How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?

by Jim Washburn

“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” That was a question asked in song by a singer named Blind Alfred Reed back in 1929. It’s not much of a song (you’ll find the lyrics here but the title says it all).

It sure did for Reed: he had a short recording career—from 1927 to 1929—then went back to singing on street corners, until 1939, when his town passed an ordinance against blind street singers. He died in 1956, at the age of 75, reputedly from starvation.

I don’t have it anywhere near so rough: We’ve got lots of stuff and eyes to see it with; there’s a roof over our heads; and we’ve still got about as much money coming in as we do going out.

But every month it’s a little harder. We’re in the same boat as most working folks, who, if they’ve still got work, have incomes that are flat or shrinking, while the cost of most things keeps climbing, as they give you less of it. There was a great moment on The Office recently where the landlord, Rainn Wilson’s character Dwight Shrute, had a machine that split the building’s supply of single-ply toilet paper into half-ply paper.

One of our indulgences is Charmin Ultra, which is pretty much the pinnacle of toilet paper unless you get into the gold-leaf stuff. Yet even the Ultra shreds and leave little specks of paper on your particulars, and the roll vanishes so quickly you’d think you had dysentery, unless you buy the mega rolls where you have to cut a hole in your wall just so it will fit on the spindle.

The five-cent Snickers bar of my youth now costs 18 times that, but is made with cheap corn syrup rather than sugar, while my discerning teeth tell me there’s fewer peanuts in it than ever. Even things you’d think couldn’t get any shoddier do. I’ve already vented on the skyrocketing ephemerality of Styrofoam packing peanuts, and now even steel wool is suspect to me. I recently had cause to clean 70 guitar fingerboards (you start out with 000-grade wool, then finish up with 0000, guitar fans). I’d begin with a handful of steel wool the size of a 1970s pubic thatch, and within five minutes it was reduced to dust.

This isn’t entirely the worst of our problems. Our health insurer, Blue Shield of California, recently announced it was raising rates on individual insurers such as ourselves by up to 56% this year, on top of huge hikes we’ve recently endured because we’ve passed certain age milestones. We’re currently paying nearly $10,000 a year for the two of us, and the coverage has a $5,000 deductible per person before it kicks in. We’re both cheap dates, medically speaking, so our money’s relationship with Blue Shield has been a one-way street for many years. They’ve probably gotten something like $70,000 from us in toto, while we’ve gotten nearly zip, yet that somehow isn’t enough to sustain them.

And pity the schlubs without the dough-re-me who rely on our society for help. Even a bright, compassionate guy like Jerry Brown can’t come up with a solution to our state’s woes that doesn’t involve slashing state services to the poor, including mental health care. As we’ve just learned from our neighbor Arizona, the money saved can exact a horrendous toll.

Meanwhile, food prices are climbing around the globe, to record levels, while gasoline prices have been lurching upwards, with some predicting $5-a-gallon at the pump before year’s end, which would be sure to drive the price of virtually else even higher.

And that also is not the worst of our problems, “our” this time meaning all of us. Over 500 people have just drowned in flooding in Brazil, and thousands are homeless. The rains are still coming, with such force that Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff said it’s causing “mountains to dissolve.” Australia and Asian nations are also experiencing record floods.

This also is more of a problem for those without money. I interviewed Nobel prize-winning scientist F. Sherwood Rowland nine years ago about the anticipated effects of global warming. One thing he said was:

Climate change in the next 50 to 100 years is probably going to have a mixture of things that are inconvenient all the way up to catastrophic. The expectation is that the Earth in general will be a warmer place, but some places will be warmer, some colder. In most places, the infrastructure has been built with the present climate in mind. If 50 years from now, that's not the climate anymore, there will be aspects of the infrastructure that don't fit. For an affluent group, that may turn out to be merely inconvenient, but it may also, if it floods your island, be catastrophic locally.

To which I then added: “At the risk of being accused of promoting class warfare, may I highlight the projection that the same folks who get rich causing global warming will be the ones best situated to coast through it—able to move or rebuild—while everyone else gets the stick?” (The full article is here.)

How does a poor man stand such times? In the case of a lot of the people I know, they’re having fun as best they can. Not extravagant fun, but they’re playing music more, hanging out with friends more, spending their underemployed hours learning things or tackling some fanciful project they’ve put off for decades.

For example, my friend Steve Soest and I have talked about building a six-string bass electric sitar for nearly 30 years. Our mutual pal Deke Dickerson called two weeks ago to ask if I had a Bellzouki, a 1960s 12-string electric guitar designed by studio ace Vincent Bell, because Deke’s doing a tribute to him at his Deke’s Guitar Geek Festival this weekend, because Deke does things like that. (The fest, sorry to say, will be over by the time you read this, plus it’s sold out to the gills anyway, though Deke somehow contrives to lose money every time because he makes the events so damned special.)

He’ll be playing a Bell-designed electric sitar at the thing, so Steve and I figured what better time to make a bass sitar, what with so much clamor for one in the world. I drew it, Steve built it and our friend Dan Dunham put the finish on it, which seems like the perfect division of labor to me.

Steve will be playing it at the fest; I’ll be on Bellzouki. Deke asked for us to wear Indian garb, and fortunately a friend of a friend had the foresight to have a six-armed Hindu god costume I’m borrowing. That’s how I’m facing the gather gloom, with six arms and a turban that resembles a brimming Jiffy Pop container. I hope you’re doing similar.

Deke’s fest always happens during the NAMM show in Anaheim, a global gathering of musical instrument manufacturers and sellers. It’s always an interesting bellwether of the economy, and the wife and I walked through it with a video camera we maybe got to work. If so, we’ll be posting various NAMMbians’ takes on how they’re coping with these times.

Late addition:

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