We Have Recessed Into the Tightest Possible Corner (Metaphorically)
The Way We Live Now: Treadin' on a treadmill made of sand. Since we're ex-cons and can't get jobs we got foreclosed on and moved from the shelter into mom's place, but we're still to poor to get divorced. MEH.
Allow us to just lay out, for the benefit of future anthropologists, the lifestyle of the average American today, based on up-to-the-minute news reports from our nation's finest surviving news organs.
- We're ex-cons (more and more and more of us!) and we can't get jobs because of that fact, and also even if we weren't ex-cons we still couldn't get jobs, because there are no jobs.
- Of course your house went into foreclosure. But look at it like this: Foreclosure is "a beginning, not an end." We hope that empty phrase makes you feel better.
- But don't worry; we're sure you can find a shelter. As one shelter director says, "We are here to say, ‘Move it along.'" Sweet.
- Better yet, move back in with mom and dad. All the kids are doing it, now! Isn't this like the 15th time this story has been written? The point is, we're all terrible losers.
- And of course our marriages failed long ago, because of the recession, but divorce would be too expensive, because of the recession, so we just stay together in misery and poverty, because of the recession.
Other than that, things are cool.
[Also the aforementioned "treadmill" is just a metaphor, and the metaphorical grains of sand on this poetic "treadmill" are metaphors made out of ex-cons, unemployment, foreclosure, homelessness, broken families, and divorce—a "sand castle," if you will, of recession-era miseries, metaphorically making it harder for you to job effectively.]
