I hate to sound like Econ Barbie ("Math class is tough!"), but I think the entire American economy just got sucked into one of those black holes in space, and I have no idea how it happened.

I mean, I don't even understand what they are saying, let alone what it means. Credit default swaps? Derivatives? Naked short selling?

Remember the mantra from the 1992 Clinton campaign? "It's the economy, stupid." These days it should be "You're too stupid to understand the economy."

But I am getting the message that it is all my fault anyway. I have been using my credit card to go out to dinner and take the family on summer vacations, and a giant sinkhole opened up under Wall Street as a result.

That, and a flood of uninformed people tried to get a stake in the American way of life by buying houses they didn't know they couldn't afford.

It certainly was not the fault of a bunch of rich white bankers who have been winking at each other across the board room for two decades.

Jason Zweig, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said that we have moved from a bull market to a bear market and may be in danger of moving to an "ostrich market."

They can apparently track these things, and everybody has stopped looking up their 401Ks to see what they are worth. We don't want to know how bad it is.

That's not me. I am trying to understand why I am suddenly worth about the same as a bag of cat's eye marbles.

Let me see if I have any of this right.

The government took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two institutions with interchangeable names that apparently do the same thing, badly. But it not only refused to help Lehman Brothers, it staked that company in the jungle like the goat that was bait for the T. Rex in Jurassic Park.

Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, kind of like those frontier maidens who kill themselves rather than be taken as slaves by the Indians. Same with Constellation, which, by week's end, had sold itself to MidAmerican Energy Holdings.

And I think China is sitting on the sidelines waiting to pick our bones, but I could be wrong about that.

All I know for sure is that I have to come up with the money for two car loans, a mortgage, my credit cards and my daughter's student loan, and nobody is rushing in to rescue me.

How do you get on the Fed's good side?

Why don't they bundle my debts and pay them off in an orderly fashion while I go out and jump-start the economy with my pent-up consumer demand?

I mean, isn't that going to happen with the investment houses? Do we really expect them to behave after we have relieved them of their ruinous debt, or are they all going to go out and build new houses in the Hamptons?

I keep hearing the same advice. Be brave and be diversified. I thought I was. I thought that's why I invested in mutual funds. I thought I was sharing the risk.

But then I found out that most mutual funds have holdings in Lehman, or one of the other doomed houses, and suddenly I feel like the only thing I am sharing is the hole in the bottom of the boat.

Brent Kessel, who is president of Abacus Wealth Partners, told The New York Times last week that during these stressful times we should take a lesson from the yoga masters.

Yoga "is the practice of breathing through discomfort," he said. "You intentionally put your body in postures that are right at the edge of discomfort and then cultivate the ability to stay there. You tend to find it passes if you give it time, but instead we rush to the Internet to trade on our portfolios."

Well, here's a coincidence. I have a yoga teacher and a broker at Merrill Lynch, and they actually know each other in my small town. Both are telling me the same thing: "Breathe through it."

That's hard enough to do when you feel like your groin muscle is going to explode. It is pretty near impossible to do when you think the American economy might be returning to the barter system, and you don't have any beads or pelts.