In the College of Hard Knocks, Scott Nearing says, an expulsion is often a promotion.

When Suent Scientific laid me off, I rolled my pension over into an annuity. OFÉ didn't have a pension plan for management employees, although the represented employees got to keep their union pension plan.

When OFÉ laid me off, I got ten weeks of separation pay, then 26 weeks of unemployment benefits and one 13-week extension.

Thanks to divine intervention, the week I found out I was going to be laid off, Brenda found out she was going to be laid off, too. They were moving her IT Help Center to Detroit. But also, since we both would be free to move, her brothers and sister asked her to buy the old home place in Parker, from them, and not to start paying them for it until Uncle Wayne's estate was settled, a matter of some two years. The house was sitting empty.

Also, due to divine intervention, and about as durable, I could go on reduced-benefit social security at 62. That would bring in another $1,000 a month.

I would have a 49-week sabbatical. To fix the house in Parker up, write, help Brenda pack up to move, in Atlanta. Brenda would sell the house in Atlanta and work up there until her job laid her off and she could draw 39 weeks of unemployment, get her garden in, her chicken tractor, in Parker. Recuperate from being laid off at age 55. Look for a job she would enjoy doing in Panama City.

We had some credit card debt. I cashed in my 401k and paid it off.

The house sold for enough money to pay a mover to move our furniture.

I was out from under the mortgage in Atlanta. Out of Atlanta. Goodbye Freaknik, the black college student Spring Break. Goodbye the National Black Arts Festival (NBAF), which used public funds to exclude white artists. Goodbye Underground Atlanta, that no one would go to except Wayne Williams, of Atlanta Child Murders fame, because it was full of black youth, who should have been at home studying their ABCs. Learning Ebonics.

Man, that's cold.

Well, they were like fellaheen.