Suburban Chic

Sitting in Naperville you have to wonder if the city has given up something to the suburbs. Naperville is a small city...maybe 140k..not sure exactly but there is a definitely a look. Newness. Newity. Newebees as opposed to the old look of the city dwellings and people rooted in twentieth century structures and neighborhoods. As a writer I crave these old structures and this old way of living but the newity of suburban living is like a clean dentist office and almost clinical. Clean restrooms abound and this is because clearly white middle class people no longer produce waste.

And you have to wonder if this is the way people will live now. Certainly the net demands this kind of living where everyone works at home. So you need space and space is to be had in the cornfields to the West because people live and work in these cornfields and don't want to feel hemmed into their little apartments they never leave because there is no company to leave for. And yes I know Google just brought their people back to the office but it is a blip. The writing is on the wall and the gulag trudge of Metra riders is bracketed by time the same way scanners have put the death sentence on check out people in grocery stores.

Tech will have its due and so we get back to suburban chic. Women with impossibly blond hair and men with gelled perfection and everyone looks like they have never cracked a book in their life. Maybe they have but they look just so unangsty and so perfect and this is really the new chi of suburban living. A blasé non plussed just out of the department store shod populace that is well heeled and white and never dirty.

It is not a bad way to live and actually very easy. Less people equals less hassle. Ask someone in Geneva Illinois their view of life versus someone in New York city. They will have radically different views on the hassle of going to the grocery store. For one person it is a battle for the other just a pleasant stroll through empty aisles. And maybe that is what money buys finally. The departure of people. Nothing new here. Our rich buy large  estates and wall out the world. So really suburban living is a poor mans rich.

Until everyone else arrives.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Book Clubs Get Fiery

Just did a ladies book club for Rocket Man and I expected it to be the normal give and take of any book club with questions about the writing process and themes. I don't know if it was the wine or what but these ladies came at me with both barrels. Why did I write a book about someone losing their home?  A lot of people keep their homes and don't shortsale them away they pointed out. True. True. It's fiction. But your character just keeps doing all the wrong things! He is so immature!

Now you may think fiction gives you a sort of bye on the I made it all up front. It doesn't. These ladies saw the main character ( a man hanging on the edge of a cliff financially, morally, losing his home, marriage_ as myself and they asked me if I was getting a divorce, if I really hated my father, if I was losing my house. I told them that I see things going on write about it and that I saw the American Dream in trouble and that was my theme. Huh!

Which brings the whole thing of suspension of disbelief. Rocket Man is about what is happening right now to people in their homes and so there is a natural inclination to say that is me! But in fact it is fiction but I think reality television has blurred the world in terms of what we think is true. The ladies at the book club never for a second believed I had made up this story of woe. "It is just too much like what is going on," one lady told me, pointing out that real fiction takes places in different times and different places. The novel of social commentary really didn't compute with her.

Anyway, it was a great time. But man, those book clubs can get rough!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The New American Dream: Downsizing

It is the first thing off someones lips who is selling their home now. I'm downsizing. Used to be people whose kids had gone off to college would downsize, now everyone is doing it. Apologies to all those still in search of the perfect McMansion, but everyone I bump into including myself talks about one thing: getting into something smaller with less taxes and less mortgage. It has become the new American Dream.

In my last novel, Rocket Man, the main character finally  gets his dream and is able to short sale his house away and go back toward the city and live in a bungalow. This is the polar opposite of the steady march of America which probably began with the first Puritans who decided a bigger log cabin was better and from then on the implied assumption was that materialism was next to Godliness and a big house put you into the Big Mans Favor.

Gatsby, right? Jay Gatsby's pride and joy, his magnet for Daisy was his home. A mansion he resurrected on the Long Island sound to show the world he had made it. The American Dream was at its zenith during the twenties and there was nothing more American than a bigger home. Bigger does not only belong to Texas, it is wrapped up in the swagger of American prowess. Let the Europeans live in their bungalows and row houses...we live in Giant Homes. We live in mansions.

But then of course that all came crashing down much like the Hindenburg with all the concomitant horror. Suddenly the big house no longer represented prosperity or at least upward mobility, now it had become an albatross around our neck...a prison of debt and sinking good fortune. Our homes could literally make us homeless now with the specter of upside down mortgages and foreclosure.

So the race is on to downsize. Who knows where it will end, but like Dale Hammer says at the end of Rocket Man  and is sitting in the small yard of his new home: I was finally where I was meant to be.

Lucky him.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man


http://www.bi/

The Great Secret of the Suburbs

I was was talking to a friend the other day who said his kid had lost their food card. I stared at him and said your food card? He shrugged and said yeah. Our food card. We’ve had it for a couple years now. And then it hit me. Food stamps. This friend lives in a comfortable five hundred thousand dollar suburban home but his kids are on food stamps and he is on medicaid. He had been a realtor and basically lost his job. But then it go me to thinking, how many other people in the land of wide lawns are on food stamps?


It turns out a lot. Forty six million people or fourteen percent of the population is now on food stamps. That is an amazing amount of people depending on the government so they wont go hungry. And here is the kicker, half of them are in the suburbs. The suburbs are no longer the place where people go to raise their kids. For a lot of people it is where they went to go into debt and lose their homes. And what has happened now is we have created a huge subclass of people living under the radar.

This type of family is probably your neighbor or lives down the street. They drive old cars because they can’t afford the payment of a new one. They are on food stamps because they need every nickel to pay utilities and keep their kids in clothes. They are on medicaid because there is no health care when you are broke in America. They might or might not be in foreclosure or in a loan modification. They are living in a twilight land of the American nightmare.

It now takes years to get someone out of their home. If they know how to file in court they can stretch it out indefinitely. This is exactly what is happening. There are now squatters in their own homes. The American Dream depends on a vision if not a mirage and this must remain intact for the kids and the neighbors. And outwardly everything seems normal. The lawn may not get cut and the cars may be old but it is all stitched together with rubber bands and paperclips. One catastrophe can bring the whole thing down.

Yet there are millions of families living this way. We have a huge underbelly of people who have fallen out of the middle class but like a ship that refuses to sink, they can keep pumping out just enough water to keep the mirage in place. But eventually they will take water. Once the banks catch up with them or someone slashes entitlements then it is game over.

Until then, the dirty little secret of the suburbs remains just that.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans struggle to find the American Dream

The I Can't Move Generation

Everyone has their cross to bear and for the recession generation of homeowners it is this: they can't afford to move. It used to be you moved to improve your situation. In the old paradyme one moved to a bigger home to take advantage of the increase in equity from the market. Trading up. This was a no brainer. You found out your house had appreciated by a hundred grand and went house shopping. You  found your next dream home then sold your current home and took on a bigger payment but it all came out in the wash because you would get a bigger chunk of equity as the market moved again. Then it all came crashing down.

In the smoking ruins of the bust the housing market is on it's head. Take the homeowner today who wants to sell. He can't because his house is now in a negative equity situation. He owes more than it is worth. There is nothing to plunk down on the next house. But let's say the house is not underwater and he wants to sell. There is still no guarantee it will sell and worse there is no guarantee there is another house out there. This is the kamikaze element to moving now. You might find yourself out in the street because you cant qualify for the next house.

So nobody moves now. People move for a variety of reasons. The big one now is downsizing. No one wants the big house anymore. Most people want to cut costs, but here is the irony of the housing bust: you can't afford to move to a smaller home. The smaller home might cost you more because you will lose all the evaporated equity in your current house. Much like a stock you don't lose until you sell. There is a chance it might come back right? Right.

But lets say you are going full speed ahead. You literally have to proceed like a blind man. You don't even look at the new house. You can only concentrate on selling yours and make peace that you may not get a penny out of it. Then you look for a new home and you have to make peace with the fact you could well end up renting. Because qualifying with no down payment is just about impossible now. So nobody moves.

Who is moving then? The people who get foreclosed. The strategic defaulters who quit paying. The wealthy who walk from their home and buy the next one with cash. The rest of us sit and wait for the next bubble.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...keeping your house shouldn't be this hard

The Dark Side of Facebook

When I first got out of college I got a job selling WATS lines for the phone company in Chicago and one of the perks was I could go up to the "Switch" at all hours of the night and walk past the tech guys and put on headphones and plug into a million conversations. I would even take dates (what a loser right) up to the switch and give them a pair of headphones and we would listen to the million voices talking into the analog void. It was amazing to think that each voice intertwined with the other represented a human,but it was also scary in a way because it trivialized each voice until it no longer represented a human, just a sound wave zooming through a huge trunk line.

Fast forward to Facebook with it's strange access into the million voices of our creation and after you get past the hype and the pictures then you end up with the obnoxious guy oin the train or the coffee house who won't stop his conversation about his kids, his family , his sex life and you are part of it. Facebook pledges to give us all a new way of interacting (so says Newsweek) and maybe it will or is it just that weird social network thing taken it's logical movie fueled zenith that will eventually end up like Myspace as a feeding ground for child molesters and porn stars--another footnote to the early days of the Internet.

But Facebook's dark side is it makes something out of nothing and by contrast knocks everyone else down to nothing. Take the couple who crashed the White House all under the guise of getting their pictures on Facebook with the President. Their ten nanoseconds of fame came and went and was cataloged into the cyberstream along with everyone out crying out for attention. Zuckerberg's prototype was rating girls on a primitive site that preceded Facebook. Then Facebook became the domain of colleges and one could make a case maybe it should have stayed there. Is Facebook really that different from the primitive girl rating site and arent we all rating each other by the life we paint in cyberland?

 We have already been privy to conversations we never wanted to know where people complained about their husbands or wives only to find out they were sharing it with the world. The Social Network is a great movie in the story of the creation of Facebook and we know that it resulted in a twenty six year old becoming a billionaire. Isnt that really what Facebook is all about? A billion dollars to hear the million voices at the switch?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Review of Revolutionary Road--the essential novel on the suburbs

I just finished Revolutionary Road. My forthcoming novel is about the hell of suburban living, but this book set the bar way back in the fifties. What a great book on the suburban culture of America. Frank and April are the quintessential suburbanites who have it all but have nothing. We pick up on them as they return from a play and get into a horrible fight. The fight is amazing in how vicious it becomes and the way Richard Yates funnels the stress of suburban living. This novel takes place in the fifties, but it certainly could be today.

April and Frank had been bohemians in Greenwich before moving to the burbs. A stunning scene is when April walks to the end of her drive and stares at every house just like hers.  The isolation, the nihilistic sense of doom is palpable as she stands in her drive in the quiet plasticity that is suburban life. She and Frank decide they want to go to Europe and escape the smothering sameness of their existence. As they plan their getaway Frank has numerous affairs and is promoted at his company. The brakes are put on their plan when April becomes pregnant. Desperately unhappy she has an affair and they fight over the abortion that April wants to have. An ancillary character that visits them from a mental institution raises the question of who is really insane.

The ending is dead on, but what Yates does masterfully with this novel is capture the soul deadening quality of suburban living for anytime. The frustration and desire of Frank and April of course are our own and while our resolution may not be as violent, Yates gives us a final image of a man turning down his hearing aid so he cannot hear his wife. He needs to say no more about the quiet madness of suburban life. We can relate.


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel, Rocket Man is due out in January.

Preflight

My father is a traveling salesman, that peculiar brand of Willy Loman that actually loves the natural flight of American selling. When I was
a boy, I thought of him as a man who appeared on Fridays when we had a steak and ice cream for dessert. After dinner, my father would
watch whatever football game was on television and fall asleep with his mouth open, tie loosened, hand over his brow as if he had just finished
one hell of a race.

I usually waited until he woke to tell him of my latest
achievement and show him my banana bike and collection of baseball
cards. But I had a brother who demanded his small time with him also,
so when my time came, it was usually just before he ran for his car,
briefcase in hand, and waved away another week.
But there was one time I remember where I had him all to myself.
For Christmas, my parents had given me an Estes Rocket Set. It was an
amazing toy with a launcher, rocket engines and the giant Saturn Five
Rocket that had conquered the moon a decade before. I stayed up late
gluing the white fuselage together, packing the parachute and inserting
the four D engines. The day after Christmas, my father and I walked to
a field to launch my rocket. We walked through the tall weeds painted
orange by the sun low on the horizon. He kept his hands in his pockets
while I carried the rocket and the launcher packed with batteries to fire
the rocket. We crunched through the frozen mud until we reached the
middle of the field.

Twilight simmered beyond the big pines and thin blue
snow dusted the ground. I put the launcher down and stretched the wires
to the control pad. My Saturn Five rocket was a beast. It took four D engines with two parachutes and four wadded sheets to keep the ejection charge from burning the chute up.
“Looks like we are launching Apollo 11,” my father murmured while
I threaded the Saturn Five onto the launch wire and connected the igniter wires to the four D engines. All four engines had to ignite or my Saturn Five would go off at a crazy angle and heave
into the ground. I checked the igniters and made sure they were shoved
far up into the engines. My father stamped his feet and kept his hands
in his pockets.
“You think this thing will go, boy?”
I looked at the man smoking a Pall Mall, his long Brooks Brothers
coat waving.
“Think so.”
“So this is what you do all week while I’m gone, boy?”
“Yup.”
My father smoked without his hands.
“Well, hurry up, boy. It’s going to be dark soon.”
I turned and walked back to the launch control and inserted the key.
The light glowed ready.
“You might move back, Dad.”
He looked over and snuffed the cigarette out, crunching through the
frozen mud. He was already looking at the distant cars on the highway,
thinking about his next appointment, gassing up, pointing that company
car back to the highway. He turned back and nodded to me.
“Well, blast it off, boy.”
I stared at my Saturn Five, a colossus of white and black with USA
going up the side in red letters. I began to count down.
“Five, four, three, two, one …”
I pressed the button on my launcher as the ready light flickered out.
There was the slight hiss of the sulfur igniters and for a moment the
rocket didn’t move. Then the four D engines caught fire, and whoosh!
The fire bent out and burned the weeds below the launcher, and suddenly
the Saturn Five was gone. A fiery tail burned high up in the cold sky as

the rocket leaned over slightly and left a white vapor trail across the early
stars.
“Jesus Christ!”
My father continued staring up while I stamped out the weed fire.
The ejection charge fired and the chutes blossomed, but I could see the
Saturn Five had gone too high for the wind and the time of day. It was
getting dark, and that rocket was sailing fast into the west, a white
satellite against a darkening blue palate.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Boy, that
sonofabitch really flew.”
I put my hand up, and I saw the Saturn Five drifting away; a gold
colossus hanging by four parachutes.
“Aren’t you going after it, boy?”
I shook my head solemnly.
“No, it’s gone,” I murmured, watching the rocket drift past the field.
“There’s too much wind.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
My father kept his neck craned to the sky and put his hands on my
shoulders. That’s what I remember. I think it was the only time we
were really together, watching that rocket disappear into the coal sky.

Rocket Man--
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Road Not Taken--Rocket Man

Hair of the dog.

The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed. The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one. But I have to make a decision. We are constantly presented with rules that we can either choose to follow or break. Does one go through the unmanned toll? Does one pay for the case of water in the bottom of the shopping cart that no one sees? They are small, middle class rules, but rules all the same. My choice is simple. Do I take the time to hang a big looping U-turn and return to the highway for the Dairy Queen I missed … or do I cut into the McDonald’s parking lot and plow across an excavated field of old pipes and earth movers, past the surveyor posts flapping like markers of the road not taken?These are the choices of our lives now. The big choices are mostly behind us by middle age, and we are reduced to schoolboys trying to whisper when the teacher’s back is turned.
What the hell.

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

A Raisin in the Sun

President Obama does not like the White House. It is easy to see that. He takes every opportunity to book out of there...to Chicago, Denver, Washington. He just doesn't like it. He and Michelle hit a school and hang with the kids, saying they had to get out of the White House. They were doing what parents do, going to school functions, taking a breather from life. I mean, really, can you blame him? He's from Hyde Park, which for those of you who don't know is hip, interracial, collars the city, South side, close to the Lake, intellectual, has the University of Chicago, bohemian and well, cool. He went from Greenwich to to the suburbs in one quick jump and he just didn't go to the suburbs, he went to the stuffiest, whitest suburb in the land--The White House. We won't even touch the name but it ain't exactly inviting. So he does what everyone who has ever had to move for kids or a job does, he busts out for the city at every opportunity to get out of weird land. And not only did he move to a white bread suburb he is now stuck in the equivalent of a Home Owners meeting everyday. Homeowner meetings are uptight and usually have covenants so anal you have to get your Christmas lights approved. Home Owner meetings only attract people with nothing to do, people who want to get into other peoples business, people who want to tell other people how to live. So here he is, this dude who likes to play basketball, hang with the fellas, eat at his favorite hip spots, go to his favorite place to get his haircut and now he's stuck up on the North Shore with the Guess Whose Coming to Dinner crowd. Even Sidney Poitier would have a hard time with this crowd. So you cant' blame him for firing up Air Force One and pointing it toward Chicago every chance he gets. In Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, an African American family moves from the South Side of Chicago to the white suburbs. The movie ends with the family packing up their apartment and leaving. The assumption is that they fit in and had a better life. I wonder what the sequel would be to that movie... possibly that same family moving back, shaking their heads, "nope, ain't gonna live with all them uptight white people." Too bad President Obama doesn't have that option.

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

The Coal

The problem with the stimulus bill is there is nothing in there for coal. Steam engines need coal. Big sleek ships and trains and even cars once upon a time ran on steam. You didn't really care about the men in the bowels of the ship shoveling all that coal into the boilers because you couldn't see them. You were far above eating your dinner or enjoying a cigar in the bar or lounging topside while the men sweated down below. So when the ship pulled into dock they loaded it up with food, champagne, caviar, fruit, cigars, wine, all the necessities for life and then tons and tons of coal. Because the ship's captain and everyone else knew that without coal the rest of the food, booze and cigars didn't matter much. Seems like there is one thing missing on the good ship's Obama's manifest for the stimulus plan--COAL. Middle class people are the coal of the economy lest you forget this go into Home Depot or Menards of Best Buy. There are no people. The employees outnumber the customers two to one. There are mountains of inventory and one cannot help wonder who is carrying the cost of all that inventory. So the steam engine has stopped. We know from our oligarchy who has taken all the coal. They are still in Washington and on Wall Street laughing their asses off that the American public bought into Tarp. See the one page article in the New York Times by Wells Fargo explaining why employee junkets are still necessary for the great work their employees do. The masters of the ship are tweaked someone would mess with their cigars and fine champagne. But even as the gilded glide far above us top deck, they too our a little worried that maybe the reluctance to order in coal might bring the good ship Lollipop to a halt. So how do we get our coal bins replenished? Bite the bullet and bypass the banks and make a national bank and start lending. Or...shock..shock...give money directly to the people. Not six hundred dollars, thousands. Prime the pump directly. It is interesting that the great populist nation is quite willing to take thousands of dollars in tax money, but recoils at the thought of giving it back. If income tax was never intended to be a permanent institution, let's make good now and give back some of the money. Nebulous promises of jobs will not replace the directness of giving credit to the middle class. Infrastructure jobs will put people back to work, but how many, how soon, remains to be seen. Our bins have been empty a while now and a bold President needs to take bold steps. Throw out the play book. Don't even look for precedent. Do the bold thing and put coal into the boiler now. The hard fact is you cannot operate a ship without coal, providing only for first class passengers. You really need some fuel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

American Entertainment

I attended a staple of American Entertainment this weekend: the big time sporting event. The game I went to in Chicago was not a good game. Both teams were at the bottom of their standings. The beginning was a study in light and sound. The lights dropped as fireworks went off and earthshaking sound shook the arena. A large bull floated like a dirigible through the pumped out smoky haze. Then the basketball game started and it was quiet enough to hear the squeak of the players tennis shoes. First time out and a bagel, a donut, and a coffee cup raced around on the giant Trinatron. The crowd simply went wild. People screamed uncontrollably for the bagel and the donut that ran neck and neck. Then the game resumed and we were back to the squeaks of the tennis shoes. Another time out and a man came out and began shooting T shirts from a large gun into the crowd. The place went nuts. Then a meter came on the Trinatron for screaming. The crowd exploded as the meter went into the red zone. Play resumed and we were back to the squeaks. Another time and out five people tried to eat twenty four cookies in five minutes. The crowd screamed in contortion as a fat man stuck the final five cookies into his mouth. Play resumed and we heard the dulcet tones of rubber on wood.

I began to watch the players on the Trinatron. It was more exciting. More dynamic. When I looked down at the real players they looked strangely normal, a bunch of grown men trying to shove a ball into small hoops. So I went back to the Trinatron. Another time out and a giant tic tac toe board was set up on the half court. People lost their minds as two boys tried to put the giant X's and O's in on the grid. Play resumed and everyone went to sleep. The game ended after overtime failed to get a rise from the crowd. It didn't really matter who won. We all came to see something extraordinary and we did. Too bad it wasn't basketball, but as Americans we expect more from our movies, sports, television shows, than just the event. We expect what Hemingway said so long ago: "In the end the age was handed the kind &*%# it demanded." I guess that's what we got.

Wide Lawns and Narrow Minds

So went Hemingways famous quote about his hometown of Oak Park. A reviewer of my recent novel, Rocket Man compared my take on modern suburbia to this quote. I would have to say that Hemingways quote seems mild by comparison. Rocket Man deals with another phenomenon not thought of in Hemingway's time--the corporification of suburban American. If Rocket Man deals with anything it deals with this final rung of our oligarchy (rule by the wealthy class) that has gone so horribly bad. But for years this is what we have had. A rule by the corporations of America and they have literally changed the landscape. Corporations thrive on homgenity, organization, streamlining complexities down to general assumptions. If we have on man do one thing then he can do that one thing all day long and be efficient at it. So went the thinking of Henry Ford when he came up with the assembly line. This basic maxim has spread out over the land in our homes that all look the same, our schools that churn out good little soldiers, not original thinkers, and our institutions, from churces on down that quite literally look like corproate buildings. Rocket Man's main character Dale Hammer is at sea not because he is so different in this landscape, he is failing because he refuses to be a cog not unilke the character in Orwells 1984. Dale is losing his home and struggling to keep his family together which includes his unemployed father who has come to live over his garage. In a sense they have been corporate refugees, hanging on to see when the next shoe will drop. In that way, they certainly do mirror us all.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

www.myspace.com/rocketmanbook

http://www.frontstreetreviews.com/