Yesterday when I checked the National Debt Clock was $20,493,703,619,404. It’s like a never-ending telethon run amok. Watch it for five minutes and it’ll go up another million dollars. Can’t sleep, check in on the National Debt Clock, and it’s still going up at two in the morning. Checking it just now and it’s up to $20,493,874,732,187. I wonder, how do we borrow $171 million in little over twenty-four hours? Do we borrow that much every day? We’re not really planning to pay all that back, are we? We can’t be.
I live in what was once a quarry pit. At some point they ran out of rocks to pulverize, and now there are townhouses and single-family homes where once were mountains of rubble. It’s a valley now with an imported horticulture, low-maintenance roadside flora that can thrive out of a gravelly, nutrient-deficient subbase and thick flowering trees growing from patches of sod. The people behind me live a little higher up on the western ridge. At the back of their yard is a bulwark of white boulders, leftovers from those old quarry days. I live alone, in a two-level two-bedroom townhouse with a two-car garage. Beneath the kitchen sink, I have an array of household cleaners to tackle the most stubborn stains or waxy buildup.
My neighbors to the right, a retired couple, we’ve never exchanged a word. We haven’t made eye contact. For the husband, waking up each morning without a meaningless job to go to has been an awkward transition. His driveway is always the first one shoveled when it snows. He uses a snow blower for the main stretches and fine-tunes the edges with one of those ergonomic shovels curved in the middle like half a parentheses, so he doesn’t have to bend. In summer he handpicks the weeds in his yard and punches aerating holes in his lawn with a long, thin-handled implement with a three-pronged metallic claw. During summer days when I’m home I sometimes hear the discharge of a pellet gun – pop-pffft – coming from his backyard, followed by the frenzied scattering of birds from the vicinity of his well-stocked birdfeeder.
I have this gnawing feeling I should do I’m not, not sure what that would be. My leg bouncing frenetically or if I’m lying down, my foot moving side to side like I’m waving at someone with it. I should feel better having my time at my discretion. I feel like I’ve fallen into one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios. Sometimes I watch the ceiling fan for a disturbing amount of time. Every revolution the slats disappear and reappear. There are six of them, only three visible if the setting is on high. I know how many floor tiles there are in the front bathroom. I wonder how I came to have thirty-three forks.
