Ha ha, very funny, mister

I'd like to write a book about my experiences inside the poverty industry.

I've been putting it off because I thought I might one day grow rich.  Isn't going to happen, so...

I kid.  I've never been able to make real money.

I've been homeless twice, and it happened both times after age fifty. While there are thousands of homeless these days everywhere in the country, millions are a paycheck away from joining the club.  Older workers are the most vulnerable, obviously.

One experience came near the end of my tumultuous career in the restaurant industry.  The business is famous for paying barely enough to keep ahead of the landlord and its not-very-subtle discrimination against aging workers.

I'll put it this way. After a certain age, if you walk into a restaurant to apply for a job and you are obviously older than everybody in the room, including the young culinary school hotshot who is interviewing you and the owner who is standing next to him, your odds fall to about zero unless you are Anthony Bourdain.

It doesn't matter that the hotshot and the owner may both be destitute next year.

If you are homeless and try this you'll be tossed before you make it past the hostess.  You may look normal or middle-class, but if that were true you wouldn't be in the place clutching a resume in your hand while inquiring about an imaginary job opening and whether you can use the bathroom.

Besides, the hostess has seen another person wearing the same clothes you're wearing just a week previously and figures you picked up your wardrobe at the local shelter, which is likely true.

The second experience came at the height of a growing battle with ennui and despair coinciding with the 2008 recession.  I was, in a word, expendable as the outfit I worked for shrank its work force from seventy to fifteen in a very short period of time.

When my minuscule unemployment benefits and credit cards could no longer cover the essentials, I lost my home--a cheap room actually (but not "affordable"), because that job paid pennies as well.

A steady dose of rental inflation and stagnant wages combined with my growing alienation--the latter due in part to the former--created a cycle of loathing and despair over the years that at various times engulfed me--survival 'til now has largely depended on an admixture of street cunning, lowered expectations, and controlled rage.

(I've yet to master any of these disciplines, either, which makes me doubly unemployable.)

Economic erosion and income disparity tell the story of a vast segment of my generation, defined by a series of "soft" depressions that followed the sudden and more violent collapse of my parents' economy last century.

(The contemporary young baristas with masters' certifications and a bucket of college debt have their own set of problems. My advice to them would be to start marching and refuse to sell any more coffee to anybody who looks rich.)

None of what I would write about is new information, of course, but it is the crux of the problem elites refuse to acknowledge even as they spend billions to capture the next generation of vital resources across the world--for their own benefit and the trickle-down theorem of shared abundance which we know isn't working.

I don't have the chops to pull off such a book in an academic sense by revealing anything about capitalism that isn't already known, but an anecdotal telling of my experiences in the quicksand could be very funny--a personal survival story.


TS