The problem with being poor is that you can’t afford to fix things and you can’t afford to buy things that don’t need fixing.

In this environment, every “entropic event”–the car/refrigerator/furnace breakdown, is a multiplying event in the mind. Any thing that goes wrong is a representation of a myriad of potential and imagined possibilities of like kind.

Each thing that goes requires repair brings into view all the other things that might or could conceivably go wrong. Each says to you, “Our name is Legion for we are many.” You wish you could ask for terms of surrender but the war never ends.