The Jenga Echo Chamber

The great principle of English law is to make business for itself.-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House

 I may have had money once, briefly, forged on the dried grinds of feral welfare culture, once I left behind Daddy’s rat pack wheeling and dealing, but Bed Bath & Beyond , founded in 1971, encapsulated upper caste suburbia I would have never been able to capture on my own without the right marriage, but that was never forthcoming in the bracketed time young women have to recognize and forge the character of the hypothetical man in question, so the death of Gustavo this past Friday, who wasn’t the retailer’s CFO for any great length of time, is not only reminiscent of the 1929 suicides which ushered in The Great Depression, which arguably didn’t end until the GI Bill picked up pace after 1944, it is also a harbinger of the American upper class warped by a pandemic decompression. Not only will the last boomer deaths signify the loss of what life was like before the digital age, but there never will be a reverting back to normal  after COVID-19, ever, not when otherwise reasonably ambulatory men like Amal emote beyond rationality in such a spectacular fashion. Businesses fail, even in state model economies, and one man’s ruin is not necessarily only one step out of the gutter, beaten to a pulp, horizon eclipsed and narrowed by the weaknesses of age. This same sort of visceral reaction pierced the gut when Robin Williams took his life in 2014. The comedian, however, in the passage of time, had a debilitating diagnosis. Amal had pressure. Some of us should be so lucky to still have a head in the game.