Happy happy joy joy. I think the good news is now.

Having a good book to look forward to every night makes me incredibly happy. After a week of dutifully trying to read Hot Flat and Crowded, I’ve ditched Friedman . . . (poor Thomas Friedman. His latest has been renedered irrelevant by events of the past few weeks. The first half is about how we’re just living at a pace we can’t sustain and there must be a crash. Yawn — yeah, we know that now. You were right. The second half is about how we can make a buck off of being a leader in sustainability. Pardon me if I don’t have the energy for new endeavors at this point in our economic history) . . . for Atkinson.  Great move on my part.

I’m two chapters into When Will There Be Good News? and loving it from the first pages. It may be the third Jackson Brodie book, the last of which was just a tiny bit disappointing, but it has the easy clarity and fluid energy and downright quirkiness of two of my favorite books on the planet: Behind the Scenes at the Museum and most especially Human Croquet. You get the violence in the family right up front, which should eliminate some dread. But doesn’t, quite. Unfortunately I have about zero reading time ahead of me for a few weeks. But I’ll sure enjoy those few pages each night.

I can tell already I’m going to want to re-read Human Croquet when I finish this one. Anyone up for a book group?

Just a little bubble, that’s all. (Reassuring self-talk)

Just tap your heels together three times and think to yourself . . . charge it!

So there’s a bubble in the gas line. We’ll have more soon. And because the housing bubble burst (OK, it flat-out busted), there’s a slight problem with the banks. They don’t really know if they trust one another enough to loan money.  But hey! It keeps our minds off the drought, right? Everyone is so focused on shortages of credit and fuel, we can almost forget we may run out of water.

To  cap off this Mad Max scenario, my microwave, the ultimate appliance of convenience, has quit.

The sky is falling!

Scary times.  To fuel ever-higher growth in business profits and tax revenues, we’ve built a culture of overconsumption so pervasive it will be very difficult to change. People borrowing for houses they can’t afford because mortgage bankers want to make a buck. Folks accustomed to living above their means through second mortgages.  Financial institutions fueling profits by leveraging (that’s borrowing, too) to make money out of thin air.  Read this “Bubblenomics” article about the recent bubbles in stock and housing markets >

The bailout only heightens my worst fear: that my children will live a lower standard of living because they have to work so hard to pay the debt their parents’ generation allowed to happen.

Will we learn a permanent lesson and change our behavior?

Friedman’s new book is on the way to me from Amazon. I hope it is all about living lightly on the land and creating jobs and profits by investing in technology and innovation to foster sustainability.  And I hope everyone’s reading it.

When I want to run screaming into the street like Chicken Little, it’s nice to remind myself it could be worse. We could be in Nashville >