I have resisted getting this card for well over a year, but a 14% savings is just too much. I caved in two weeks ago and have been using it since.

I once worked for a consulting company that did store location analyses. We were on permanent retainer by Macy's, for example, to study potential new store sites and evaluate the demographics of the surrounding population, existing competition, roads and transportation. The federal government published statistics every decade, I think, on the purchase patterns of the population by income segment, part of which was a "standard" purchase basket. What these folks in the aggregate bought at the store every week: food, necessities and the like. We used all that to give our clients a single number: annual dollar sales per square foot if they built a store at that location.

Oh Lord, we would have loved to have had this Rewards Card database. There are people in this world who would kill to have this database.

An insurance company, for example. Run a new applicant against the Rewards Card database for high cholesterol consumption or fat as a percentage of total calories purchased. Sorry kid, but you buy too much of that "cheesy food product" and the hamburger with the "meaty fatty extract fill". And cigarettes. Kid, you bought cigarettes.

They won't do that? Maybe not today, but that database, once it has tracked purchases over time, can tell them your income, your family size, your education level, your sleep patterns (Any neurotic behavior here? Purchases after 2:00 AM? Aspirin? Sleeping tablets? Quarts of Beefeater gin?), your eating habits (noted above), whether you clean your house often enough (are you landlords out there listening?) and a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't even want to hallucinate.

Still, 14%. When they drop the hammer and kick into this real time, day after tomorrow, no doubt, the Sole Proprietor will be old enough that, well, when they break down the door, maybe it'll be about his time anyway. It's been a good life. My pharmacy records alone are enough to do me in on any given date, so what the hell. Lucky Stores may now own my ass, but they'll have to split the proceeds with all the other lien holders that keep my social security number in their files.

I know, this is pretty paranoid. You go too far down this path and you end up living in Montana in a cave building letter bombs and not calling your mother on the weekends. Your web page takes on a certain gamey slant. That Tommy gun link under "favorite sites", for example, what's that about? Any solitary habits, Sole Prop? And this "Sole Prop" business? Sole? Prop?

These may be the last times that a man or a woman can get out of town and start anew and leave his or her past behind. Wasn't that the legend of the old West? A place where a man (or a woman or a family or a small guerilla army) could start anew without judgement, without a past to pull them apart? Wasn't it once considered a bit rude to ask where you'd come from and where you'd been? When you didn't mention you'd changed your name or that there was a sheriff in Orange County who really, really really wanted to resume an interrupted conversation?

"Get out of town?" You mean like deserting the wife and the kids and running off to Pittsburgh with Trina? Neglecting to make your child support payments?

More like a transgression against the body politic. A youthful indiscretion on or with drugs in another man's car with a lawyer's "younger than she looked" daughter. Your average psychotic roadblock where one more hour would drive you postal and your only alternative is a rucksack and an extended thumb out on highway 101 (or Hwy 5, if you're in a hurry).

This month I finally pay off a lot of money I've owed the federal government for the past several years. More than once the thought has occurred "wouldn't it be nice to just disappear off the face of this earth and not pay these two faced bastards another dime? To begin life anew in some exotic land like Florida or Connecticut or Kansas City, MO?"

Maybe those days are passed. The feds are paid, a reduced fat hamburger is on the grill and a man soliciting donations to the Old Tommy Gunners Retirement Community is on the phone. I guess I'll stay, write my journal and go to my Lucky Rewards.

There was a day, though, when the Sole Proprietor was younger, blood in his eye and courage in his heart, willing to sacrifice for principle and live life on the edge, without the 14% discount.