‘Twas the night before All Saints, and all through the House
and Senate: no movement, no clicking of mouse.

The ballots were set by the mailbox with care
in hopes that St. Obama soon would be there.

Incumbents were out on the trail and stump
hoping to find just one more hand to pump.

And I on the couch with a bowl full of candy
had settled in front of CNN with it handy.

When a knock at the door threw me out of my seat
my first inclination was to quickly retreat.

But I knew that I’d have to answer the door
maybe for a neighbor, perhaps someone poor.

Perhaps for a candidate, wanting my vote
or a wayward painter, offering a new coat.

When I cracked the door, my mind filled with wonder
my view of the world so soon tore asunder.

For there on my porch, where I had to play host
I came face to face with a real live ghost!

As I stared at it and my face flushed with heat
it raised up a bag and said “Trick or treat!”

Relieved from my fears, I turned for my bowl
all too happy to pay a sugary toll.

How could I have forgotten the point of this night?
Children begging from strangers under moonlight!

So imagine my fear as I turned back around
the door had been closed without making a sound!

All I could hear as my face turned to ash
was CNN talking today’s market crash.

But maybe the child had left for the streets
not wishing to wait any longer for sweets.

As I drew in my hand, and was turning around
there was the ghost, no longer earthbound!

It was floating about, as light as the air
and you’d best believe that this gave me a scare.

There were no limbs a-dangle and no strings attached
in my whole life I’d seen nothing this matched.

Its eyes were dead empty and my heart skipped a tick
I had to admit that this was quite a trick.

Feeling faint and woozy and likely to choke
I barely could hear when it actually spoke.

“You know, do you not, this can’t go on any longer
a whole nation of people with their goal to monger.

“You steal and thieve while calling it ‘work’
you’re rude to each other and then go berserk.

“You assume, do you not, that you deserve it all
but blame everyone else whenever they fall.

“And your only true faith is in science and guns
while you mortgage the future and buy by the tons.

“And your only answer for the traps that you’ve set
is to accrue and accrue infinitely more debt.”

Before I even had the chance to reply
it soared up the chimney, away it did fly.

I wondered if others would be getting this warning
I wondered if I would wake up the next morning.

Then I heard an exclamation that made my mind riven
“Happy Halloween, you will not be forgiven!”

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I used to have this crazy multi-colored backpack. It was some sort of plastic vinyl material and different sections of the outside were hued in vibrant Mexican restaurant shades – orange, green, purple, blue. The overall effect was one of discordant rainbow gone awry. I loved this backpack.

I forget whether I had it in seventh grade (Oregon, Catholic school) or got it just thereafter, en route to CTY in Baltimore for the first of what proved to be three summers (the last two in Carlisle, PA). My distinct memories of the backpack are during CTY and shortly thereafter, the early months at the Academy which I recently recounted so fondly. The more I ponder it, the more I think I must have had it in seventh grade, because I later reflected that so many of the sexual-orientation-based slurs I was targeted with that year (and later) could be traced back to my proud carrying of an insanely multi-colored backpack.

Regardless of when I first carried it, I was still carrying it when I became involved with someone who might put some of those slurs (theoretically) to rest, in the fall of my second try at eighth grade (the first in four years) at the aforementioned Academy. I was tall; she was tall. I was awkward; she was awkward. What’s more to like? She seemed extremely into me and I was harassed by most of the popular girls in the school for something like three weeks into “asking her out”. I was in the slow crowd of a slow school (though to be fair, I wasn’t really in a crowd yet), so no one really had any idea what going out really meant. I distinctly remember a note from one of the popular girls who was passing the time trying to set us up for her own amusement using the word “steady”. The year was 1993, but the whole episode was straight outta ‘53.

For three years, embarking on this awkward abortive “relationship” would be the biggest regret of my career at the Academy (until said throne of remorse was toppled by an infinitely worse and more serious relationship). There was simply nothing to it. We were virtually afraid to talk to each other, we barely held hands, we never got anywhere close to kissing. I’m not sure we even hugged each other, though we must have at least once. She made me insanely nervous, in no small part because people had spent so much time telling me that she liked me. I didn’t know what to do with that. I won’t say I didn’t have an interest in her, but I think my real interest was in the idea of the whole thing. The idea of being liked. The idea of actually openly expressing feelings for a girl. I had had crushes on girls since kindergarten and it felt like it was finally okay for the first time ever. Which is probably a large part of why the interaction continued long after we had run out of things to say to each other. Which hadn’t been much in the first place.

What I hadn’t been enrolled in the Academy long enough to realize was that while it was “okay” to “be going out”, no one was really doing so in eighth grade. I had picked up some misconception that lots of people were dating and it was sort of the hip thing to do (probably based on more blind assumptions that the next place one goes will always be the one filled with more intelligent, mature, advanced creatures – see also skipping grades, college, work, and every other new experience in my life). As it turned out, our relationship was big news when it started and only became the larger object of ridicule as it progressed (or failed to over time). Every indignity of the two months (or thereabouts) need not be recounted here, but many of my future good friends (lifelong, no less) spent the period after lunch running between she and I as we awkwardly ambled up the path, a well practiced demonstration of how much space was between us as we were walking “together” and how utterly empty of interaction our relationship really was. As I recall, most of our conversations toward the end were about how much we weren’t bothered or intimidated by this blanket rejection of our peers and felt no need to speed things up.

The relationship was abruptly, almost cataclysmically ended by me. Her best friend at the time (and a future girlfriend of mine, as it turned out) had made repeated dire predictions to her of a randomly selected specific date in the future, darkly labeled “Doomsday”. They had private conversations about it and I only periodically heard of it from one or the other of them, with no real details except the girl’s constant denial that any such prediction had any merit. Sick of hearing about it the night before the predicted day, I declared to the best friend and another friend in the locker bay that “Doomsday will never happen!” They giggled uproariously and then asked me if I really knew what Doomsday was about. I (how could I have been so oblivious?) really didn’t. And they looked at me and led me to some conclusions and I blushed, suddenly realizing I had declared that I would never break up with the girl. Blindly crazed by the ridiculousness of my declaration, I went straight home to fulfill the prophecy on the phone that night, simply to make it perfectly clear that I had not intended to declare the relationship eternal.

I never much talked to the girl after that night on the phone… I remember distinctly her responding to a group of people asking about it within earshot of me that “He doesn’t have a reason!” and then she pointedly glared at me. I didn’t treat that girl fairly and I knew it almost immediately, let alone with the passage of time. I held all sorts of things against her that weren’t her fault – the bullying of the popular girls, my naivete and misunderstanding of the school, my not really considering whether I liked her as a factor (just being giddy that someone actually liked me), the incredible social ostracism that resulted from our spectacle of a botched partnership. None of these were her fault. They were the fault of the situation, of circumstance, of (gulp) all the factors that made eighth grade such a living hell the first time around, when I said that “hormones” and “adolescence” were just cover-up words for inappropriate and inhumane treatment of others (I still largely believe that they are). But in my mind at the time, she was conflated utterly with the disastrous situation and I could not have dug myself a larger social hole to start five years at the Academy. There were tons of people who knew almost nothing of me by the time we graduated except “that was the guy who dated ___ in eighth grade, right?”

Or at least it felt that way.

Shortly after the phone call and the fulfillment of Doomsday, my multi-colored backpack started running out of steam. It was tearing and dirty as all get out… the material was cheap and didn’t hold up well amidst Albuquerque’s volatile climate. I denied needing a new backpack – I loved my color wonderland and never like replacing anything utilitarian (see also and especially shoes). My parents had to get me a backpack to get me to try to replace the technicolor satchel.

Their knowledge of my love of green and my Mom’s avowed love of L.L. Bean combined to prompt them to purchase the green L.L. Bean backpack of that year’s vintage. It arrived a few weeks after “Doomsday” and my parents attempted to confiscate the color wheel in favor of the new bright green book-carrying machine. But – horror of horrors! – it was identical to the backpack the recently dumped girl carried each day and had since I met her.

Explaining to my parents (who had really only tangentially been aware of the “relationship” in the first place, given that [A] it was embarrassing, [B] I saw her outside of school exactly once, and [C] we didn’t talk on the phone all that much) exactly why taking this backpack to school even one time would be the piece de resistance in a carefully crafted social suicide already in progress was, in a word, difficult. Given my new resolution to start salvaging the next 4.5 years, it was unforgivably impossible. Not “try it, you might like it” but “return it, yesterday”. It was one of two gifts I received from my parents in high school that I outright rejected and refused.

We argued about it periodically for something like a week before they finally conceded. That weekend, we trudged to the mall to find suitable non-doppleganger shoulderwear. And we walked into an Eddie Bauer store where I picked out the green backpack that would travel with me through the rest of my educational life.

Four years later, as a freshman in college, I would discover that this backpack, already a veteran of more time with me than any other item in a school setting, was identical in every way to one owned and regularly carried by one of two people on the college debate circuit I would truly wind up detesting. Over four years of bemused acknowledgment of this coincidence over an ebbing and flowing rivalry, we would only accidentally switch packs once; remarkable given that the general practice on APDA is to leave everyone’s stuff strewn all over an auditorium each weekend, often only loosely arranged and hastily grabbed on the way to wherever is next. Thereafter, we learned that he always left his main section zippers at rest at the apex of the backpack, equally meeting in the middle, while I always had mine all the way over to one side or the other, with only one zipper holding the whole operation closed. We never were confused again.

As bitterness grew in our rivalry and some particularly harsh words and accusations were exchanged at different junctures, I began taking extra precautions to ensure that he had no excuse to “accidentally” walk off with all my cases. I’m sure he did the same and both of us were completely overreacting. But as someone said on the forum in a thread recounting some of these events, 2001 was probably about the most bitter time imaginable to be in college debate and no one really wants to go there again.

The girl recently RSVP’ed and then retracted her RSVP to come to the ten-year high school reunion. Unlike the other ex of mine to follow this pattern, I was a little sad to see her follow it. I’m not sure I’d have any more to say to her than I ever did, but she’s married with kids and life seems to have worked out for her. It must be said that some pictures of Emily from eighth grade look not dissimilar from this individual at that time, and it makes me wonder about change and timing and a whole host of things.

The guy who actually shared my backpack hosted many people, including Emily and I, at a Super Bowl party in 2005 when we were back east. He seemed happy, more mature, less eager to lash out and prove himself to a world that wasn’t always kind. He walked us out when we left and sincerely thanked us for coming; it had been a nice surprise for all three of us (Emily liked him even less than I did). He died the next year at the age of 26.

Fish and I had a bizarre series of phrases we used to say early in high school, when our friendship had solidified later that eighth grade year. It was based on L.L. Bean – he had something from there or my mom did or we were just talking about L.L. Bean. It began with “L.L. Bean. What does the L stand for? Love. Love Love Bean.” and ended, after multifarious precarious permutations, with “What does the Love stand for? Bean.” It sounds like a commercial in this retelling, but it was really just about silliness and how Fish and I could make a humorous interaction out of anything. For some reason, walking in the windy October city tonight on the way to a late lunch or an early dinner, this old scheme occurred to me. And I was whisked away to L.L. Bean and the whole history above.

Really, I just wanted to talk about backpacks.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

There is a man who lives in front of the building where I work. He has been living there for well over a year. I don’t mean he’s living in a neighboring building or he lives down the block or that he lives even in something so luxurious as a cardboard box. He lives, nestled under a particular window, in front of our building.

Before we found out his real name, we had nicknamed him the Random Number Generator. He spends most of his life standing under our window and calling out various numbers. There’s really little telling if they’re actually random or not. They are staccato and orderly seeming enough, usually interspersed with the names of cities, famous personages, and government officials. The numbers may well be ZIP codes, birthdays, social security numbers, phone numbers. When working with numbers all day, this is not the most helpful auditory experience.

The man was wearing a shirt today – it was warm enough that this might be in question, though he usually has many layers on. He was napping when I saw him on my way home from work, but the blue-green logo on his shirt was unmistakable. It was a Wachovia shirt.

He’s not the kind to ask for change (indeed, very few people do within earshot of Glide since we have so many free services), but he’d only need about six bucks to get a whole share of what he was advertising. Tomorrow, it might be four and a half.

It is a symptom of the homeless that, among many other indignities, they must suffer to wear absurdity. It’s a hand-me-down lifestyle to some sort of ridiculous extreme. A waft of shirts advertising some sort of discredited diet scheme filtered through the Tenderloin a while back… it was unsettling to see peppy shirts saying “Ask me about the ____ Diet!!” on thinning homeless men. Another version wanted you to ask the wearer how they lost so many pounds.

How indeed.

The Random Number Generator is clearly intelligent, perhaps a bit of a conspiracy theorist, perhaps a bit of a savant. It is hard to imagine that he’s totally unaware of the state of the globe at large, or at least what the pundits believe is same. Perhaps he takes a special sweet triumphant satisfaction in wearing Wachovia’s banner on his torso, a signal of a giant Goliaths felled by the coming Davids of the poor and previously forgotten. Were he to wander down to the Financial District (he never leaves), he might give several high-class brokers a fright. Here is the harbinger of their own future. There but for the grace of luck go I.

And luck is changing.

The focus of the media during the Columbus Day Rally was not on the previous times that the market had bolted up such steep percentage precipices. It was merely on the unprecedented height of the point climb, the towering reach for four digits of movement. In the margins, it was noted that the last time this happened (percentage-wise) was in 1933. 1933 notably not known for its economic recovery and triumphant financial hope. Followed, of course, by gains in 1931, 1928, and 1932. And then Monday. What good company for projecting a joyous financial future.

No wonder it’s only taken 48 hours to give all those miraculous gains back, while keeping just a little interest. By tomorrow, it’ll all be gone again.

Last night was the full moon; tonight the Ides of October. Tomorrow it seems the hurricane’s eye will finally leave us and the storm will resume. Already the inner bands of rain have started to creep in.

A deluge of sorts is also descending on the Blue Pyramid, with the most one-day traffic since May. While parallels could be drawn to the markets see-saw peaks and valleys (and indeed, it has been a mostly down year), I’m taking it while it lasts.

Wachovia’s merging with my bank, Wells Fargo. My bank wasn’t always Wells Fargo – it used to be called Norwest. Then Wells Fargo bought Norwest and said they’d still say I’d had a checking account with them since 1997, which sounded fine to me. I liked Norwest’s color scheme better, but Wells Fargo does have a strong, rich history in the West.

Norwest’s color scheme was just like Wachovia’s, come to think of it.

Sleep well, children of the Tenderloin. All this nonsense will be over soon. Or at least different.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

“Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
world serves its own needs, regardless of your own needs.
Feed it up a knock, speed, grunt no, strength no.
Ladder structure clatter with fear of height, down height.
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for hire and a combat site.
Left her, wasn’t coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered crop.
Look at that low plane! Fine then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed.
Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right – right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”
-R.E.M., “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”

Even the four horsemen have to take a breather now and then.

Today was a waste of a day, a day spent in purgatory, a day that was just like September, except the direction is already well established. It’s almost like everyone forgot what was happening, wanted to pretend otherwise, wanted to return to business as usual.

But Monday looms like a towering monolith in the distance. And everyone with a job knows that Sunday night can be worse than Monday morning.

Of course, much of America won’t be working on Monday. The literal markets will be open, but the proverbial markets may be closed. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The only reason the market didn’t lose 1,000 points on Friday was the rumor of a weekend retreat by the G-7 financial leaders being sure to yield results.

Today, the managing director of the IMF announced that the last couple weeks “had pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown.”

Sounds like you should just keep holding on to your 401k and hope for the best, just like the media tells you.

There is no news, there is no progress, there are no ideas. Capitalism is broken and no amount of fooling seems to be able to fix it, in no small part because people are starting to realize just how transparently empty the whole thing is. Money is just an idea that we all agree to. Once we stop agreeing, the idea seems pretty silly, doesn’t it?

I mean, think about it. Think how ridiculous it is that financial booms and crises exist. How utterly absurd. It’s not because people have more things or fewer. It’s not because there are wars and plagues or an absence thereof. It’s because of machinations in this fabricated concept of money that declare that some people own things and others don’t, that some people can hold sway over thousands of others and others cannot.

It’s laughable. Sit down and contemplate this idea in your own words and thoughts for twenty minutes… you’ll be mindblown after ten. People talk about financial crises like hurricanes that can’t be predicted, like pestilence that can’t be cured. It’s all in your mind. Or in six billion minds.

Which makes it all the more silly when the media comes back and tries to say that irrationality is overfeeding the panic or back when Greenspan chided the market for “irrational exuberance” in the dot-com bubble. As though made-up money had something other than irrational collective action to it. As though it’s perfectly rational to stand at the altar of small green pieces of paper and commit your whole life to their acquisition. As though it makes all the sense in the world that everything can be built or destroyed on the back of such little pieces of paper (or promises to send you such pieces, or electronic records thereof).

For a world that believes so fervently in science, it seems like an awful lot of blind faith to me.

Which is why, I suppose, I don’t fear that the end of the world will come with the end of capitalism. Which is why I’m so convinced that people will just look back and shake their heads that such media of exchange were so dominant for such a long period of time. It will have the same nostalgic tinge as Norse gods or the Greco-Roman pantheon. Couldn’t they see the seepage of their own individual human flaws into this godlike attribution? Couldn’t the realize they were merely playing their own fears out and calling them holy?

It’s hard to know what to do in the eye of the storm. The calm is unnerving, the quiet disquieting. The air doesn’t feel like truly undisturbed air. It carries an electrical charge, a current, it’s aswirl with its storm-tossed past and future. It knows what’s in store and it whispers like a warning that this is mere deception.

Does one give into the temptation to come up above ground, furiously batten the hatches, recognizing that any second the second half of the maelstrom could hit? Does one hang tight in the basement, ignoring the opportunity on the surface, insisting on playing it safest?

Weekends are just another idea we humans have created and agreed to. Most times, they make a lot more sense than money. But this time ’round, it just feels like over-simulation of a hurricane. I’m ready to get the storm over with already. There’s a new world to build on the other side.

When I was young, my teeth were trying to teach me a lesson in peaceful coexistence. My adult teeth didn’t want to replace most of my baby teeth, forcing them out by coming straight down over the top of them. They wanted to live side-by-side, like shark teeth.

I lost a couple teeth the conventional way here and there, but most of them had to be pulled. Two rows of coexistent teeth just do not combine for the look most people find aesthetically pleasing, and I had plans to open my mouth regularly as I got older. It’s hard to imagine using such a tool for anything other than random and irrelevant intimidation prior to a debate round.

I had teeth pulled in several cities over several years. Visalia, Portland, Washington DC. I had gas and novocaine and at least one visit that felt like there was no anesthetic at all (the gas was the worst of the three). But the standout dental appointment, the one that has stuck in my memory the strongest, was on Monday, October 19, 1987.

It was a midmorning appointment at the Georgetown University Medical Center. I remember my Dad mentioning it being cheaper because a student dentist would be performing the procedure – pulling, as I recall, 2 teeth that day. Prior to meeting the student dentist, I had visions of him being roughly my age and equally competent to perform dentistry. I was just a little bit anxious.

However, he turned out to be in that age group of people that one knows intellectually is much younger than one’s parents, but seems, from the vantage of childhood, to somehow be older because of their general remoteness and distance from one’s own age. The connection of family seems to bridge age gaps much more than connections with intimidating sixth graders or graduate school students. And frankly, he ended up being perhaps the most competent dentist to ever peer into my maw.

It was as he was starting to work on the second tooth that I remember discussion starting about events outside that room. The room was strangely like a room full of cubicles, looking nothing like any other medical facility I’d ever been in. And my father started talking with the dentist about stocks and the market and what was going on. It wasn’t until the next few days, discussions at Roy Rogers’ after school on sore teeth, that I really started to comprehend the magnitude of the change that had taken place. 1987 proved to be a slightly volatile year. (And yes, I followed politics when I was 7. I don’t know how one could live in DC that year and not follow politics.)

I have a dental appointment today.

Yesterday was Yom Kippur. In an almost precise tie with Good Friday, Yom Kippur is one of my two favorite holidays to come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the only two I’d keep. I believe I’ve talked about this before, right around last Good Friday, so I’ll spare the full details here again. But a full day to fast, reflect, and take personal responsibility for one’s actions? That I can get down with. And what good timing to boot.

I won’t plunge into detail about the Yom Kippur that is the emotional standout comparable to the dental appointment describe above. But it was around the same season, nine years later, and involved waiting in the Advocate office, just sitting and waiting. A time for my own reflection. A time wherein I was about to embark on something I would come to regret and be overwhelmed in efforts to take responsibility for. A time that brought me to the very brink of issues of forgiveness and guilt, responsibility and atonement.

Sometime shortly after the outbreak of the Iraq War, my father coined the phrase “America will not be forgiven.” There was brief discussion of putting it on bumper stickers and banners, starting a movement that, like so many my father and I discuss, raises concerns about being disappeared or openly removed from society. We didn’t start the presses, we kept it to ourselves. But even then, with the extreme harshness of the phrase and the mood, I don’t think anyone anticipated the tsunami that is lurching over the coastline right now.

As I type this, the answer to yesterday’s question has bobbed from 4 to 8 to 1 to 2 to 3. I learned the word “volatility” in 1987 when talking to my Dad about the stock market and the association is still good today. When I typed yesterday’s post, the market was down about 50, then up a handful, yet it still managed to answer yesterday’s question with a 6.

I have started openly talking to people in daily life about the impending Depression. The quantity of denial abroad is astounding. Many are still unwilling to believe there’s a recession underway (or even to come), many still want to think that an America of plenty and excess is the way of the future, the way of all things. Despite humanity’s incredible innate adaptability, I will never fail to be stunned by each individual human’s ability to take what they have known for a very short time and assume it will carry on forever, without interruption.

Can we be forgiven for this indiscretion, this incredible lack of foresight? I grew up on lessons of the Holocaust and World War II, discussion of 1930’s Germany and the writing that was increasingly bold and red on the wall. The vantage of history was not terribly kind to those who stayed in Germany as the ’30’s progressed. Many critiqued how anyone could just stand by, continue going to their job or running their shop, hope for the best, be sure that the zealots were going to calm down, that things would turn around, that militarization was just a precaution. By the time that many realized what was really afoot, it was far too late to talk about crossing borders or bailing out. And the price was unfathomably, unforgivably high.

Surely no one can be blamed for being hopeful in a time of crisis. But there is a line between hope and delusion that is critical and can literally differentiate between life and death. I do not think the situation locally parallels 1930’s Germany precisely for several reasons. Not the least of which is that I can’t think of a place to go right now.

But as I consider that, this can’t be all that dissimilar from then. The whole world was immersed in a Depression then. Everyone was electing dynamic dictators to navigate out of the crisis. America’s breadlines could not have been beckoning from across the shore, whispering of the opportunity for a better life outside of Germany. Indeed, the outlook was so globally bleak the Germany’s machinations of progress might have looked the most stabilizing, the most hopeful. One could almost be forgiven for bailing from another country and sneaking into Germany.

But like the move for those who rode out of the dustbowl into California, only to find that opportunity was dead across the land, this would have been a poor decision. Being wise in an era of panic is difficult and sometimes requires an amount of forethought that humans are simply not equipped to exercise. No wonder so many people just burrow – dig in and entrench in their current environment, pretending that nothing is going to change.

I once said, working on a project where I was obliged to defend Robespierre, that “paranoia is healthy in paranoid times”. I don’t think Robespierre can be forgiven on these grounds, but it occurs to me that I might ask others to forgive me along these lines. I have been compared, recently and by more than one, to the guys on the street with signs about the end being near. The irony, of course, being that we work with street people every day and I haven’t seen a sign like that in 2.5 years of life in the Tenderloin.

Forgive me if I’m right. Forgive me if I’m wrong. And I will try to find a way to forgive those who, through denial, misrepresentation, and greed, have created the maelstrom that could drown the whole world.

If you’re looking for hope, there’s a rainbow after the flood. But first, we must survive the flood.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon,
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo woo woo.
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.
Hey hey hey.
Hey hey hey.”
-Simon & Garfunkel, “Mrs. Robinson”

They say that in the past, toward the end of the last Depression, when baseball was America and people needed a hero, people had only one question for each other in the spring of 1941: “Did he get one today?”

The question was about Joe DiMaggio and whether he had extended his hitting streak.

In the future, if we ever get there, I have long maintained that those in my generation will have only one question for each other in our twilight years. “How many have you had?”

The question will be about the number of cancers we’ve each survived.

In this interim period, somewhere between 1941 and 2041, we are in the midst of the slowest, most methodical stock market crash in world history. No one is out in the streets marching to the titular chant, but the only question of note for those financially inclined, aware, or concerned, should be as it says: “How many hundreds down today?”

I’ve read a lot in the last week about “market analysis”. A co-worker walked in yesterday morning with a freshly printed oversize sheet from her retirement planners displaying full-color charts of how the market always goes up, forever and ever Amen, despite dips and splutters just like this one. Everyone’s just chomping at the bit to “call a bottom”, “get in on the ground floor”, and “buy low”.

There’s another element of the discussion, one that revolves around so-called “capitulation”. That when everyone gets enough fear in them, enough panic selling occurs, and enough people call their broker screaming “sell it all!”, we can finally transition back into the slow, steady, stair-climbing growth that supposedly defines stock markets. Because there will be no one left who wants to sell.

I humbly submit that the two paragraphs above are in diametric conflict with each other, and together they combine to be the complete illustration of the anatomy of a slow crash, or perhaps even a Permanent Crash State. Every morning, CNN runs the headline “Stocks Set to Rebound”. Every morning, for the past week. Every morning, stocks are up for a few minutes, even an hour or two. Every afternoon, in the half-hour before the closing bell, people panic sell like Wall Street is closing forever.

But every morning, through the help of Fed actions, punditry about bottoms and ground floors and capitulation, and good ol’ fashioned American optimism and can-do spirit, the next day has Stocks Set to Rebound! Everything’s going to be fine. And it’s this buying, consumerist, happy-go-lucky attitude that leads to a repetition of the pattern and ensures that as long as there’s capitalism in America, there will be no capitulation.

In 1929, people had no such assurances and hubris about their markets and their financial systems. There was no FDIC, no unemployment insurance, no guarantee that money would be there when things went wrong. People felt the need to provide their own financial security, not just trust that everyone was on the same page with get-rich-quick schemes that don’t require anything other than blind faith and fiat.

So when things went south, they did so in a hurry. Everyone gave up quickly. There was massive, widespread, almost universal capitulation. No one was looking to get in on a ground floor or find a buying opportunity. No pundits said that maybe the market was ripe for bargain purchases as it was careening to the ground, carrying so many investors (and their portfolios) with it.

And thus, it could be over (more or less) in 48 hours. One big crash to rule them all. And then, as my co-worker’s handy chart reminds me, it would be 16 years before levels at the outset of those 48 hours had been reclaimed.

The Permanent Crash State looks completely different. There’s a sucker looking to buy every minute, ensuring endless volatility and false hope. No one wants to capitulate because they just know this market is ripe for getting into any second. It’s just the right number they need to spot, the right falling knife they need to grab by the handle. 9,000? 8,000? 7,6,5? It’s somewhere, here, I promise, the perfect opportunity to get in.

Meanwhile, of course, people will peel off on the sidelines. My moment of capitulation was Monday, but your mileage may vary. Maybe it’ll be at the third bailout. Or the nationalization of the airlines or the banking system. Maybe it’ll be when the government cancels its debts and the press conference from a missile silo in North Dakota announces that anyone wanting to appeal this decision can file their complaint with the full force and vigor of the United States military.

But even then, I promise, CNN and CNBC will be telling you how oversold defense stocks are, how people have been dreaming for generations at getting in on the Dow Jones at today’s price of 1,700, how you would be a fool not to think that everything was going to be great from here on out.

Many hundred-point chunks between here and there, though. How many today?

If you need me, I’ll be watching baseball.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.