunday morning before soccer I stopped in at the cafe to get a lemonade. While I was in line I overheard some girl say something like "Well, Americans don't really understand such and such" and "Americans just don't get so and so..."
I suppose she could have been a Canadian, but from the way she was saying it, in that kind of "I hate being American" half apologetic, half despising sort of way, I knew right away she was an American girl talking to a foreign guy. Or maybe she was an American girl talking to a like-minded American guy she was trying to impress.
Of course I have said those kinds of things before. I have been in some stupid conversation about nothing that means anything and have blurted out some lame anti-American line trying to set myself apart by commenting on what Americans just don't get. There is nothing too wrong with that. Its good to be a little self-loathing, and America really is pretty messed up and all. But just hearing this whiney sentence out of that girl's mouth just the way you would expect to hear it made me cringe. It made me never ever want to apologize for America to some snootie foreigner. Lord knows I have done that enough times to make me want to vomit in my own shoes.
I hear Al Gore might be running for president.
I hope he does.
I always thought that guy had a pretty good head on his shoulders.
4 comments:
The real question is how do people afford the eternal hellfires of Hades that they get for buying that SUV.
people afford SUVs because they buy them on credit. poor americans buy status items with such a terrible frenzy. this is the great backlash of capitalism. of course the great thing about capitalism is that we don't have to think about it all the time. In this way it is much better than communism. sometimes, however, you wonder what it would be like if communism won the cold war and we all had to wear those uniforms with the worker ant antenaes.
also, we'd probably be able to move to vladivostok or the aral sea without any visa issues.
Of course, someone would still find a way to complain about how easy it was to travel now.
what I'm trying to say is that there is no hope for humanity. really none at all. so in this way capitalism is probably a solid form of economic governance.
I hope Carter runs, maybe then I can afford a house.
Maybe. On all counts. But only maybe.
Post a Comment