I don't live in a big city. I live in a college town, surrounded by agricultural areas. It's never been a place with a whole lot of poverty.

I replied to a guy peering through my cracked (as in spider-cracked) car window that I had no cash and am barely making it myself, which is the God-honest truth.

When the light changed, I literally had to decide if I was going to push the horde of homeless people a little with my car in order to get to where I was going on time. These didn't seem to be "tent city," temporarily-out-of-work homeless. These were filthy, toothless, self-talking homeless. (Or is that what the "tent city" homeless have become?) I felt disoriented and paranoid for a minute, like I'd flashed into a scene from Thriller or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Where the hell have I been? When did my town turn into the Tenderloin?

It's freezing today. We have a big storm coming up this weekend. We don't have shelters to speak of, because both the town and the state are broke. Where the on earth will all those shivering wanderers go?

Here's the thing. I really wanted to help these people. You know, beyond spooning soup at the Jesus Kitchen. But the truth is, I'm a miserable coward, and I'm afraid of them. I'm afraid of drugs and desperation and dirtiness and crazy, because I'm so close to being in that arcade myself half the time.

Which is dumb, because I'm one of the really lucky ones. When we had to foreclose this year on our elegant Victorian we'd rebuilt by hand from the inside out, we had somewhere to go. I mean yeah, the house we're in now has poor insulation and is full of scampering rats, and our appliances are used and inefficient. But I have enough skills to get by as a "consultant" until the state coughs up enough money to start hiring in my field again (just today they laid off 100 more folks locally, in my line of work). I live in a gay-ish urban tribe of sorts, and everyone has at least some work. It's not like we've had to consider giving up the dogs because we can't feed them. (Or eating the dogs because we can't feed ourselves.) But still, you know. I'm now below the poverty line. We all are. One of us has epilepsy, another diabetes, another rheumatoid arthritis, and another hasn't been to the doctor or dentist for a decade. Oh and? I'm afraid to mention how many higher degrees and decades of graduate-level training (and student loan debt) we share between us. It's too fucking depressing.

We're lucky, though. We have a home and each other.

But I got really scared of where my brain went as I was driving along, trying not to hit all the homeless people who were jaywalking, skinny dogs offleash, or riding their makeshift bikes against traffic, pulling their trailers of esoteric belongings. I found myself locking the doors to my crappy-ass rustbucket, and imagining some sort of natural predator to cull the herd--maybe vampires or werewolves--since there are so many of us, and apparently so few resources. (And too many "New Moon" ads.) Terrible, I know. But that's how people start to think when things get bad.

So I come home, and I read about fucking Bernanke talking about raiding Social Security and Medicare to feed the ravening Fed and to line Wall Street with more frankincense and myrrh. And I think of all those Glenn Beck psychos with their Waco-rific caches of ammunition, and how quick they'd be to leap to the defense of the Bernanke's of the world if we "socialists" ever got fed up enough to grab the torches and pitchforks.

So I'm hunkered down with my sadness bowl of weak soup, surrounded by the

sophomoric papers someone has hired me to edit for a pittance. And I know I should be grateful.

But really? I'm starting to freak out.