Great. Just great. The stock market is in a freefall.
Our bond rating has been dropped from AAA (American Automobile Association?) to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous?).
Unemployment and home foreclosures are leapfrogging each other to see who can go highest.
And The Prude still hasn’t learned how to can her garden produce.
Her plan for some time now has been to learn to live off the land.
Being a glass-half-empty sort of pessimist she always believed the ‘depression is right around the corner’ school of thought over the ‘better days are sure to come’ camp.
But when you pour pessimism into a procrastinator you get someone who worries today about getting something accomplished tomorrow.
By now The Prude had planned to:
-raise chickens
-expand her garden to include beets and potatoes
-buy a grinder to grind her flour to bake her bread
-lay up a supply of propane for her little stove and oil for her hurricane lamp
-memorize large chunks of poetry and narrative so if the electricity gets cut off she can entertain her loved ones in lieu of television, ala Little House on the Prairie)
-have a stash of yarn and fabric on hand to make replacement clothing for her family. As soon as she learns to knit and sew.
-dig a hole 100 feet deep for an outhouse
The Prude isn’t just a pessimist, she is a worst-case-scenario pessimist. She pictures a world with no fuel, no electricity, no money.
But so far she hasn’t learned any useful skills to compensate for the lack of the above.
She could wrap yarn around her loved one’s feet when their socks wore out, and swath them in bolts of fabric. If it was good enough for Julius Caesar…
There is firewood galore, so we can keep warm, and her family doesn’t particularly care for poetry.
But the whole food aspect of economic disaster causes her sleepless nights.
Both the incoming and outgoing of the food.
She needs to work on filling her pantry with non-perishables and having a clean and sanitary alternative to a flush toilet.
Maybe she can convince the world markets to hang on for just a bit longer…
3 comments:
Love this. So familiar...
Clever as always, Prude. I'm surprised you ever get any sleep with all you have to worry about.
Great. Now I have more things about which to worry. Thank you, Prude.
But wait--I forgot for a moment that I, too, procrastinate. Maybe I can put off worry until tomorrow?
Well done, Prude! You have solved the crisis in my world.
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