Dreamland

Bad Cars, Meat, and Real Estate

I’m staying down South in an old wooden house with a rusty tin roof. I’m here to do charity work, help the local poor fix up their houses. I drive a green ‘72 Chevy Nova that stalls a lot. It breaks down on me in front of a shopping mall, I have to walk away.

I decide to rent a car to drive up North to visit my Mom & Dad. I tell the rental agent I want something economical that gets good gas mileage. The car he gets me is made out of plastic, even the tires. The inside is framed with wooden one by twos. As I’m driving up the freeway the wood starts to splinter and one of the back windows is starting to rattle, looking like it may fall out at any minute. They just don’t make good cheap cars like they used to.

I’m helping out my Dad with yard work, mowing the lawn. The lawn mower keeps stalling on me. It seems like I have to pull on the cord and restart it every five minutes. I go inside to talk to my Mom. She’s cooking up a huge pot of boiled meat. It looks like several football-sized hunks of bologna or Spam, bubbling up in a big steel cauldron.

Mom tells me that most of their friends and neighbors are broke, they lost all their money investing in the big real estate bubble. When the property market crashed, some of them lost their homes because they couldn’t afford their insurance premiums. She asks me if I lost anything. I tell her “No, I didn’t have any money to invest in real estate, I already lost it all in the Stock Market last year.”