Vic Socotra

06 September 2008

Ruby Slippers

I got up antsy. Must be the pressure change with the storm coming on, gripping like the cold green fingers of the Wicked Witch. Maybe it is something primordial that connects us to the burrowing mammals and the birds, the urge to seek shelter against something you can sense but not see.

If I was a real burrowing mammal I would have turned over and gone back to bed. Even in the darkness, though, I could see that the tall glass windows had betrayed their thinness. They were fogged over, the clouds actually coating their surface with a thousand droplets that refracted the lights of the parking lot below.

I got up and padded around. I touched the inside of the back door. The paint was still tacky, and I cursed myself for a fool in starting a project that required drying before the storm. I should have measured for plywood to fit the windows, or done something constructive to prepare. Instead I bought paint in a shade called Ruby Slippers.

I was conflicted on the name, if not the color. I would have preferred something rugged, like Captain Blood, but you go with what moves you. The color grabbed me instantly, a rich vermillion with brilliant highlights.

Standing in front of the sample catalog, it made me want to click my heels like Dorothy and be somewhere else, where the vibrant hues in the tribal rugs on the floor matched the colors of the hills under a happy sun. The new hardware and the brass dragon profile were ready to install, but that was going to have to wait until the paint dried, and that was completely problematic.

I could see the nightlight in the kitchen, which meant there would be coffee. The power was still on, a godsend. The weather-guessers had said the winds would arrive after midnight, and their models were wrong. The latest had the storm coming ashore at three AM near 33.3N Latitude and 78.8 West Longitude.

While we slept, an Air Force crew was out there in the thick of it, measuring the ferocity of the gale. Bless them and all those who try to keep us safe while we are safe in our beds. They reported minimum central pressure in the eye at 983 millibars, or 29.03 inches of mercury.

The eye=2 0is tracking toward us at twenty knots. Here at 38.94 N 77.103 W, we won’t see the heavy winds for hours. Sixty miles an hour now, but maybe the green hills will scrub some of the power from them on the way.

I pulled out the two dinners of the stove I had slow-cooked overnight, just in case, and put them aside. When the power dies there will be something to eat. Funny how simple things can be when you reduce things to the essentials.

Painting the door is one of those things, an acceptance that I am going to be here in this collection of varying-sized six boxes for a while. The difference between debt and market va lue is going to take years to fix, assuming I can keep working. There was enough to be antsy about that. The Times says the unemployment rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August. It is the most people out of work in five years, and even if that is only a fraction over the historical average, that is cold comfort.

There was more. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were put on notice that the Fed is going to take them over. When the market closed on Friday, anticipating the arrival of the Marshals share prices for both quasi-public institutions were just over five bucks. They had been at $70 and $65 just a year ago.

I morosely clicked over to my retirement account and saw that the market decline had taken the value to less than the settlement with the Ex despite having dumped more cash into it.

The two institutions guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, probably including the inflated ones on yours and mine. The Treasury apparently thinks the risk of collapse is too much to bear, and the helm must be seized before current management does something stupid.

The Times quoted a Columbia University economics professor named Charles Calomiris as calling them “zombie institutions floating around with time on their hands.”

That is a truly unsettling prospect. I have food prepared, batteries deployed, and candles at the ready. That was a comfort, being able to do something to prepare. It is the small things that matter, since the big ones are out of control.

The Mavericks and Change Agents say that it is time to do something different. I’m ready to give it a shot, though what they really have in mind is printing more money, and devaluing what we already have. For people out of work, I suppose it really doesn’t matter. But for those of us hanging on by our fingernails and ruby heels, it is a daunting prospect.

The really big programs- Social Security and Medicare- are going to go in the red in less than a decade. That will shake every one of us, old and young, right down to the deck plates. We could do something, even if it is as simple as ceasing to dig the hole that we are in. Creating massive new entitlement programs at a time when we are watching the slow-motion collapse of the existing ones does not seem to make sense, but on we go, eyes glazed, along a foggy road.

With the storm making the slow but inexorable progress up the coast, today we have hours of time on our hands. We still have a few years to try to clean up out act and get ready for the fiscal hurricane that is build ing.

I just wish there was a decent choice besides the zombie shuffle toward disaster. I’d really like to click my heels together and get out of here before the storm hits.

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