About 8:30 p.m., on the fifth or sixth day of the government shutdown, I walked out of a discount cigarette store run by some nice Pakistani people with two cartons of cigarette tubes. My wife makes her own cigarettes with an electric machine.

There's a coffee place next to the cigarette store and a Chinese takeout joint on the other side, then a bar, then a senior center. The parking lot is wrinkly asphalt covered in run-over, flattened generic cigarette packs and losing lottery tickets. The people who pass through the parking lot are made of wrinkled leather covered in tattoos.

And toward one side of the parking lot were five girls, all in their teens, and one of them, her blonde hair a swinging circle of light, was "twerking," bent from the waist, bouncing her hindquarters up and down to some lively, unheard beat. The other girls formed a square around her, all of them laughing.

Two fat guys, talking in fast Puerto Rican Spanish got out of a white work van and headed into the coffee place, white plaster dust clumped on their buckskin-colored work boots.

This was 14 blocks from a building where my mother danced the jitterbug in 1946, a three-story building that used to have an Elks Club on its second floor.

The girl's hips pumped and she glowed all over, a kid having fun, while the other girls laughed, high squeals rising into the hole the streetlight poked in the dark. Above the dark, the debt ceiling hovered like the unfolded wings of a bat.

Ah, we're a carnival, us simple folks, dancing tribal dances, working in the drywall trade, travelling to America to sell cigarette tubes to the poor, serving in Afghanistan, putting a bottle of beer in the freezer when we walk in the door from work, so it will be good and cold when we get out of the shower.

We are. We're a carnival every day, the wonder of it being that we go about our elemental business of feasting, fighting, dancing, loving and working without sanction from above. You can push us back a little but, when the guys in the wing tips are home for the night, we'll slip out for a pack of smokes, getting off a job that should have crushed us, we'll stop for coffee on the way home, we'll twerk in parking lots, ignoring private property and any applicable laws about the expression of joy in public places. We marry when we want, not when it's wise, and we breed when our betters say we oughtn't.

We're easy to seduce and hard to love, easy to kill and hard to forget.

Hundreds of miles from where the seat of government sits, constipated, wheezing and squeezing, too mean to dance and too rich to die.

We're a nickel and dime people, like all people, like the ancient Mayans and the Renaissance Italians and the medieval Irish.

And we dance. Damn you, we dance.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com