Laura used to drive down the street towards the river while looking around under the seats for her glasses as we screamed in terror. In high school, she was one of my first girlfriends and Sunday she found me online and gave me a call. I couldn’t even recognize her from her picture, but the second I heard her voice she was the same cute and completely insane girl I remember. Suitable to my current end of game experience we joked about how she had cheated on me with a sailer while diving in Florida and she caught me up on what she’d put time into over the last years.

In hearing about her life I felt suddenly like a very exotic creature. After college she focused on having kids and a long marriage and has hardly left the state. Her husband gathers the neighborhood guys to watch football once a week. I’ve never watched football and there may be only two states I haven’t visited, let alone the rest of the world. I’ve never even had a TV.

I realize that I live in a bubble, surrounded by freaky programmers, filmmakers and artists. Sometimes, though, I forget how significant the gap can be and Laura really grounded me. In particular, she connected me to the reality of our current financial situation here in America.

I hear about it on the radio. My friends have lost jobs, but most of my friends are the kinds of people who are laid off all the time. They work at small businesses that fail or contract jobs that are temporary to begin with and are used to free falling in between. Without kids or a huge attachment to material things, I myself consider hitting the road with a guitar and a backpack more of a romantic vision than a terrible hardship.

She lives in Michigan. Her friends are losing their critical long time jobs right and left. They have families and mortgages and people are so desperate they are literally abandoning their homes to foreclosure and heading to places like Florida and Arizona to live with relatives and friends. That’s the reality behind the ranting I hear from commentators as I cook in the evenings or sneak in Morning Edition while I write software and read email in the morning. That’s what is happening to real people in this country, the people behind the numbers.

The next few years are going to be rough, and things are only going to get worse as we run out of oil and water. I’m not sure if it’s time to ditch my extra guitars and load up my camping supplies but you never really know until it’s too late. I’m certainly feeling a little too far from Canada’s forests at the moment. I’m also glad that I have no debt and don’t need much to survive. If anything, I’ll be a resource for those in worse shape. At least, I know how to start fires with sticks.