(05.20.11) Recommends:

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters.

So, if you've been paying attention to the news -- real, quasi, pseudo, and otherwise -- lately, you've been hearing a lot of discussion of the "debt ceiling" and whether Congress should raise it. You have, e.g., the Patriots for Profit crowd off making noise in one corner. And then, e.g., Timothy Geithner is making equal and opposite noises in another corner. Things have become so desperate that CNN has even trotted out a FAQ to help us sort through all of the issues.

A helpful reminder: CNN is viewed primarily by the institutionalized and the incarcerated. The network's fearless, hunky leader, Quinn the Medicine Woman Anderson Cooper, was once host of reality television show The Mole. Becoming a "news" "reporter" for CNN is probably most properly viewed as a demotion. End tangent.

Anyway. Debts ceilings, the future of Western Civilization, etc etc. Honestly, the details of the story are mostly relayed to me by various correspondents, as I can rarely bring myself to watch television and even when I do I insist on turning the volume off and instead listening to old Sea Wolf songs.

But here's the thing. Every time I think of the topic, I know that I'm supposed to have a Position that I should get righteously indigent about. And yet, instead, my brain drifts off to a place I walked by on a recent night:




Following are several key things to notice:

1. This Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant is several stories tall.

2. EBT -- that's polite talk for "food stamps" -- is welcome at this KFC which, as has previously been mentioned, is several stories tall.

3. The restaurant sells enough product to keep the hundreds of thousands of square feet of the interior of the restaurant completely illuminated at 10pm, well past closing time, and yet many of the light bulbs announcing the name of the restaurant have burned out. I presume this is because when employees are asked to climb a ladder hundreds of feet to change said light bulbs most die of cardiac arrest before reaching the top.

All of which is to say: even if we get this debt ceiling thing figured out, we still have a very long ways to go.

Oh, yes: our 12-piece bucket of freedom drizzled in gravy still glows like a shining city on a hill, or like the flickering incandescent light bulbs of a neon fast food restaurant sign.

Or something. Or whatever.

But: But the garden that you planted remains.