After a twelve hour nap, I considered the ridiculous and ancient tv that was bolted to the wall, presumably to thwart dastardly tv thieves.

It was all I could do to keep myself from yanking it down anyway, throwing it in the backseat of my car, and tearing out of there, cackling maniacally. The damn thing didn’t even have a remote and I had to change the channel by hand, just as my forefathers did. It was an instance where retro was a colossal pain in the ass rather than kitschy, and I shut it off after about fifteen minutes.

I reflected on how I was starving. It had been twenty hours since I last ate.

Starving. No one in this country is starving.

"Hey, did you hear about Kyle?"

"No, what happened?"

"He fucking starved to death, man."

I laughed at the scenario, at the name ‘Kyle’, and almost felt good. I’ll eat tomorrow, I decided, or the day after.

I considered the classifieds and saw that there were around fifteen places in my price range that I couldn’t afford to rent. The cheapest was a studio at $625 a month. With the deposit I would need over $1,200 to move in and I had $585 to last me two weeks. If only I wasn’t so fucking impulsive and had saved. I’d been wanting to leave her for months. I made anywhere from $675 to $725 every two weeks, depending on hours. I could have afforded any of these little studio or one bedroom apartments, just not right now when I needed it.

Hi, I’m Ned. I’m the working poor. You’ve probably seen me at Walmart buying cheap Chinese crap to distract me as I edge ever closer to oblivion. I may be the working poor, but at least I’m working, goddamn it. At least I’m doing that.

I went deeper into the classifieds and found a guy trying to unload his Coca-Cola memorabilia collection. He wanted $1,800 for the whole shebang. It included signs, posters, vintage this, vintage that. It was a very large collection, he said, and in excellent condition.

This man was not the working poor. This man was bored out his fucking mind.

Maybe, though, he just recently became poor. Maybe lottery tickets got him or the slots or some other form of socialized gambling. Maybe this was why he was selling his stupid collection. Maybe it was meth or booze or living beyond his means to impress his neighbors. Maybe he got laid off from his job installing those little plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. Whatever. I felt sorry for him. The poor bastard had to sell his painstaking pile of various Coke crap.

I flipped the page and saw a list of storage units for rent and, suddenly, knew what to do.