You, Me, Joe Biden and a Punt

Well, I tell you what.

I read a lot of different things. That separates me not only from Sarah Palin (stop, now, you: I mean because she reads 'all of them, any of them'), but also from people who recycle well, since because I hate to walk that far I try to read them all online (the rest I drive around with in my car until I can surreptitiously dump them in the appropriate bin at my favorite gas stations while the nice man is checking the oil over on the blind side of the hood). And from Madrid to Macchu Pichu, Ankara to Akron, and Birmingham to Bristol Bay, all of a sudden on that side of the political divide (which currently seems to be about 97 percent of the global population), Joe Biden is a lateblooming heartthrob.

Wow, eh?

'Joe Six-Pack' qua hottie. Who knew?

He has a nice smile, apparently. And something about masterful, or statesmanlike or manful manhandliness of taking things in decidedly masculine order or whatnot. At any rate, there are many ladies of a certain age worldwide who would, were he stranded in a punt on a slow-flowing river, not hesitate to request a row out in order to ask were he okay or not. And then offer him sandwiches.

Here's what I know: despite his years as an 'insider' (who is he expected to be -- as a Vice-Presidential candidate of a 200+-year-old republic -- Oscar Romero? Czeslaw Milosz? Deborah Harry??), he is not a billionaire. He's not a millionaire. He is not close even to the latter. In terms of financial planning, if nothing else, and for good or ill, Joe Biden is deeply representative of the Average American, few of whom, it seems, for the past thirty years or so, have managed to sock away anything of substance for the future.

What this means, for those nice older ladies with crushes, and for you and me and Joe Biden, too, is that when everything plummets to its most horrific nadir, our stocks will not be affected! Our mutual funds will remain unscathed! Our 401Ks will remain largely as they were: nonexistent. Our children will have precisely what we had bequeated them last year, and the year before: good wishes, much love, and a solid love of learning and of the world and their brothers and sisters in it. And an inherited stiff upper lip.

I'll tell you about investment: I just returned to working in restaurants. (It seems even the working rich can't afford a private chef.) Last night, the new dishwasher in the ill-fated (only at this place; it's not actually an endemic issue, so don't give up your career plans!) weekend dish shift gave (no) notice that he was leaving to pursue greater riches with a cousin in Brooklyn. Sadly, he wasn't going to receive a check from that workplace before his cross-country trip - but he did have a car to sell.

Enter real economics, real 'Joe Six-Pack,' real individuals controlling their own financial futures. The line cook, who had been bicycling to work happily for months through spring and summer had only recently begun to revisit his transportation priorities. (Seattle has less-than-ideal bicycling weather at times, noticeably at 12AM in January.) The dishwasher had a car and a concrete plan, the cook had money and a vague longing: move 300 dollars in one direction, and one person is on a plane to destiny and another in a heated car toward bed. One guy gets five or seven dollars more an hour, and the other guy gets, minimally, two hours more free time per day. And, if that's too much idleness to deal with, the opportunity now to cut it back a bit with the chance for a second job.

For me, particularly since I'm so terribly depressed about everything lately, it was heartening, even exciting. The grey market will endure, and at least that is something. I hold up restaurants, and particularly kitchens, as paragons of many things (some undeniably glorious; others less than stellar, but not least of which is as a bastion of concrete, visceral, sometimes aching reality in a postsurreal world), but what made this even more brilliant was that, at the finish of the night, the security guard who has been living in an unplumbed van finalized the deal with one of the salesmen (by then drunk) for the papers to the Class C motorhome, on the basis of which he can now finish selling his second van to a guy who wants to use it for hunting and camping, and at the end of the day (literally, or I couldn't bear to say it; it was 11 at night, we had our aprons off and were washing the olive oil and beef fat off our forearms; I am at peace in my soul calling that 'the end of the day'), at least four people were happy with the real transactions they had completed.

Unless of course the whole 'Dollar Up Euro Down!' storyline doesn't entirely pan out for the long term and we all, along with the purchasers in these happy narratives, end up pushing barrelcarts of ABD Yaşli Dolarlar through whatever 'Main Street' is handiest for the 'Joe Six-Pack' under question looking for the one Dollar Store left that will take 4 million $ for a 4-oz. tin of non-metric kippered herring.