Ah, Monday. A day to celebrate doing nothing.

There’s 24 hours of “24” airing on FX. As a child of television, the offspring of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gabby Hayes and Art Linkletter, I’m in seventh heaven! It’s Labor Day, a day to spend doing nothing except laying on my spongy bed and watching the stories unfold. Sound boring, eh?

Ha! Doing nothing is sometimes the best thing in the world, the most luxuriant, peaceful activity I can think of, especially when I’ve no money and no chores demanding my attention. I can simply kick back and soak up Keifer Sutherland’s magical mystery tour.

So Bush is in Ohio babbling about budget projections, predicting that everyone who’s working will hold on to their job and everyone who’s not working will have an opportunity to get a job. Gee. Sounds good, eh?

But it also sounds like a pipe dream to me. The economy is in the dumper and the outlook for a deep deficit is solidifying, so I’d say the nation is in for decades of financial hardship.

And so it goes. I’ve been thinking about Labor Day and its meaning. A holiday commemorating the daily labor of American workers, a kind of pat on the back from Congress.

But if things unfold the way I think they will, Congress probably will soon consider eliminating such holidays, extending the retirement age to 75, and lower the minimum wage. I think that congressional actions that allow outsourcing jobs to foreign nations is one way to put downward pressure on the American worker to accept lower wages.

And while the cost of living keeps rising, we flunkies in the trenches will find it harder and harder to climb out of the fiscal morass the Bush administration is creating for us, especially those of us who aren’t captains (or queens) of industry, those who haven’t got a marketable ideas, a new, imaginative invention or a solid footing in the service sector, life is looking bleak. Oh, not as bleak as life must appear to our soldiers in Iraq, but bleak nonetheless. To me, it’s hard to avoid concluding that, given U.S. war-costs in Iraq, the fact that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, and the post-war strategy in Iraq appears to be collapsing, we’re on a very thin limb in a gale-force wind.

I don’t know what the future holds but it’s not too difficult to predict that it ain’t gonna be pretty. We seem to be witnessing the erosion of the American Constitution and the advent of a bloody historical period of violence and instability on a global scale.

That aside, I wish D would call me and invite me to a movie or just to come over and hang out. I miss her and wish we had more time together.

C'est la vie.