Metaphors Are My Friends

Several weeks ago, we residents were given an early 2009 bonus: notification by a budgetary official in Sacramento that California could be in the "Brother Can You Spare A Dime", riding the rails category within two months.

The Golden State has now become so bankrupt the Pacific vacations elsewhere. We're so broke we can't afford a dust bowl. Times have become so tough the Grapes of Wrath are served at The Four Seasons as blue plate specials. Los Angeles is so depressed it no longer wants to waste time asking for an NFL team. Metaphors are so cheap, they're found littering the ground next to hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

Imagine an entire State "shutting shop and buggering the customers" as my Cockney mother might have said. A "For Sale" sign" hung out from San Diego to Crescent City. A whole world of 401K wounded, scuffling mindlessly along in their Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, Miu Miu, and Le Coq Sportifs, clogging up the I's, both 5 and 15. All glory bound elsewhere than here. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 monumental thesis of Westward Expansion comes in 2009 with reverse gears.

Our biggest concern is no longer who wins the Rose Bowl, but whether the float roses are edible over an unlit Coleman stove seasoned with dirt. Today's big question is one of practicality: Is it more viable to live over an underpass or under an overpass? The opening lyrics of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" have now been changed to "This Land's Defaulting on You and Me."

We've been terminated, decimated, eradicated. So now it might be time to rethink our State Motto of "EUREKA" and maybe change it to "WTF."

The new year is starting off great. Poupon goes well with rock salt.