Bailout? That was SO last week. The economy? Can’t we just declare a moratorium on the issue, like one of the candidates has suggested?

Sure we can. Now… Let’s see what else we can think about.

How about the beautiful Autumn colors? And how many people will now be enjoying them all the more because they have to walk, being no longer able to afford the price of a Sunday ride to the country? No, no. that’s not right.

How about the upcoming World Series? The Fall classic! We used to all hunker down as an entire nation and plug ourselves into it, game by game, just the way we sit around for hours now watching the red numbers go by at the bottom of the CNBC crawl… wait. Let’s start over.

How about all the sounds of the little children as they get themselves off to school? How fast they grow! Turn around and they’ll be marching off to college in no time, to the tune of $50,000 per year, money that was recently all-but assured in the low-risk money market fund that’s now down 20% year-to-year… good Lord. Hm.

How about the pleasures of the home? The feeling that we get as we gather around the hearth together for an evening, ma and pa quietly reading in their rockers, little Johnny and Jenny sprawled on the hook rug doing their homework, Alfalfa the old hound dog gnawing on the remains of a $30 t-bone. How we all scrimped and saved for that house! No, it’s not perfect. As the winter winds begin to head down from the north, you can feel the cold seep in from the windows, which need fixing again, could cost a couple thousand dollars there for sure, and the roof, well, let’s just hope it’s got another year or three in it, because that could be another $20,000 easy, which would be hard to bear since the Adjustable Rate Mortgage we took out in 1995 suddenly isn’t looking like such a good idea and there won’t be any raises for a good long time and, you know, it’s possible, things being what they are that there might not be any bonus coming in February… think about that. No bonus.

Just might have to sell the cow to make ends meet.

You see? It should be easy to stop thinking about the economy. Now if I could just stop thinking about money…