I step away from the Committee and look what happens. They’ll just have to wait.

Yes, this country’s governmental legislative leaders are caught in a vise of shrt-trm visions.

On one hedged bet, revive the economy with government bloat.

On another, restore solvency to prevent disaster.

To whom/what are your leaders most loyal?

In a global economy, any entity can legally line your representative’s retirement account with golden threads.

Does a country really matter to a person like me with investments spread around the world that leech like a parasite the profitable skin off workers’ backs?

If you don’t care to follow your representative around 24 hours a day to see what that person is doing to save your country from going bankrupt, who will?

How secure is my stock portfolio if my country isn’t?

Buy your beer with your interest, not your principal.

What are your principal principles?

To think the way I do requires few friends, unfortunately, because my thoughts are fanned out and filled with impossible-to-resolve contradictory sub/cultural belief structures.

My wife is the only person I trust and with whom I trust myself.

All else is illusion to match my literary output to a global social structure we call reality.

Long ago I grew bored with the interplay of ordinary lives in a social structure we call the workplace.

Another Monday of rehashing weekend sporting events with coworkers. Another joke about Wednesday being hump day. Another comment that Friday gets us two days closer to Monday once again.

How many friends and family members have reminded me that life within our species is essentially the art of small talk?

And so, here I am, the primary caregiver for my mother in-law who needs the comfort food of small talk more than anything else to ease her general starvationlike condition of loneliness.

She’s eating up all the attention she gets at the skilled nursing facility right now, supplemented by visits from her hometown church and neighbourhood friends who are like family to her.

She has commented more than once that she must be boring me.

She is a sophisticated smalltown lady with proper manners and a relatively clear mind for a 93.5 year young person.

Basically most everything that I am not.

I am a clever suburbanite with contriteness and a fuzzy set of thoughts at almost 49, old in mind if not in body.

She thinks like an aristocrat while I think like a … well, like whatever strikes me as funny.

To hear her break down family/friend backgrounds by social class and economic job category would add great character studies to a Jane Austen novel of the 21st Century.

She needs a home healthcare person from the equivalent of a smalltown upper middle class family of the 1920s and 1930s, if I read her thoughts correctly, or one used to working for such a family. Preferably one who is licensed, bonded, insured and not on the skids.

Definitely not a guy like me who’s willing to sacrifice friends and acquaintances for the sake of barter exchange efficiency and a good joke, hopefully one that is innovative, inventive and funny.

Maybe my mother in-law is right and the desophisticated, unthrifty habits of modern American living is the country’s undoing.

Some people are born into upper/middle class and some wouldn’t know a good classy lifestyle if it was given for them to live frugally but wealthily. Some become academic snobs.