Hmmmm. It’s already past 10 am on a Friday morning in mid-October and the phone hasn’t even rung once today. This is noteworthy because on a typical day, I would have already received a half a dozen computer-generated calls from various credit card companies and collection agencies. A few weeks back, I was receiving calls every half hour from Macy’s, aggressively trying to track down a debt. I mean that literally: every half an hour. After the first day, I easily recognized the number and simply didn’t take the call. How much was the debt? $20. Each Christmas I make a single pass at a shopping mall, purchase about $150 worth of gifts, and use my Macy’s credit card. The $20 was lingering from last Christmas. When I finally spoke to someone in the Macy’s collections boiler room, I ask how it was possible that I could be making monthly payments for 9 months on a measly $150 and still owed them money. She replied that probably it was because of the the 30% interest rate. In other words, the original $150 debt had become a $195 debt after the first 30 days, and $240 by the end of February, and so forth.

For several days, I fantasized about some grand gesture that would get the attention of the iconic retailer that introduced America to the department store Santa Claus, or at least would serve as a warning to other shoppers. My original plan was to attach a 20 dollar bill to a brick and throw it through the window of the nearby Macy’s in El Cajon. It then occurred to me that the name on the check would be pretty self incriminating. My next idea was to write an angry screed, print up a couple hundred copies at Kinko’s, and blanket all the cars in the Macy’s parking lot. But at 10 cents a copy, 200 copies would cost me exactly the $20 I owed Macy’s. I finally just paid them the 20 bucks and moved on.

We are already 2 years into this depression, and nationally over 10% of the adult population is unemployed. “Experts” believe the figure to be closer to 15% if you count the people who have simply given up or who’s unemployment benefits have dried up. I have been officially unemployed since January of 2009 when some incompetent shithead named Hal Brown (aka “The Hammer)”, who was inexplicably programming  a local radio station where I worked, decided to pull the plug on the talk format. The entire staff was layed off over a period of 3 or 4 days. I was the last to go.

My agent at the time was Ronald Bain. Ron was a home-bound double amputee (diabetes) who worked out of his home in Lake San Marcos, California. He was wheelchair bound, so I knew Ron would always answer the phone if I called him with a problem. In a previous incarnation, Ron was a hot shot young exec at CBS Sports in New York in the 1970′s, who, by his own admission, drank himself out of a career. I was one of 3 radio “talents” he represented so I was responsible for 33% of his income. Ron died of a massive heart attack the day I was fired.

I was wondering out loud the other day to a friend: With millions of desperate, unemployed Americans, hounded hourly by collection agencies, having been or about to be evicted from their apartments, or foreclosed from their homes, how come there haven’t been more incidents of guys going “postal”? He replied that the truly desperate probably had to sell their guns just to pay their bills. I suppose marching into your former employer’s or your mortgage company with a baseball bat or a slingshot wouldn’t have the same effect or provide nearly the same satisfaction, and since “going postal” incidents usually end in a suicide, clubbing yourself to death with a Louisville Slugger is not an attractive option.

I’m going to have to blog like crazy for the next few weeks because I want this to be a daily narrative, but I also have nearly 2 years that I have to backtrack and re-capture. This will be in lieu of the occasional political rant that I’ve been periodically posting to this site for the past few years. In all honesty, I haven’t paid much attention to politics for several months. As someone once said, there’s nothing like imminent peril to focus the human mind. And what you focus on, of course, is your imminent peril, not the sideshow of electoral politics. I still catch Kieth and Rachel on MSNBC on a regular basis, but lately their shows merely irritate, not entertain, me. Maddow’s obsession with don’t-ask-don’t-tell and Olbermann’s fixation on Glenn Beck increasingly annoy me. I frankly don’t give a shit anymore about those things. I can’t afford , literally and figuratively, to pay attention to things that don’t effect me directly. I’m a month behind on my mortgage payment and I averted a water shut-off this week by a single day. My 94-year-old mother lives with me because we can’t afford to put her in a nursing home.

What’s obviously missing this time around in any of the news and political coverage in the Mainstream Media, are the usually human interest stories about the millions of every day Americans who are facing financial calamity from which they are unlikely to ever recover. (At the least, for the moment anyway, I still own a home with a fair amount of equity in it.)  I recall that during the last recession, in the late 1980′s, the networks were filled with such stories. I remember watching an evening newscast about 20 years ago and the focus was on the collapse, due to foreign competition, of the domestic auto industry. ABC was doing a little vignette about the desperation of a man who had been recently layed-off from his  job at the Jeep factory in Toledo, Ohio. He was a couple weeks away from home foreclosure and his wife had recently left him. I immediately recognized the poor sucker as a guy I went to high school with. His name was Randy Cameron and he had worked for Jeep for nearly 20 years. Within a year, Randy was dead.

The only similar reportage I see these days is usually related to the “stimulus” package, or the bank bail-out and their relationship to the unemployment figures. On financial channels like CNBC, guys like Randy Cameron are treated like statistics that might either help or hurt your investment portfolio. On sports talk radio and television, unemployment and financial disaster are merely the reasons why the Charger’s game is blacked out this weekend due to poor ticket sales. In cities like Toledo or Youngstown, 20% of the population is unemployed and selling their plasma to put food on the table. In Detroit, you can purchase a foreclosed home for $150. In the affluent suburb where I live, Alpine, Ca (population 17,000), nearly 250 homes are in foreclosure. And these are 700 thousand dollar homes. Seems to me there might be a story or two behind those statistics. I am one of these stories and that is the pupose of this blog.