On Spinning Signs and Spinning Stomachs...

I skipped breakfast today before bringing my two oldest children to church. We had to leave Rachel and Captain Weenis at home. He's suffering from the dreaded "green nose."

On the way home, we saw a young man spinning a sign around advertising yet another trashy-looking new home development. Middle Tennessee is full of those. It's a land of endless vinyl and plastic stone facades filled with vinyl and plastic families.

The fellow threw his sign into the air, half-heartedly. And dropped it. Then he picked it up again for another spin. And clumsily dropped it again. At that point he looked around, presumably for whatever schmuck had hired him. Seeing no one, he played it cool. Standing there, sign on the ground, as if he was simply waiting by the road for the end of the world. He looked around nervously, again seeing no one, then kept pretending he hadn't been hired to do something inane.

It doesn't matter. Those houses probably aren't going to sell. They were built for a market that doesn't exist anymore. Just large vinyl reminders of the result of monetary expansion and the crack-up boom that follows.

Like the kid with the sign, the developers are eventually going to have to drop their signs, look around, nervously... and walk away. With a hair's-breadth of economic research (the historical kind, not the bilge from CNN and the Wall Street Journal), they could've seen things were overheated and heading for disaster before they laid their foundations. But people see $$ and the chance to turn it into $$$$, and they get crazy. "Hey, so-and-so made $100,000,000 last month building strip malls! We should do that!"

And they do, and eventually people start to realize that the whole thing is a ponzi scheme of endless flips... and blam. Bubble is dead.

These thoughts in mind, I went home and decided to have a bowl of soup. Goat soap. I'd made some yesterday after a trip to Amish Country with three Ethiopian friends.

Then I saw the cheese dip in the fridge. Super-nuclear spicy cheese dip. I ate that instead, with chips and a beer.

Then chased that with a shot of rum and four pancakes with maple syrup.

Inside my stomach, another little sign was now twirling. My appendix tells me it clearly read, "Stop, we've hit critical mass!"

We all have to live with the results of our decisions. Tomorrow I'll feel fine... but developers? They're heading into financial hell.

And vinyl stinks when it burns.

-DG