I won’t tell you to go shopping. They tried that before. You spent your little credit cards till the numbers wore off and then squeezed your house for money and spent, spent, spent. That worked real well. For a couple years.

Now we need to crank up the economy again. Our smart bank guys loaned you so much money that we all went broke spending it. We need a new crank to get things going so we can all be rich guys again.

Some people say the way to go is get a job and make something. But what kind of things do we make here in the old USA. We make music and movies. We make computer games. But you can only sell so many of those. We used to make loans and sell them to just about anyone. That one sure is gone. How about making something you can wear or turn on and watch or just pick up and carry around? We don’t know how to make that stuff anymore.

We do services, not stuff. We do wash-your-pooch, curl-your-hair, mow-your-grass, cook-your-Mac, rub-your-back, paint-your-nails services. Lots of doing. Lots of services. That’s OK, I guess. But we are pretty saturated with services. How much more can you do without getting illegal.

I wish we could still make great stuff like a good fast bicycle or a fancy new kiddee toy or a kitchen seven-in-one mixer or even an old fashioned broom. So I don’t have to always buy stuff from overthere. Overthere is nice, but overhere should be OK too. They say we cost too much to make stuff so we have to use robots or overthere people who work like crazy and don’t like money much. That’s what they say.

I read in the paper today that all the new money is in health! That’s what’s going to crank up the old economy.

So let’s start cranking. Everybody, get sick, right now!

Kickstart those doctors and nurses. Get that health money flowing by sharing some germs and bad habits.

I know we try. We eat fat. We drink our livers blue. We smoke our lungs black. We are not well. But not sick enough to ratchetup the economy. We need a good disease for every red-blooded American. Like a chicken in every pot we need a bunch of microbes in every belly. A virus in every cell. We need some good old fashioned low-grade sicknesses in every home.

We have some bad diseases that you could get. But they kill you quick. We want good diseases that just make you go to the hospital a lot, see a doctor every day, need a nurse, take a bunch of pills, but most of all, let you keep on working your health business job, helping those other sick people. That’s how to make the economy work. Everybody stays sick and goes to see each other for new treatments and meds, paying through the nose with good hard cash.

So where do we get these diseases we need? All the good diseases live down near the equator. Malaria and sleeping sickness keep you hanging on forever and taking pill after pill. They never get cured. They could be a goldmine.

I was going to call on our genetic engineers to fix up those down-south diseases to suit us up-north Americans, but why? We don’t need to do anything this time to be saved. Isn’t it funny how the world works?

Global warming is sending bunches of mosquitoes our way with lots of fancy new diseases in their pointy little snoots. I’m looking forward to that. You should too.

Now, everybody, roll up your sleeves, give them little bugs some blood and, hurray, catch something good for America.

It was a disaster.

I knew right away this morning, stumbling toward the kitchen, boiling water, measuring out beans. Going thru the seven steps, or was it six. Finally pouring as the steam rose up from the kettle. Then it hit me. The filter was still on the counter. Jumping back, I knocked over the filterholder and my cup and dropped boiling coffee grounds on my foot. Yep, disaster.

The coffee conundrum: how to make coffee before having coffee.

Sort of like the chicken and the egg. But I always come first, groggy, bleary and trying to carry out those seven coffee-making steps in the right order without any neurons firing. I have the steps written out and nailed on the wall but forget to read them. Nothing works.. But after two sips my daytime starts. After a big cup with its iridescent greenish bubbles floating on the dark brown thick liquid that I love, I can think and read and even do math and all those normal brain things without much trouble. I just need a jump start to get going.

I tried other ways. Exercise. It doesn’t wake up the brain. It makes it happy, but still thoughtless, after a mile or two on the track. I tried smoking but was afraid I’d die, not in fifty years, but now when I nodded off back under covers with it dangling on my lip.

So it’s coffee for me. And face the conundrum daily. And fail once or twice a week.

This got me thinking. Can’t there be another way. Maybe a caffeine patch and a smart alarm clock that slaps it on my forehead five minutes before it goes off? Maybe an automatic injection of caffeine from a syringe hidden in my pillow? Way too tricky. It would miss me and get the dog and he would go even more psycho running around after his tail for an hour or two while I tried for a final few minutes of sleep. I need something simple for my daily brain fix.

Then I remembered those genetic engineers again. They are taking genes from plants and sticking them into rats to make them smell good. They are taking genes from fireflies to make goldfish glow at night. They are taking genes and moving them all around for silly reasons. But do they face the big problems? I want them to take that caffeine gene today and stick it in people. Stick it in me. Maybe wire it to the wakeup system in the bottom of my brain. Then every morning—my eyes open and Bang! The juices flow and they smell like coffee. I am my own coffeepot. No more beans. No more failure. No more disaster. Life is good.

Then I thought why stop there. I remembered my exercise. That happy feeling I got when I ran a lot. Instead of just being awake why not be happy too? We already have the gene for it. You just have to work too hard for it.

Remember those old smart guys in England who had a calculus of happiness. Mr. Bentham said the best plans lead to the most happiness for everyone. And he made a lot of sense. And the Declaration of Independence promises us that we all get to pursue happiness all we want. But why pursue it—just make some exercise happy juice in your brain and be happy.

Yes, we do have the gene for human happy-juice but let’s hook it to something besides exercise. Something easy. A little work would be fine for getting happy but not running all the way across town. Let’s get those scientists to hook up that gene to something like scratching real hard, for instance. Get a runner’s high when you scratch your back for a minute or so. Feel low, scratch your head. Feel blue, scratch anywhere and that gene kicks in and the happy juice squirts out in your brain and joints and you are happy as a snake on a warm road at sunset.

Why stop there? There are even bigger happinesses. Mr. Bentham probably wasn’t thinking of this but how about sex. Not the messy drippy, plug-it-in, every-once-and-a-while sex, but all-the-time, happy sex. Just move the wiring. Move those sex nerves from your privates to someplace else. Leave all the complicated plumbing and baby-growing parts where they are. Just move the wires. It’s like moving the phones or rewiring the house. We need those scientists to get to work on this right now. This is one hot plan, Mr. Bentham. You should have thought of it.

Your nerves creep along from your spine and grow towards their destination. They have some kind of map or they move along little valleys in your body and finally they hit the spot they are aiming for and you can feel stuff. So the problem, Mr. Scientist, is how to give nerves a new map. So they start out just like normal but grow and reach someplace that you can use more often. Not the place where your mother told you not to touch. Then we humans would have true happiness. Or something close, like feeling real good.

Where could those nerves grow so we could be really happy? Maybe someplace where we could do something public, something social so you don’t lock yourself in a room jiggling your nerve ending all day. How about growing sex nerves all the way down to your fingers.

Then you would really enjoy shaking hands. You would go looking for friends to say howdy to and then after a few firm, all-American, tight grip minutes of the old up and down--Blam. The neurons fire and you are one happy dog. Not to mention your friends.

OK, with the nerves moved, making babies would be more like going to work. Not much fun. No pleasure. Just follow those seven steps in the instruction manual and then—Bingo--conception.

But that’s OK. One of the big problems was that it used to be too much fun making babies. Now you have to go buy the book because you are no longer hard-wired to do it. Most people would be going around giving the howdy-do so often they wouldn’t have time for making babies. Just when they really wanted one.

The church would like it. Sex without fun and fun with proper handshakes. And to top it all off, when all those churchgoers shake hands before the sermon on Sunday, going to church would be fun too.

Finally, thanks to Conrado LaRiviere, a man with lots of pretty good ideas, and the conversation with him last Tuesday that led me here.

Moving Mountains

We are in a mess. Lots of people are not working and this time they don't have jobs either. It used to be you could just sit around in front of your computer and get paid for not doing much. Now you sit in front of your computer and hope for email from Nigeria with your lottery winnings and Viagra ads.

This mess has two parts: one is people forgot how to work hard and the other is there is no work anyway. Some folks might just give up and tell everyone to sit on their hands as they mouse around the internet, but I have been checking things out. Those political scientists are calling for big, new public works projects to give everyone a nice fat paycheck and a shiny, new shovel to go with with their snazzy, new work ethic. That's the way out of this mess.

Public works projects may solve the work mess but they leave us with another big problem: what should people work on? We don't want them just raking leaves. We want them to build something that will last. Before when this happened in the 1930s they built a bunch of post offices and highway bridges. But who needs post offices these days—we have UPS and Mailboxes, Etc and they work just fine.

How about making bridges--we built so many bridges before that they got old and concrete is flaking and rebar is dangling down and they shake in a strong wind. We could rebuild them. But then people would just keep on driving their gas-guzzling cars. Maybe a few shaky bridges every evening on the commute will make people take the train and then we can really get out of this mess.

We need trains. Let's build them. Maybe they could be wind-powered solar trains. But then they couldn't go very fast. A train with a windmill doesn't have much umph to climb hills and mountains. Trains go best when its flat . We need more flatness in America to make trains use less fuel. It's a flatter country that will get us out of this mess.

So what I am suggesting is that we make a lot more smooth, level places in America. Move those Rockies and Ozarks and Blue Ridges out of the way. Just make a big flat pancake America from coast to coast. Then a train can go all the way across on a windy, sunny day or maybe just from your house to your new job flattening out mountains and digging out rocks and dirt. A good all-american job that has lots of work ethic to get us out of this mess.

I bet that you guys who always look at the bottom of the empty glass instead of the top are asking: what are you going to do with all the dirt when you flatten out America. Ha. This is where my idea is really great. We pile it up at the borders. You try to sneak into America over a mountain twenty thousand feet tall. Who needs fences. Who needs border guards. Just cover the roads with about three or four miles deep of dirt. No one can drive in. No one can get out. It's like living in the world's best prison. We are saved. Hurray for America. No more mess!

Even better, with all the dirt lined up east and west along the border (instead of the north and south like it is now), then all those cool pacific breezes can blow all the way across from California over into the Atlantic. Just think of those warm sunny mornings in the highlands of Nevada where everyone is going to trade in their fur jackets for flipflops and shorts. And those big pacific storms will fill up the deserts with lakes for all the waterskiers who had to move to some drybone western town and pack their waterskis in the garage or sell them on eBay. Now all Americans have the right to bear arms and to waterski all the way across America.

OK, you say: what about snow skiers. I planned for that too. Don't forget the border mountains. Go ski down from the top of North Dakota to the bottom of the hill in Chicago. Or Maybe from Maine down to Connecticut. So, we may have to cover up Maine and all those border states with a mile or two of dirt but who wants to live there anyway. Ditto for all those towns near Mexico. They can all be ski resorts instead of cactus farms.

Then to top it all off—just remember where all our cold fronts come from. Canada! And with the trans-border mountains blocking off the north then the cold just stays up there and those Canadians can tighten up their moose-skin blankets and dream about balmy Chicago and Minnesota, so close and yet a mountain range away.

So I say it one more time: Hurray for this great pancake of a country we are going to have. Hurray for getting out of this sticky mess. Hurray for America.