Had a long conversation with a friend last night who is worried about his life imploding should a recession hit. I was able to peel back the onion to the point where he's really just resentful of a short-term work problem but still. No easy fixes.

Me? I'm about to spend $3k on the paint on my car.

I wonder how much of the callousness of wealth is associated with cloistering. I went to a class held by my financial planner back when I had no finances to plan. He played a game with us: he told us to write down our five closest friends, guess their income, and then average and lo and behold, there was our income. He used this to point out why country clubs exist: when you're wealthy, you don't wanna hear about poor people problems.

YOU HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT POOR PEOPLE PROBLEMS.

I rode six miles in a downpour on Monday. I could ball up my toes and watch a sheen of water build on my shoes. My gloves would drip when I made a fist. And I got home and took a warm shower and poured myself some Armenian brandy and played Destiny on a 4K TV. Prior to that? I rolled past a half dozen smoky, shitty garbage fires, orbited by homeless attempting to stave off hypothermia. I yelled "are we having fun yet?" at one of them and I think I heard "Fuck you, you're going home." Hard to say. I was deep into my second book on the determined hopelessness of the Japanese war in the Pacific. Boojie AF.

The whole of the financial press is about interest rates and unemployment statistics. The popular press' take on all this is "the stock market is not the economy" but to the people doing the hiring? The people deciding on layoffs? The people purchasing industrial robots? the fuck it's not. I saw a breakdown yesterday that points out that 80% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans but if you don't recognize that 10% as the ownership class you're delusional.

I subscribe to Garden and Gun. It's hilarious - it's claims to be the "magazine of the genteel south" or some shit. They've got ads for Flexjet and private duck-hunting vacations and they clearly don't bicycle past the homeless very often. But I also managed to con Elite Traveler out of a free subscription (instead of $155 a year for six issues) and they legit run ads for Embraer.

Trump is Elite Traveler readers telling Garden & Gun readers to help them trick TV Guide readers into thinking they matter. And I wonder how long they can keep it up.

Longer than we'd all like, I think.