The Idea Well

I established this blog to test ideas for articles, short stories, and books, and other publications. Currently, I'm working on a memoir Shield of Faith and a novel The Rosary Bracelet. I will post ideas or even complete works like short stories or rough drafts of articles I hope to publish in print media.

Just for starters, some of the works in the pipeline are How To Survive A Mental Hospital, which can be both an article and book. Another project I'm considering is Wage Slavery, The Conspiracy To Keep You In Debt. This book will explore the possibility of a Wage Master, a person or people who control how much you earn and how much it costs you to live. Unfortunately for a lot of people, their wages are not enough to pay the cost of living. Hence they fall into wage slavery. Do we really live in a free market economy? Someone profits from Americans falling into debt, and that someone wants you in debt.

The idea for this book comes from my own contradictory experience with the American employment system. I'll admit I don't have another point of reference, but let's ignore that for now. For many years, I lived off disability from the Social Security Administration. My only debt was student loans, which I managed to pay with my disability check.

Then one day, the United States Patent and Trademark Office hired me as a Patent Examiner. They gave me the highest salary I'd ever been offered. So I moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Washington, DC (Alexandria, Virginia to be exact). Basically, I spent all my money on expenses like rent, groceries, and medications. Since I was no longer living with my parents, my expenses skyrocketed.

Furthermore the job of Patent Examiner was horrible. It was like working at a Burger King for geniuses. We had a quota to fill for patent applications prosecuted. The management threatened me to speed up my production or else. Basically, the job was so stressful, I was certain I was headed for a mental hospital. I resigned about five to six months into the job.

In the end, my debt had also skyrocketed 300%. I had less debt before I had a job, and it was manageable. What explains this paradox? Go to work, get into more debt. Thus I suspected that there exists a conscious effort, by perhaps somebody with a PC, to control the economy from your wages and cost of living to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. With the click of a mouse button, this Wage Master controls your financial destiny.

I'll admit I'm not an economist, but perhaps this project is a chance to learn economics, something I never studied at all in college. I was too busy with trying to understand things like fine-structure splitting in hydrogen atoms.