Escape From the USA

The Way We Live Now: Dashed upon the rocks of destiny. The dream of leaving the city behind to luxuriate in the fresh mountain air is finished. Sell everything, buy gold, and bail out. The Fourth of July is dead!

Once upon a time every organic chef and computer programmer in California wanted to sell their little bungalow in Fresno and head for the bracing mountain air of Oregon, where they would build themselves a somewhat larger bungalow, where they would raise their families and dogs in close proximity to coffee shops and bike trails and lots of Northern Lights weed and be yuppies with enough of a ruralist edge to be forgiven for everything. Well guess what? Those Californians are still flooding into Oregon ready to start anew, but there are no jobs for anybody. The anti-Californian backlash can only lead to a civil war, won by Oregonians, already equipped with terrain-specific Subarus and deadly hiking sticks.

Fuck that. Eddie Bauer is bankrupt, people. There's nowhere to gear up. Better to rent a U-Haul, pawn everything, and feed all the cash directly into the gold vending machine, exchanging your soon-to-be-worthless paper money for Krugerrands. Once you've melted it all down into portable ingots on your castoff Oregon cookstove, stash your wealth in a fake gas tank and slip across the Canadian border under cover of darkness. July 4 is the perfect date for escape from the American hellscape—the border guards will be distracted the omnipresent fireworks, the last fleeting displays of outmoded patriotism in a falling empire.

Oh sorry July 4 fireworks are canceled because of no money, you are DOOMED.