poverty and poker

After being ass raped at the border again and not but two miles into Grand Island I see the troopers lights. Somehow he spots the little red inspection sticker shining through the windshield glass covered in rock salt. (This year's sticker is blue.) Then, there I am, roadside in the rust covered heap of shit on the way back from a grand celebration in Niagara on Buttercup's post radiation life, her 28th birthday.
What is this about now? I ask the cop in a neutral tone. Why am I being stopped?
You're being stopped for failure to inspect your vehicle sir.
It's not my vehicle sir. Silence.
He didn't care, having made the stop, I knew I'd be processed and pushed through the system. The most likely course, I pay the ticket having violated the public trust. This would be a setback, the little things that add up to failure. Get your shit together and in line, quit fucking around, be done with it. This is how this works. The anatomy of American poverty. Now just to be clear with my reader, I'm not poor, not in any fair and measured sense of the word. I've traveled around the world, hold expensive degrees from leading schools and enjoy a plethora of experience. I've got energy, skills, talents and options. It would be a great feat to starve now. I just couldn't afford the car now in either case, my timing always off. The kicker of the matter is I had the beast in the shop some days prior trying to get it in gear to pass state inspection but there were just too many specifics wrong with the her. New vehicles come from one of two sources, other peoples money or steady per capita employment. Still, all of this is choice. Poverty. Like I said, I'm not poor. I've got education and that makes me wealthier than some, but economically, as in scale of income, I'm impoverished. America is designed to keep you on the edge. What's more is, your success or perception of success has as much to do with your failure as any measured quotient. Design is the great communicator. The design of everything - the design of your face, the design of your trip, the design of your vehicle, the design of your wants and needs, the design of your family, your neighborhood, your mailbox and your neighbor. Maybe that's why I choose to give it all away. There is a promise in giving yourself, that a greater and fuller experience awaits. A worker deserves his wages but those wages can be anything- they can be freedom, they can be trips across borders or trips over mountain passes, over cities or grasslands, over imagined terrain and back again. All of it without fast food or dreams or queens. All in all, the struggle here is not such a bad thing but it will eat at you nonetheless until your friends and neighbors are waxing over the void. Especially when the gamble fails and there is nothing else.