LOST IN AMERICA.

In what sounds like a reboot of the 2009 tale of financial woe from New York Times econ reporter Edmund L. Andrews ("Granted, the beach house was an embarrassing mistake"), well-known writer Neal Gabler reports in the Atlantic that he does not have $400 on hand for emergencies, nor indeed a pot to piss in, and it's his own  fault because he never learned to balance a checkbook. Gabler's hook is that he's actually middle-class, though his is the exalted idea of "middle-class" popular among his type -- which leads to some hilarious sections, like the story of how he had to carry two mortgages because "the co‑op board kept rejecting the buyers," and "my wife had been out of the workforce so long that she couldn’t get back into her old career, and her skills as a film executive limited her options."

Still, I feel for the poor bastard. So does Rod Dreher, which is great because he's the one guy who can make Gabler's story even funnier. Dreher focuses on Gabler's revelation that "I made choices without thinking through the financial implications," and the fact that those choices included living in New York and being a writer. At first, as you would expect, Dreher condemns this as a symptom of our godless, willful times:

He felt that he deserved the life he had, and could not choose otherwise without betraying himself. I think this must be an extraordinary thing, in terms of history: people who spend recklessly to give themselves the lives they think they deserve. If you think about it, though, our culture, which valorizes Authenticity, encourages this.

That's what causes overspending -- the search for Authenticity! (If only Gabler knew he could get it much more easily at one of Dreher's Walker Percy Weekends.) Plus Dreher knows a landscaper who says people are lazy and don't want to work, blah blah. But eventually Dreher has to face the fact that he, too, is just an ink-stained wretch and in time the financial reaper may come for him, too. He muses:

If for some reason the market for my writing dried up, and I had to take a job doing something else to support my family, I would do it. But I would probably resist it for as long as I could, because it’s very hard for me to separate my sense of identity from my writing. Still, bills have to be paid, and I would hope that I didn’t hold out for long.

Now, I ask you -- who could read that and not imagine Rod, at some future date when the Benedict Option racket has collapsed and nobody wants 5,000-word essays on how transsexuals are destroying the Republic anymore, in a variety of alternative professions:

Customer: Hello, I'd like to order a cake please. 

Dreher: Would this cake solemnify a homosexual union?

Customer: It's for a gay marriage anniversary party, but we don't want anything written on the cake.

Dreher: Hmm, that one's on the line. Would you mind praying over it with me?

Boss: DREHER YOU'RE FIRED

Customer: Hello, three tickets for Zootopia please.

Dreher: You're bringing children to this?

Customer: Yes. It's rated G.

Dreher: But it promotes anthropomorphic miscgenation. Have you read Robert Putnam? Well, I mean Steve Sailer on Robert Putnam -- Putnam doesn't know the importance of his own words.

Boss: DREHER YOU'RE FIRED

Furniture mover: Why you sit down? Only on job fifteen minute.

Dreher: I have mononucleosis. I have to rest frequently. 

Furniture mover: Why you take job you sick? 

Dreher: Because that's what a man does! You think they'll mind if I just lay down on the sofa that's still in the truck?

Furniture: Boss catch you he fire.

Dreher: Well, of course -- I'm white.

Boss: DREHER YOU FIRE

Oh, I could do this all day.