Finnegans Pidgin

 "Later, speaking it—saying the days of the week for example—I felt that I had talked my way onto the pages of Finnegans Wake, where Joyce writes the days of the week as moanday, tearsday, waitsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday. In Pidgin, they are mande, tunde, trinde, fonde, fraide, sarere, sande."

~~ from The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux

Raised on scrapple, sold at Walmart

We're in this together now.

Lucy Zhang @ Heavy Feather Review

Lucy Zhang has joined Jason Teal and Hillary Leftwich at Heavy Feather Review as a Fiction and Nonfiction Editor. Zhang tweets @Dango_Ramen and publishes flash fiction often. Submit your poetry and prose for full consideration!

9/11

Labor Day Weekend 2020, brought to you by covid19

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 52% of American adults under 30 live with their parents, and the number of households headed by 18 to 29-year-olds declined by 1.9 million (12%). At the same time, the August 2020 jobs report shows that workforce participation rose to 61.7% from 61.4% while unemployment declined from 10.2% to 8.4%. It's worth noting, perhaps, that 29 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment compensation although the $600 extra per week expired at the end of July. Happy Labor Day!

$96,000 a year; retired teacher, no savings or pension

In the strange world we live in The Washington Post reports on the debt, hunger, and eviction of "households on the margins," and included examples concern an American who was earning $96,000 a year pre-pandemic as well as a retired English teacher who has no savings and no pension, living off a meager Social Security payment of $870 a month while housing a grandchild. I'm not sure that "the average American" is a reader of The Washington Post, but in a country where median household income is about $66,000 (combined pay of all workers in the household), and most people do not have fixed-income pensions to look forward to while imagining that most K-12 teachers are among the chosen few who will receive them, I suspect that readers would have trouble relating to these examples. Of course, we may be well past the point where "the average American" reads more than the headlines or attempts to analyze any information at all.