October 2nd 9:40 AM 

I’m completely exhausted.  Rob had me up half the night.  He couldn’t stop pacing, wouldn’t come to bed.  I even offered to drain his pipe, but that didn’t seem to want to work.  I had begun to fear I left the computer on and he read this, but I didn’t really believe that was the case.  If he ever found out about this, any of this, he would kill me.  The thought of him finding out had me lying awake and pacing along with him.  It actually made me consider giving up this whole thing.  

I even considered he knew something about what I did, yesterday and then he finally let it all out.  

“Are you that out to lunch?”

I just don’t get what’s bothering you!

“The whole country is a financial melt down and you don’t get what’s bothering me?  Do you have any idea what we’ve lost?  We’ve lost 72 cents on every single **** dollar.  72 cents!”

It took a few minutes for all this to sink in.  Rob and I keep a grand in the saving account and a grand in the checking account.  The rest of all the money he’s ever made, he’s invested.  I never really got into the whole thing, but we almost always saw really nice dividend checks and he’d seemed always able to come up with a nice sum of money when needed.  So, I never really questioned anything.  I always trusted his judgement, his fore-sight.

Where did you put all this money?

“I put 50% into AIG.  I put 10% each into Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Bank of America, Citigroup and Kraft.”

Kraft?

“Yeah, Kraft.”

Why would you buy Kraft?

“Why not?”  He had been sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hand and he suddenly looked up, the splaying the fingers of his hand as if I was asking a stupid question.

Well, let’s see.  You sink our hard earned money into an insurance giant and four of the biggest banks in the country and then you pick Kraft.  I’m just trying to understand your reasoning, here.  I mean, why not an accounting firm like - oh - I don’t know, account-temps, or something like that.  Why a food company.

Now he put his head into both his hands.  I was standing in front of him and he looked so pathetic sitting on the edge of the bed with a limp stick visible through the gaping whole of his striped boxers and his head in his hands.

“You know how much I love to eat Oreo Cookies?”

What  has that got to do with it.  They’re Nabisco.

“Nabisco is a division of Kraft.”

He held out his hands, rasing his head and looking at me like a politician in search of votes.

“Who doesn’t like Oreo Cookies?”

End of discussion.  I didn’t want to hear about it anymore.  As far as I knew we had 2 grand left to our names, the promise of a pay-check and two packages of Oreo Cookies in cookie draw.  I wasn’t out to lunch.  I knew what was going on, but could I do about it?  What could anyone do about it?  What are they doing about it?  They’re doling out money.  They loaned 85 mill to AIG so a bunch of rich executives could spend a week at a resort in California.  I’d like to spend a week at a resort in California, but I don’t matter and the worst part of all this is that none of us matter or even understand why we have to keep propping them up.  This isn’t about the banks or the brokers or the mortgage houses, anymore.  This is all about the jobs.  These institutions employ millions upon millions of Americans.  They have to stay open.  They have to keep functioning.  People who get ten bucks an hour and health benefits can’t lose their jobs.  If they lose their jobs and they have no money to spend then it dominoes into all the businesses that these institutions don’t employ.  I’m not out to lunch.  My brother is a cop.  The worse the economy, the higher the crime.  They have to fix this mess.  This country can’t survive that big a mess.

I was so happy, yesterday.  Anna made me so happy, yesterday and Rob just turned it inside out and upside down.  I wanted to see her, again.  I wanted to see her today, but told her I was busy.  I told her I had appointments and chores and couldn’t it wait for the next day?   She was okay with that.  She was okay with the next day, but the next day isn’t today.  The next day is tomorrow and tomorrow is so far away.  I wanted to call her.  I wanted to make tomorrow, today. Do you think it’s wrong to want tomorrow, today?

I hate Rob.  There’s nothing wrong with CD’s, I’ve told him time and time again.

“You’re mini-minded,” he would always say.  “You’re a woman without vision.”

I saw this coming.  I tried to tell him.  It began with the oil companies wracking up record breaking profits.  A few months ago, we were paying 300% more for a gallon of gas, then we were paying three years ago.  The average annual increase in salary is three per-cent.  That leaves us some 97% in the negative and even more than that.  The price of deisal went up along with regular gas.  The price of deisal was killing the trucking industry.  There isn’t a business in America that doesn’t have goods shipped to them via deisal.  Guess what?  They had to raise prices and that only increased our annual negative number. 

The whole tax rebate was a joke. 

How many times, in the last year, have I heard President Bush say, “our economy is fundamentally sound.  We are not in a recession.”  Every time I heard him say that, or, read it in the newspaper, I kept waiting for him to add - “and I don’t care what anyone says.  There are weapons of mass destruction.  We just haven’t had the time to check all the hiding places.”  Nearly eight years of the worst leadership this nation has ever seen.  What does that say about us?

And now  another election is upon us.  This may be the last election.  This could be the last American election.  This was a country of freedom and equality for all.  This was a country of free enterprise.  Now, it’s just a country in fear.  We react to fear.  We are consumed by fear.  We are so full of fear, we’re too afraid to think.  We’re to afraid to question.  We are attacked by a madman.  Only a madman would forget about him and invade the nation next door.  We are hated for our freedom, our mutual respect of one another so we create a department of Homeland Security and grant it the right to throw our freedoms away.  We are despised for our excesses born of our free market system, so now we adopt the policies of socialist states that own stakes in their banks and businesses.  America is at war.  American’s are dying on the battlefield only the war is not being fought on foriegn soil.  It’s being fought in the halls of the Congress and Senate where officials from both parties are clueless about the hopes and dreams of our forefathers.  Hell, Americans can’t even live with one another anymore.  There’s probably no better symbol of how ignorant we are of America, than that poor kid suspended from that Florida school for getting a Ray-hawk haircut.  How dare he support the Tampa Bay Rays.  

I’m such an ****.  I should have called Anna.