just checking

I want you to imagine that someone is handing you a check. And this check represents compensation for, quote unquote, work you have done over the past two weeks. Work you might not particularly enjoy. Compensation for the eighty or ninety or a hundred hours that you might otherwise have spent . . . reading the great American novel, whatever that might be, or trying to write it -- or, if your taste runs in a different direction, reading about the systematic dismantling of the social welfare state, such as it has existed in rudimentary fragments in this country for sixty or so years, or organizing an effort to oppose this. Time you might otherwise have spent listening to music, or playing it, cultivating your friendships, preparing and eating organic, whole foods. Eating out your girlfriend.

And now I want you to imagine that before you even deposit this check in your bank account, you already know where every nickel of it is going, that the bills are already coming due, that you have already written some of the checks, that you are playing the float. Sure, a lot of it is lifestyle stuff -- the cable bill, the minimum payment on the credit card purchase of Ikea furniture -- but still, you are living, as they say, paycheck to paycheck. And losing ground.

Eighteen or twenty percent interest on the credit cards, the occasional late payment fee. Sometimes you play the float and lose, and end up paying the bank twenty-five dollars on a bounced check.

Or to take it a step further, imagine that the bills that are coming due are not what most of us usually think of as "lifestyle stuff," but rent, groceries, electricity and water bills, keeping the phone in the wall. Liability coverage -- not casualty, just liability -- on the car, because you can't quite give up the car just yet.

Or imagine that you have played the float one too many times and you can no longer maintain a checking account -- that you have to take the paycheck to your employer's bank and maybe pay a fee for turning it into cash. That you have to buy a cashier's check or a money order to pay the rent. That you have to pay the electricity bill by hand. The car is gone, and you are dependent on public transportation.

A lot of people live like this. Maybe some people in this room, certainly some people on the street just outside that window.

And now I want you to imagine that you have somehow gotten past this, that you have found work you actually enjoy doing that pays just enough to cover the rent and the groceries, the occasional bicycle repair, and that allows you time to read and write, to listen to music, to be with your friends.

Imagine there's no heaven.