DRIVING around the hood I play a guessing game which is, economically speaking, morbid. I call it, “Pin the Tail on the Failing Business.”

A couple of months ago I had money on a bead shop figuring, in a bad economy, beads are one of life’s little luxuries folks will do without. But I seriously underestimated the commitment to beading in the San Fernando Valley.

As it turns out it was the men’s formal wear shop that took the bullet, quickly followed by the bird seed store, the unpainted furniture place and about a dozen others. But that bead shop taught me a lesson – just maybe it’s life’s little pleasures that will get us through these amazingly tense and irritating times.

That would explain the sudden explosion of frozen yogurt shops. I finally cracked and went in for a taste expecting to have the run of the place, Monday night at 9? Ghost town, right?

Wrong. I walked into a wall of human lickers, pre-pubescent KISS wannabees lapping up the Country Vanilla and Pecan Praline swirls, the Mango Tangos, Cheesecakes and ladling cookie crumb and sprinkle toppings onto an extra large Kahlua Supreme.

If the Great Depression of the 1930s made Hollywood, today’s recession is making frozen yogurt a second Sutter’s Mill. Instead of panning for gold we’re licking our blues away. Everybody, let’s sing! “Brother Can You Spare a Scoop?”

Life’s little pleasures are recession-proof because they’re cheap. Even a family trip for frozen yogurt at three bucks an ounce is chump change after the 25 year spending bender we’ve been on. As you may have read recently in this very newspaper, California has lost 800 car dealerships in the past 16 months. But we’ve added 15,000 yogurt stands in the San Fernando Valley alone. At least it seems that way.

Inexpensive pleasures add joy and simplicity to life. While licking a cone or feeding the birds or stringing some beads you have a chance to unplug from the digital world and take an old-fashioned analogue look at life.

There’s no going back, I know. And while life may have once been simpler it was never simple. However, we seem to have perfected the art of unnecessary complexity. We’ve made life much harder than it used to be. Much harder than it has to be. This was a choice.

Consider the 1930s and 1940s. Our parents and grandparents survived 30 percent unemployment and a gigantic, two-ocean war that killed uncounted millions, yet they could send their kids (us) to fine public schools, with teachers galore. Their roads were paved, their trash was collected, water was abundant and “the gang” they hung with were friends who came over to play cards and listen to records. There were enough cops to catch the bad guys and firefighters to keep the city from burning.

Maybe this is simplistic, but just maybe we’re so sophisticated today we’ve lost the capacity to run our affairs without everything bubbling over in a crisis. Apparently we can’t afford the police or fire departments. It nearly takes an act of Congress to get rid of a rotten teacher, and if you so much as talk about cutbacks they’ll go on strike.

The city can’t fix its sidewalks or pave a street but they nail you for 16 quarters for an hour of parking. If you water your lawn you’ll go to jail, but the murderers and rapists will go free because we can’t afford the prison guards. At least that’s what we’re told will happen if we don’t vote for Measure 1A and 1B on May 19. It’s government by apocalypse.

And we keep electing the same people who brought us to this sorry state and believe them when they say this time they have the answer. We want everything but we don’t want to pay for it. How did the “Greatest Generation,” the ultimate realists, raise children so divorced from reality?

But the world is in the process of slapping us back to our senses.

We’re suddenly thrust into an age of retraction. Our parents and grandparents lived through a terrible ordeal; economic misery, dust bowls and battlefield carnage. They survived it all not by blubbering over what they had lost, rather by cherishing what they had.

The simple pleasures.