Santa came a couple days early to my RV park. Among my goodies were a couple lottery tickets, and wow I won $5. Since I've never had a lottery ticket before, I had to read the fine print to find out what to do next. 

Later...a woman behind the counter at the convenience store gave me a disdainful look when I asked for cash instead of five more lottery tickets. Didn't she think that we were supposed to learn anything from the recent shenanigans on Wall Street? 

Perhaps I could do even more to save the American Way of Life. Yet another portable DVD player had died on me, and I won't buy another. I was forced to buy a 15" LCD TV/DVD combo. It was the first boob toob that I have ever owned.

O Woe, what has happened to the idealistic young man whose first decision as a young adult was to never own a boob toob! But my country needed me. Besides, it only pulls in a couple channels out of the æther, and they are good for nothing other than some glorious football on Sundays.

Just one more purchase. My winter coat is over twenty years old. The ring around the collar has become so entrenched, so molecularly cross-linked to the coat, that only lacquer stripper could touch it.

You need a long, knee length, winter coat to keep cold wind out, down there. I spent hours on the internet to no avail. I couldn't even find the right term to use."Trench" coat doesn't work.

Gradually this turned into an obsession. Retirees do things like that, you know. Finally the breakthrough came; "stadium" coat was the magic keyword. But of course they were out of stock. What happened to all this media noise about the economy going over a cliff because the consumer won't spend? Here I was, begging--begging!--people to take my money, but they wouldn't.

I am heartily sick of the cliché that America has a service-economy or an information economy. I could have used a little of either. The coat's photo on the screen had only the most casual relationship to the real coat. They can't even get the colors right. The screen always shows a black coat, which obscures important details. Actually I did want a black coat, and after surrendering entirely too much information to them, they said they're out of black.

Gradually I realized the fundamental problem here. In the general nature of things, garments are dimensional, quantitative, numerical. But the internet only throws flowery, vague and misleading adjectives at you. It's a labyrinth of taxonomy.

How ironic! Think of that hilarious section in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which the yankee of his age was put back in time to the Middle Ages. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get the medieval-ist to use a number to describe things that were inherently numerical, like the distance between towns.

And there I was, on the internet, in our so-called high-tech age, frustrated by the fact that they wouldn't tell me how many inches long the coat was! They only did so once, and that was a woman's knee-length coat. Hey wait a minute...could I...should I? Why not!? I was desperate.

I noticed a photo of a pretty, all-American girl at the top of the website, with a 24-hour, 800 number to call. In fact a woman did answer the telephone, although she sounded like a college girl somewhere in the Hindu-Kush, who took some pity for my frozen tush.

I said I was buying a Christmas present for my...uhh... wife. What is her size?, she asked. I blushed. She tried to guide me through the arcana of female mensuration, like size 10 and misses and petite, but it was hopeless. Finally I just said that she was 5-11 or so, had big shoulders for a woman, and was sort of flat chested. I was losing credibility by the minute, and hung up.

Well there you have it. From a gambling addiction to couch potato-hood to cross-dressing. Earlier I wrote about moral rot in retirement. Maybe now you'll take me serious.