In this provincial town, despite losing our cornerstone bank to one of the largest bank collapses in history, the realities of the deepening recession have not hit as hard yet as they have elsewhere. I still have my job and no one I know has lost theirs; our key industrial giants, though cutting costs, have not, so far, slashed a significant number of jobs.

But small signs abound: Along the route to work and around the neighborhood, for-lease signs are more common and some small boutiques, the trappings of condo-ization, have vanished or are in the process of closing. Sometimes I see people holding signs that advertise condos for auction. One of our city newspapers is for sale, and no one expects a buyer.

Tomorrow is another day and another chance for a big bomb to drop.

The dot-com bust hit this region hard, and there's a part of me that thinks that since I lived through that—two years of underemployment—I can live through this, whatever comes.

Call me crazy, but I have a sort of carefree curiosity about the whole thing counterbalanced by only a twinge of dread.

Of course, that may change as evidence mounts.

But for now, I just have to say: Thank fucking god I didn't buy a house!

For years, everybody and their dog has shamed me on the house issue. You don't own?

No. Who can fucking afford to own in this town?

Turns out, if you're willing to overspend on a variable interest mortgage, you can tell yourself a tiny-ass $300,000 condo is a sweet deal or you can stretch to get a $700,000 house.

Well, a) I don't like condos and b) I'm all about bigass down payments.

Instead, I've been trying to build a savings, part of which is a savings for a house that I'm in no hurry to buy.

Meanwhile, I love my apartment and the cheap rent that goes with living in it for so long.

Importantly, I have no debt. No car loan. Not even a balance on a credit card.

And if I were to lose my job, I could cut way way back and eke by on a modicum of what I'm currently earning.

Thus, I find myself in the very strange position of having some small nest egg of cash sitting in various accounts losing value, of course, or idling at balance without much interest.

I feel tenuously fortunate. My healthy sense of alarmism keeps me grounded in the uncertainty. There's nothing protecting the majority of that nest egg, after all. And we don't know how far this rabbit hole goes.

I don't know about you, but I feel like hunkering down. I know the economists on the radio say we gotta spend our way outta this, but I'm not buying it. It shouldn't have to be us, and you know it's not going to be them because they've said as much. We spent our way into this. Let it be the government that invests through the recession for our future and saves when the economy is growing.

I'm tired of them asking us to sacrifice solvency for their pocketbooks. I'm sorry, but it's time for big fucking correction. It's gonna hurt and I can't see what it'll look like, but did we all really think that we could keep buying cheap-ass shit made overseas while we ourselves stopped producing anything and stopped paying ourselves what that labor is worth?

We've been living a lie, living beyond our means, since at least the 70s. How bad is it going to hurt to correct 40 years of profligacy?

I don't know. But I hope we do it, and, I gotta say, I'm really fucking glad that we have YouTube videos to tell us how to grow, make, and repair things. We're going to need them.