I can't afford to bank there.

There's a building at the shitpile-esque turnoff to Philadelphia's container port. This building, a hemidemisemi greek revival-looking structure, sticks out like a black man at a Merle Haggard concert. No graffiti, no piles of trash in the lot, and no spiderwebbed glass in the windowframes. It's pretty, in fact. An oasis of order, around which it looks like Detroit's city dump.

This is where truck drivers transit between I-95, the Aorta of the eastern United States, and Philadelphia's container terminal. Amidst the broken ruins of a couple of power plants, some train tracks long since gone to rust, and the odd run of broken asphalt sits this prosperous bank-looking place.

This is not a bank, however, but rather, an 'upscale' strip joint. A nudie bar. A nipple ranch. Or, as we local sailors like to call it, The First National Bank of Boobs. You see, I park my truck at a lay berth nearby. I always drive by this place IN DAYLIGHT. This part of Philadelphia at night isn't a place where I'll drive unarmed, sadly. Anyhow, in daylight yon nudie bar is closed, and since I've never driven out of the parking area at night, I've never seen the customers of the Boobie Bank and Trust, so I can't say for sure whether or not it's 'upscale.' I use the quotes because the sign for the place includes the word upscale specifically, and nudie bars aren't known for classiness in general, so I'm assuming that it means that they serve beer in bottles and at about 10 bucks a pop.

Now, back in my yoot, I enjoyed a night out in Houston or two while on shore leave, which included a stop at the ubiquitous nudie bar on the way home from a steakhouse. Yeah yeah, waste of money I know. Actually, it's such a waste of money that I don't patronize those places anymore, anyhow. Haven't been able to justify spending money on that sort of thing in a long, long time. So I'm not going to be turning into the parking lot of the not-a-bank anytime soon.

Of course, in theory, I could probably lose less money in a nudie bar than I would in my own bank, judging by my retirement portfolio's performance.

I may be on to something. By losing money at a reduced rate ($1 bill at a time), I might actually do better at riding out the current recession than I'm doing now.

Finally, this is some retirement planning I can get on board with.