My monkey’s been working overtime lately. A lot of overtime. Filling my head with thoughts of shrinking incomes and looming bankruptcies and impending foreclosures and medical care reserved for the privileged and few.

Even when I seek refuge from my fiscally-induced panic attacks—and strive for the mind of a forest deer, as the Buddha suggests—I’m quickly bombarded with the realities of an economy so depressed that seldom can I step out my door without my primate being roused from his fitful and haunted slumber.

In the past two weeks, I’ve helped friends vacate their mortgage-logged home, overheard strangers rail about their unemployment, received an email from a friend laid off from her nursing job, listened to chainsaws mow down the trees my neighbors are selling to pay their mortgage, spoke with another neighbor who can’t find a job after laboring all his life as a carpenter, ran into an acquaintance who’s moved in with his parents until he can locate work and afford a place of his own.

All within a span of two weeks.

What makes it worse is how commonplace such stories have become. No matter where you travel in the US, you can find hordes of people struggling to keep their heads above water. Even if the DC elite want us to believe that recovery is at our doorsteps, the fact is, many of those doorsteps are floating downriver, along with the rest of the houses torn from their foundations.

And it doesn’t look like the trend will abate anytime soon. The national foreclosure rates continue to mount at a staggering pace. In August alone, mortgage holders filed 78,880 first-time default notices. Admittedly, that number was down 18% from the previous August, but the total still represents a 33% increase over July of this year, the largest month-to-month increase in three years.

And all these defaults mean one thing: Banks will be repossessing even more homes in the coming months as the new foreclosures work their way through the process. But here’s the kicker. Those banks received billions of dollars in bailouts after they helped to orchestrate this mess in the first place.

Of course, it doesn’t bode well that jobs are as scarce as they are. According to the US Department of Labor, the current unemployment rate hovers around 9.1%. That means, assuming the Department of Labor is correct, a staggering 14 million people are out of work.

But the department is not correct. At least not completely. Their figures don’t reflect the 9.3 million people working part-time because they can’t find full-time employment. Then there are those who’ve given up looking for work altogether—another nine million. Now throw in the 2.5 million who want to work but haven’t found anything in the past year. And what about the self-employed, another group often ignored in the economic tallying?

Add those together and we have an unemployment rate that easily exceeds 20%, a rate, in fact, fast approaching the 25% reached during the height of the Great Depression. Even Ron Paul is scratching his head at this one.

And then we have all those bankruptcies—a projected 1.46 million this year. The good news, I suppose, is that this estimate actually amounts to fewer bankruptcies than the previous year. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of bankruptcies. A hell of a lot of people in the process of losing everything.

So that’s why my monkey mind has been getting the better of me. And I must not be alone, based on what I’m seeing with the Occupy movement. A lot of us, it seems, have been affected by all those scrambled thoughts that suggest something isn’t quite right with the system. One might even conclude that it’s downright criminal.

The Occupy movement started on Wall Street when 1,000 protesters gathered before the bastions of capitalism to express their outrage over social inequities and corporate greed. Within four weeks the movement had spread to Seattle and Los Angeles and Tokyo and Frankfurt and Madrid and Santiago and Auckland and Tel Aviv and Kuala Lumpur and 900 other cities across the globe.

Not all these protests, however, have their roots in the Occupy forces. In Spain, the Los Indignados movement gathered steam last May when protesters set up tents in Madrid in response to the high unemployment rates. In the UK, students have been in the street for the past year protesting the rise in school fees, while students in Santiago have been organizing protests since May, demanding that education be available for free to everyone. This past summer, protesters in Tel Aviv occupied the city’s financial district in response to the high cost of living. And the Arab uprising last spring has served as an inspiration to movements across the globe, including those who found their way to Wall Street.

Regardless of what fueled the original flames, the frustrations are the same all over, with more and more people fuming over the economic hardships they must endure as a consequence of corporate pandering, laissez-faire politicians, and economies that have trickled neither down or sideways, but only up to the money-grubbing misers who got us in this mess in the first place.

So the growing wave of anger continues to spread—and so do the number of protests. In fact, the movement has grown so strong that the mainstream media can no longer ignore it—at least not completely.

And you can always tell when the media finally notice something, but want to maintain a hands-off approach. They conduct polls, like the one conducted by CBS News and The New York Times. According to their results, 43% of Americans agree with the Occupy movement, that is, 43% believe that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed. 27% disagree. Mostly older conservative Republicans.

Yet the big question that remains—a question, I believe, not included in the poll—is whether the Occupy efforts will result in meaningful change. The movement is already bigger than the tea party, but it’s a movement still in its infancy, and we’ve a long way to go before the gold dust settles. Then there are the 1% who control most of the wealth in this country—along with the media and politicians they put into office. None of them is likely to take such a movement lying down.

Even so, the Occupy banner brings hope at a time when many of us believed that the final war cries of Reaganomics had pushed all hope aside. So for now, my monkey mind can enjoy a brief respite—at least until the next round of legislation sends me leaping to another branch.

Or heading to the nearest Occupy shindig.

On the way to the BART station, I passed the Mission District unemployment office, where a line of men and women spilled out of the front entrance and flowed down the sidewalk for half a block. Those queued up next to the building ranged in age from 16 to 60, most of them Hispanic or African-American, and most of them just standing there looking at nothing in particular as they waited for the line to start moving. Several of the adults had children with them. The kids, for the most part, stood patiently with everyone else, indifferent to their surroundings, as though they’d been waiting on that sidewalk since they were old enough to stand.

As I passed the entrance, I noticed a security guard looming in the doorway, no doubt there to discourage the hordes of unemployed from stampeding the government offices and all those government workers.

He didn’t look particularly happy standing there, but at least he had a job. Not everyone is so lucky, as the line he guarded so readily demonstrated. In California alone, nearly 2.3 million people are out of work. That’s 12.4% of the state’s workforce, a rate well above the 9.8% national average. And even the average is nothing to scoff at.

But these are the times in which we live. Just ask the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to their findings, employers laid off over 152,000 workers in November. In fact, for each month this year, between 133,000 to 200,000 have lost their jobs. Then there are all the jobs that went missing in the two previous years. Add them together, and that’s over 8 million since the recession officially began in December 2007.

Here’s another interesting tidbit. The Bureau basis these statistics on filings for unemployment insurance and includes only mass layoffs, that is, layoffs that involve at least 50 people from a single employer. That means people being laid off from smaller companies, those who do not qualify for unemployment insurance (such as the self-employed), and those who are no longer eligible because their time has run out, are not being counted. In other words, we’re a hell of a lot worse off than any of us care to think about.

And I’ve seen the consequences of these layoffs everywhere I’ve traveled. In one town after the next, stores were boarded up, buildings were abandoned, ma-and-pa businesses had gone belly-up. Add to that rising tuitions, cut-back in services, deteriorating public infrastructures and you’ve got a story that echoes from one coast to the next—an economic downturn that’s left communities beleaguered, institutions faltering, and families struggling to survive.

Yet despite these grim realities, politicians and financial analysts continue to suggest that we’re on the road to recovery. Not surprisingly, they point to the record profits that American companies continue to post. In the third quarter of this year, for example, US businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the highest figure recorded since the government began tracking this information over 60 years ago. Yet little of that money has trickled down to the people who need it, such as those laid-off workers standing in line at the Mission District office.

(Remind me to send another posthumous thank-you letter to Ronald Reagan.)

Despite the record profits—and the enormous executive pay-offs they portend—jobs continue to disappear in alarming numbers, and the more lay-offs we see, the higher the rates of bankruptcies and foreclosures spreading throughout the US.

Consider this. In the same quarter that businesses were toasting their colossal good fortunes, bankruptcies continued to rise across the country. In fact, there were an estimated 1.6 million bankruptcies declared in 2010, with states like Nevada, Tennessee, and Georgia topping the charts. That’s up from 1.4 million in 2009.

Of course, none of these figures beat the record 2.1 million set in 2005. That was the year Congress decided to make it harder for individuals—not businesses—to file for bankruptcy and get rid of their debts. In October alone of that year, over 630,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy as they rushed to avoid the effects of the new law. Even so, staggering numbers of individuals are now left with no alternative but to head to the courts, despite the burdens added by Congress in 2005—burdens, as I’ve already mentioned, not placed on corporate America.

As you’d expect, along with the staggering number of bankruptcies is an equally dire rate of foreclosures. In the first three quarters of 2010, banks repossessed over 800,000 homes. And although the final tally is not yet in for the year, estimates put the number of foreclosures well over a million. In fact, 1 in every 492 homes is currently being taken over by the banks.

That’s not all. The yet-to-trickle-down economy has resulted in even more people losing their health coverage. Recently, the number of uninsured Americans jumped to over 50 million people, yet we’re still years off from Obama’s watered-down health care bill fully kicking in, that is, if incoming Republicans don’t manage to undermine what little gains we’ve made. That’s right, the party that wants to lower taxes on the rich is also the party that wants to eliminate health care for the sick and poor.

Guess what else. The GOP is also against extending unemployment benefits to people like those standing in line at the Mission District office, should they fail to find work in a timely manner. But as we’ve seen, the party has no problem extending tax cuts to the rich and powerful.

And the Democrats, unfortunately, rolled right on over and let the Republicans get away with it.

After I passed the unemployment office, I continued my walk down Mission Street, rode BART to the Embarcadero station, and found my way down to the waterfront. There I met up with my friends and we hopped aboard a ferry to Sausalito. It was a cool, but gloriously sunny day, as we sailed past Treasure Island, circled around Alcatraz, slid along Angel Island, and landed at the Sausalito Ferry Terminal.

Sausalito itself is a pricey slice of real estate swollen with boutique shops, trendy restaurants, upscale hotels, and massive homes that cling to the hillsides like jewels encrusted on a tiara. Throngs of mostly white tourists stroll along the sidewalks as they peek into storefronts and study the menus near the restaurant entries.

What I don’t see are boarded-up shop windows or abandoned buildings. And if there are any unemployment offices in the vicinity, they’re tucked away in the far corners of the county. In fact, I’m not sure Marin County even allows out-of-work people within its boarders, at least in those places within such close proximity to all these multi-million dollar dwellings.

That’s not to say Sausalito has escaped the economic woes of the past few years. In November alone, 10 homes ended up in foreclosure. That’s 1 in every 674 residencies on the chopping block. Yet if you consider that banks are foreclosing on 1 in every 99 homes in Nevada, Sausalito remains fairly unscathed.

At least that’s how it appears as we walk along the clean and manicured sidewalks. If I were to base my impressions of the economy on what I see here, I’d suspect that the US is experiencing a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity. The only evidence of hard times is the musician at the ferry terminal, with his stringless guitar, faltering voice, and dachshund propped up on his shoulder.

But every community needs its color, its entertainers, its performers, even if they must be imported from across the water. And in a place like Sausalito, where color is in short supply, the only way to mix things up is to fill the galleries with tourist art and ship in busloads of laborers to keep the houses immaculate and the gardens fit for the finest of the Bay Area royalty. After all, what would people think if the yard in the next-door mansion started to look a bit shabby?

Had this happened only a few times, I’d think nothing of it. But I’ve run into the same situation in every place I’ve visited here—without exception.

Floridians are quite proud of their weather, so proud that they often define it not in terms of what it is, but what it is not. “It might be cooler than usual,” they say, “but at least it’s not snowing.” Such remarks normally include a comparison to one of the windy, slushy, icy settings up north. And the implications of what they’re suggesting are quite clear—Florida is superior to just about every other place in the country.

What interests me most about these Floridians is not so much their endless obsession with the weather, but their apparent lack of pride in any other aspect of the state. I mean, I never hear them bragging about their acres of strip malls or miles of over-developed shorelines. And not a word about their proximity to Disney World and Universal Studios and Sea World. They don’t even boast about their hurricanes.

At the very least, I’d expect to hear something about the white sand beaches and the aquamarine waters surrounding the Keys. But I don’t. It’s all about the weather—and how nice it is not to be in those other places.

What is it, then, that makes the weather paramount over all other considerations? On the surface, I can appreciate wanting to escape harsh winters. I grew up in Chicago and then lived in the Colorado Rockies for 15 years. I know about long, hard winters and what it means not having to deal with them.

At the same time, my interests in places to live and visit are also driven by such factors as culture, history, diversity, community, and access to the type of natural beauty you find in the few semi-wild habitats that remain in the US.

Florida still has some of those—down south around Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. The assortment of birds, for instance—the egrets, herons, ibises, and anhinga—line the waterways as they wade through the shallow waters and hang along their muddy shores. Then there are the snakes. And the panthers. And all those goll-darned gators.

They’ll certainly get you thinking about what wildness is all about.

Just last week, I was standing on a wooden platform in the national preserve, looking down at a 15-foot alligator that from my perspective seemed almost as wide as it did long. The gator was sleeping along the bank of a slow-moving river, about ten feet from where I stood. Suddenly, its eyes popped open and it stared at me with a deep, dark, ancient gaze that drilled right through to my core and pushed me back in an involuntary jerk that was as instinctual as avoiding a hit on the head.

But that’s what nature does if you let it, hits you over the head. As long as there’s nature there to get to you. Unfortunately, about 50% of Florida swamplands no longer exist, leaving entire animal populations at risk. Wading birds alone are down by 90% of the numbers they once were. On top of that, non-native plants have invaded the area big time, altering habitat and choking out indigenous species.

Yet the wetlands don’t seem much of a concern to the Floridian transplants I’ve spoken to. In fact, many have never traveled down to the southern swamps, rarely venturing far from their sun-drenched, ultra-planned, concrete-reinforced communities.

A side note: I’ve had little opportunity to meet those who don’t actually live in these communities, but keep the communities running, that is, the gardeners, housekeepers, maintenance staff, street cleaners—all those who come by English second-handedly and are too busy working to talk about the weather or Everglade gators.

I have met a few transplants willing to venture out of their concrete enclaves. Just this past weekend I stayed at a small campground in the south-central part of the state, just north of all that surviving swampland. My campsite was surrounded by rows of permanent campers who, each weekend, commuted from their walled communities to their campsites, where they had left their massive RVs and trailers and satellite dishes.

This was a private campground, which is why campers got to park their rigs there all year round. It also explains the plethora of holiday decorations. My first night there, Christmas lights twinkled on the trees and shrubs and along the patios of the permanent sites—so many, it was unnecessary to wear my headlamp at night to find my way around. Along with the colored lights were a multitude of inflatable Christmas characters—including the superstars of holiday cheer: Santa, Rudolph, and the baby Jesus. Each one required a constantly-running blower to keep it inflated. And if that wasn’t enough, on the following morning, a camper began running a small leaf blower to clear the debris from around his RV and the area around his neighbor’s. Then the owner of a nearby trailer pulled up in his giant SUV, entered his mobile home, turned on his stereo, and played it till late in the night.

The only sounds that penetrated all the manufactured disturbances were the falling acorns as they hit the tinny tops of those RVs and trailers.

With all that noise, I doubt much thought was given to the stillness of the surrounding pastures or the breeze that rustled the moss-draped oaks. In fact, I doubt they even noticed the plummeting acorns above the din of their TVs and disco-dancing stereos.

But in all fairness, they didn’t stay locked up in their plastic and tin fortresses forever. That night, one of my neighbors built a campfire and invited other campers to join in. Given how cold it was, particularly by Florida standards, I readily accepted. True to form, once we were settled around the fire, it came out that I was from Seattle, at which point they immediately launched into a series of discussions about the superiority of Florida weather compared to the rest of the country. I drew closer to the fire to ward off the cold.

I was tempted to bring up the fact that Florida has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. And one of the highest foreclosure rates. Not to mention an oil spill still knocking on its shores. And, of course, all those condos and citrus farms that continue to eat at the wetlands.

Still, I can understand their pride in not having to shovel snow. It makes life a lot easier. A lot more comfortable. And being comfortable is what it’s all about. How else would you explain these suburban tankers they call camping? When you have a home on wheels, you eliminate any risk of discomfort, any chance you’ll be inconvenienced, any need to be challenged by the perilous encounters that nature might offer, even if those encounters amount to little more than falling nuts.

I drew closer to the fire. One of the campers raised his foot and held his shoe close to the flame. He had stepped in a pile of dog shit and was trying to burn it off. During his sole-roasting adventure, he talked about the weather and how lucky they were to live in warm sunny Florida.

I wonder what the discussion would have been like had this been July, when everyone is running from air conditioned room to air conditioned car to air conditioned shopping mall. Of course, there’s no way in hell I’d be down here for such a discussion. I’d be at home in the lush, temperate Northwest, amid the sparkling blue waters and snow-capped peaks and mountainsides of pristine forests—where summertime weather is mild and gracious and better than just about anywhere else in the country.

I step over to the cash machine to retrieve more quarters for the second load. I reach into my pocket for my wallet. My pocket is empty.

I race back to the front-load washer and look through the window at the sudsy water filling the tub. I see my shorts on the top of the pile. I envision my wallet sloshing around in those suds.

I try to open the door but it’s fused shut, so I rush over to the attendant. I ask whether there’s a way to stop the washer once it’s started.

She stares back at me with a look of both indifference and disdain, the kind of look that the bored and frustrated and powerless give those who are momentarily at a disadvantage, the kind of look that provides them with a temporary sense of vindication and superiority, that leaves them feeling something akin to satisfaction.

“No,” she says. “You have to wait.” She looks away before she finishes speaking.

I return to the washer and check how many minutes remain. Sixteen. I look at my shorts longingly. I watch them go round and round. I watch them take my wallet on a Six Flags whitewater river ride.

I step outside to wait out the rinse and spin cycles.

The laundromat sits next door to Guerneville’s only coffee shop. Together they form what constitutes the town center.

Here you’ll find the full spectrum of the town’s finest, residents and visitors alike, patronizing one, both, or neither of the businesses. They lounge in the chairs, hang out at the picnic tables, huddle around on the sidewalks.

Here you’ll find the eighteen-year-old mother with her three children, the aging hippy with her tie-dyed shirt and Birkenstock sandals, the volunteer firefighter from the station across the road, the queer couple celebrating their twentieth anniversary, the wasted teen who’s been smoking weed since ten, the suburban family with their 2.3 golden-haired children, the Silicon Valley bikers who just arrived on their new Harleys, the homeless man who carries his house in a plastic bag, the state-supported, heavily medicated, chronically ill SSI lifetime wards.

I sit down, more toward the coffee shop side of things. Next to me, a guy in his late twenties bums a cigarette from another man. The second one is older and taller and stringier, with circles under his eyes so dark I think he’s been punched in the face.

“I just got out of jail,” the younger one says. “I have no cash.”

The older guy hands him a cigarette. “No problem, man. I won’t ask why you were there. None of my business.”

“Wasn’t so bad.”

“Hope you didn’t murder anyone.”

The younger one shakes his head. “Nothing like that.  Parole violation. Only thirty days.”

“Get yourself straightened out, that’s what you need to do. Figure out your passions and follow them.”

The young man smokes. “I know what I want. I’m gonna be a farmer. I’m gonna raise chickens.”

“Chickens.”

“I can’t wait to eat my first one.”

“A chicken eater,” the black-eyed man says.

“I can’t wait.”

“When you plan to start all this?”

“Already have. My husband and I bought eight acres near Sebastopol.”

Decades ago, Guerneville was a popular family vacation spot—campsites, cabins, canoeing—all in the heart of California’s redwood country, next to a slow-moving bend on the Russian River. The influx of drop-outs in the late sixties and early seventies, along with their carloads of drugs, changed the area forever. The bikers showed up around then too—and not the Silicon Valley kind. Then the queers arrived, with plenty more out-of-control substances. There were also the wine connoisseurs, bouncing from winery to winery, swelling in rank every day.

Throughout all this, the families kept coming.

So what you have now is a bit of everything. That and the aftermath of an area that in the last twenty years has been hit hard by floods and failing economies.

I go back into the laundromat and check the washer. Nine minutes to go. I return outside and take a seat nearest the door. I listen to a man grumble about the state of the economy. He talks to a woman whose got that rich New Ager look, a cross between an astrologist and an heiress, with wavy blonde hair that cascades down to her waist.

The man’s probably in his fifties, with a short, thick body and hair that’s long and matted, dark brown and streaked with gray. At least half of his teeth are missing.

He tells the woman he can’t work because the Mexicans are taking all the jobs. “Try to earn a living,” he says. “Try to get anything done, and they get in the way.”

I take note of his teeth because of a previous visit to Guerneville. Several years ago I spent a few months down here, hanging out, writing, getting to know the region. On more than one occasion, people who lived in the area said, “You must not be from around here. You have all your teeth.”

Such is the nature of meth.

I step into the coffee shop to use the restroom. A sign hangs on the bulletin board in the hallway. It announces a meeting for Guerneville business owners to discuss the growing problem of homelessness in this area. The goal is to bring people together to discuss solutions that everyone can live with.

But the town is facing problems in which homelessness is only one of the symptoms. Many of the businesses have closed, buildings are falling apart, tourists are staying away in record numbers. But drug and alcohol use remains high. So does unemployment.

On the last three evenings, I strolled through town in search of a place to eat. Many of the restaurants were closed, the streets nearly deserted, not unlike a western ghost town in a Gary Cooper movie. Granted it’s the middle of the week, but this is still July, the height of the tourist season. I’ve been here in tourist season before. I know weeknights are slower. But weeknights in July should not be like the dead of winter.

The Safeway is busy, though, at least it was this morning. I stood behind two women in the checkout line. The first dug through her purse as the cashier rang up her groceries. After a furious search, she announced that she couldn’t afford all the food. So she handed back several items—candy bars, salsa, pasta sauce, Cocoa Puffs, a bunch of rhubarb. Once she got the amount down to what she could afford, she paid for the groceries, all the time apologizing for causing any trouble.

The next person in line, the woman in front of me, pushed a cart that carried a baby. All she bought was a tube of Blistex. She paid in cash, took her change, and rolled away. That’s when I noticed the case of blue sports drink in the bottom of the cart, hidden from the cashier by the baby seat.

A lot of the people who hang out in the makeshift town center have nowhere else to go and no money to get there. Jobs are in short supply. Businesses are struggling to survive. Relatively few tourists are coming and those who do come are not spending.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts California’s current unemployment rate at 12.4%, compared to a U.S. average of 9.7%. The state has lost nearly 245,000 jobs this past year.

Yesterday, I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has spent nearly $100 million on her campaign and might be donating another $30 million to the state’s Republican party. As Meg Whitman has discovered, power does not come cheap.

Republicans, not surprisingly, are salivating. Democrats, I’m guessing, are running with their tails between their legs.

I wonder whether any of that money will find its way to Guerneville. I wonder if the people who need the money the most will ever see it.

I return to the laundromat and wait out the last two minutes of the wash cycle. When the warning beep sounds, I open the door, pull out my soaked shorts, pull my soaked wallet out of my shorts, and pull my soaked money out of my wallet.

It might be the only clean cash left in California.