CAFFEINE!

What in the world is it (it being the world) coming to? I just paid eighty fucking cents for a can of pop (not pop [pop]) and they were sold out of fucking Coke Zero, and I still feel Zeroed out and coked up. Please don't make me sit still any longer. The eighty cents is an approximately 6 and 2/3 percent increase on the previous price, which was a reliable $.75, which allowed me to not only buy a pop (fuck soda) with a dollar, but get a goddamned quarter out of the deal, too. The accumulating busts of General Washington in my desk drawer would eventually contribute - in no small part - to my ability to do a little laundry on the weekend, which is a necessity, because the laundry room in my building's basement doesn't have a change machine. So here I am with my Sprite (hm, actually caffeine free. I may have to rethink my mood) and waiting to here the pleasant light tinny clink of two dimes, but am instead bombarded by the resonant gong and crash of four Olympic-Barbell nickels. So not only am I deprived of my daily dose of State factoids (did you know that 2007 was Jamestown's quadricentennial?) but none of my nickels were the Lewis and Clark commemorative editions.

So now I'm thinking of cutting out the pop altogether from my life (again), which is probably healthier anyway. Which I need. But what if I swing too far and start drinking wheatgrass or alfalfa juice and I excreet sweet, dewy, cellulosic scents that no one can stand? On top of this, I no longer am getting my daily quarters, so I can't afford frequent laundry. So my smell getsn worse. Which gets me fired from my job (what if my boss asks what state the Old Man in the Mountain is In, and I am without a reference?) and I loose my apartment. No one can afford that place in these trying times (I think to myself, wistfully inflating my sense of achievement) so it will go unrented, the company goes under, and will get bought out by some conglomerate who puts in a change machine, or those fancy rechargeable-card-operated systems, and I am forced to walk by feeling like I was displaced, the place I was was improved, and someone who could afford the shit anyway profited off of the improvements. And here I am taking shots of wheatgrass or snorting bamboo and wearing hemp (which doesn't need laundered! the smelly girl at the counter told me) wondering how I ever could stand it inside that corporate structure, so entwined and built in upon itself that a five-fucking-cents increase ruins us all.

Start learning to make your own salt pork and shoes, bitches. The depression is a comin'.