A true story that can save you millions

A man and his son were standing near the road. The son wore a patched officer's jacket and the old man's beard was so stiff with dust that it seemed to be made of wood.

A van pulled up beside them.

"Excuse me?"

The old man stared ahead. The little boy ran his fingers over his lips, as if he had a mustache there.

"Do you know if anyone is hiring? What the jobs situation is like?"

The old man had a very, very slow song in his head that prevented him from concentrating. The boy took a picture. What had it been, six thousand years?

After a moment the van pulled off into the middle distance and exploded.

Welcome to the new normal. The economy in tatters, Oklahoma on its side bleeding like a stuck animal. Whatever way you turn it doesn't matter; the future is blocked.

In Chesterton, Philadelphia; in Purges, New Hampshire; in St. Relishe, New York.

Gone are the days

Gone are the days of easy money in the dot-com boom, low interest rates, fast approval on your second, third, fourth mortgage. The old distinctions have unfastened themselves from one another and reemerged as loose alliances of disputed cloud-shapes. Dawn is no longer a grand opening or a grand reopening. Joggers in Binghampton can now be stoned or shot by any other jogger. The gum has gone black and the plants are withering on the windowsills of the dry cleaners.

"What this country needs," the president reiterated during the press conference, "is a strategy for dealing with this kind of information. In the past you would send a letter by mail and it wouldn't be strange for it to take a week or two to find out whether there had been, I don't know, a hurricane at grandma's or wherever. Today--you find out immediately. That's what we face. Orphan weeks and pilgrim weeks. Huge reaches of inner canyonspace traversed by the narrowest currents of fear."

That's when I wake up, gather my things, swallow aspirin, make coffee, catch a bus from the Mosque. This vision of the soul still with me, I watch as the Sears Tower vanishes from the rap videos that play in the headrests. All affiliations languish. Global health is in crisis, global finance is in crisis, and I am anxious about my anxiety, concerned that my identification with Hamlet is not vital. Ramadan, for instance, is an enigma to me.

"Usury is the only thing standing between us and the Middle Ages," I tell the driver.

"No man!" he says, tapping his fingernail to his earpiece. "No man!" he says again, before finishing his conversation in French.

The radio gets louder and louder. All attempts at a grand bargain have failed. I can no longer hear my thoughts. Soon the road will end and the dust will consume me.