SONG OF THE DAY: I'm Just Your Clown (kudzu'd)

When I attempt to calculate where I’m at standing next to the pyramid of abstract numbers stored inside Yakub’s fingerprints, to contemplate if my class transition was strong enough in two-thirds of a generation to be able to “retire” like they do on the TV shows, it looks iffy at best, which to be honest, is much better than most of my folks have known. When you become the first generation seemingly with some work and paycheck stability, America reminds you it’s a carnival game, and the carney lenders and zero percent interest havers and all them types start yelling at you, because capitalism desperately wants to break us all down to zero before we die. But I’ve known sleeping outside normal walls, and I ain’t gonna live what’s left of my life afraid of what could go wrong, even if the con is set up to go exactly that way. I never did get a chance to ride trains, and though our American world ain’t really geared the same ways it was a century ago, I can stand at a busy intersection around a big town’s skirt, and cast those cardboard sign trotlines, to panhandle my way through a day. It ain’t nothing new. People like me been waiting for nothing for as long as they sewed white stars into a blue fabric sky that was far more mythology than reality. Sleeping on the ground is just getting back to the Earth and returning a dust a little ahead of the reaper showing up, making that transition a little easier. If need be, I can be that funny little futuristic hobo clown with the sad face, camping in the woods behind the big box store that survived these conditions better than me, because the railroad tracks became interstates, and the town depot is a Wal-Mart. I wonder if the carnival game will become so abstract that they have historic strip malls as tourist destinations for folks to swim through the romanticized nostalgia of how easy life used to be, when all they had to do was drive their supersized vehicles through metastasizing suburbs to their favorite chains? Could the con possibly last that long? Maybe. There’s a whole lotta marks out here still.