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You can score points by being contrary. In times when everyone is borrowed up, leveraged out, and plunked down, you can make a living just by being conservative and holding on to your money and drawing interest. When everybody is tight assed with their money, you can make a living by taking advantage of low interest rates and taking some selective risks.
The power of money, like karate, is the power of the empty hand. To have money and not spend it is power, the power of non-action, literally potential. How many do-dads do you really need anyway? The worst thing about money is having to think, worry, or obsess over it. This can happen with either too little or too much of it, and becomes all you ever think about. As with everything, the middle path is the best, avoiding extremes. Buddhism is at its best as an antidote to high-stress modern Western-type lifestyles. In the absence of such, it might seem like a religion of passivity. It’s almost as if the Buddha foresaw what was to come and prescribed a cure in advance. This might violate causality, but nothing better has been prescribed that doesn’t. Maybe there was something innate in the Indo-European mentality that knew what was likely and that the Indo would have a prominent role to play as antidote to the Euro. You can always back-fill logic later: how do I know what I mean until I see how much money’s at stake? People who can save their money are masters of the world; those who can’t are slaves. The former are creditors; the latter are debtors. Little by little money accrues to the creditor’s account at the expense of the debtor, over and beyond the current debt load. This is trickle-up economics.
Money is dirty. Money is addictive. Keep it under wraps. Keep it in your pants. Use it but don’t show it. Do your dirty deals down dark alleys. Money invariably leads to the hard stuff, oil and guns. Money is a medium that leads to extremes. In the hands of humans any extra is inevitably gambled on a fixed outcome with a fixed income. The dealer always wins. The house never loses. Like any good virus, its only purpose is to reproduce itself. If left to its own devices, money reproduces itself faster than bacteria, the black magic of numbers come to life and spreading like kudzu. Money lay there for years inert and lifeless until someone discovered that powers of ten and numerical place notation could make someone wealthy. Like sound amplifying through reverberation, money gets larger every time it changes hands, every time it shows up in someone’s books. All parties with interest get a piece of the action, a blip on the screen where two particles collided and something was given off. The squiggle on the screen is our only proof of the entity’s existence. Money is the measure of motion. If you hold it, then it evaporates with inflation. The thing itself only has worth during a depression, but that’s too depressing. Suspension of disbelief is essential; confidence is the foundation upon which a house of cards is built. Suspension of disbelief is the crucial test of any good movie. It also applies to ‘real life’. If you’re aware of the fact that those are actors acting, then the movie’s a failure. If you think they’re just making it all up, then the story’s already riddled with more holes than can be filled.
Business is like a limb that’s been amputated, but I still feel it there, erect and at attention, counting its money like some junkie who can’t make a move without ensuring that there’s another carrot lined up and waiting to mark the path and give meaning to life. I’ll never be an artist if I can’t get the monkey of business off my back so that I can concentrate on some creative work, get my eyes off the prize and concentrate on the task at hand. The bottom line rules like the line of her bottom used to, the thin red line of fulfillment, an innate idea of something warm associated with form. Business is a reflex action, a nervous tick, a cheap whore luring with vacuous charms.
Business is a disease infecting my soul like the heartbreak of psoriasis. The virus is clever; not only does it allow you to reproduce fully, but it even allows you to survive in some reduced capacity as a worker drone. It infects early in the teen-age years so that it can’t be readily distinguished from the multitude of other desires begging for your attention and sweet caress. It’s a disease of the soul, like alcoholism, like HIV; it infects the pleasure center, so that you want it even though you’ve already got it. You want it even though it’s bad for you. Business is a monopoly game, in your dreams, building empires and getting you out of jail free, just like Thailand. When rich people here get busted, they run for office. Business is the opium of the rich. Business and sex cancel each other out. The more I get of one, the less I need of the other; same with opium. The pleasure centers are the same, though no evidence of cross-tolerance. They all affect your ability to have a good shit. I’ve tried going cold turkey from business, but stuffed in whole-wheat bread, hold the mustard. The results are inconclusive, maybe too lofty an approach. Probably better to try sex as a substitute, a sexual maintenance program. Sex in the morning is the real thing, the hard-on you’re stuck with, rank like the smell of bacon to a vegetarian, the dark side of appetite. Good sex is like a good shit, nature’s dirty secret. Opium will plug you up like sticky rice, something like sticky mind. The antidote is physical work, high fiber, and fear. That’ll clean you out and get you up.
The medium is the message: MONEY, dragging us all down to its own pathetic level of 0’s and 1’s for ease of computation and digital logic. Its best defense is a good offense, get there first with the most and close the door behind. Share the monopoly board with your arranged marriage partner. The dirtiest most untouchable thing in the Dark Age of religion now grabs us by our genitalia and leads us down dark alleys with weird characters. Chinese pictographs and ancient petroglyphs are scrawled on walls in a conspiracy of silence, telling us what we already know in a language we’ve long forgotten. Muslims got the male suicidal death wish down pat: me against my brother, me and my brother against our father; the three of us against our neighbor. OK, love your neighbor in a nod to Jesus as the next to last prophet to actually turn a profit, but forget the others and their other brothers. So on and so forth, relationships’ strengths run in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source of separation. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, bad cosmetic surgery masquerades as high desert philosophy masking macho misogyny. If you gotta’ put a veil over your wife’s head, why not just try some makeup instead?
Europe has multiplied and divided until there’s no cards left to shuffle, so time to deal. If Europe can indeed unite, they’ll be pulling off the greatest political turnaround in history, from World Wars to world government with a stroke of the pen and a shrug of the shoulders. The fruits of capitalism can overcome a multitude of sins, but it’s first come first served. The guy who owns the stadium definitely has the home court advantage. India is like Europe without the money, so an easy target for cheap shots. Is there something in Indo-European language that lends itself to divisiveness, individuality, and caste systems? Loosely divided into two major races and more strictly divided into two major religions, India has as many languages derived from Sanskrit as Europe has from Latin, and ends up relying on English to get by. Ditto for Europe. Go fig.
It’s a good time to be a Communist, now that it’s totally discredited and can be re-discussed without mention of the Soviet Union. The Soviets never had a clue as to what they were doing, but Marx definitely did. He might have even been half right. Societies have come a long way over the last five thousand years in terms of human rights and physical wellbeing. Even Chomsky will admit that. The problem is that there is no guarantee of further improvement. Slavery only became eradicated when it became clear that there were better ways to reduce people into draft animals; i.e. cram them into cities. Communism is great at distributing wealth; it’s not so good at creating it. Europe did better with their social democracies, a multi-level system that allowed for individual initiative while still providing a vast umbrella and safety-net for everyone in society. That kept the Communists at bay, but put Europe at a competitive disadvantage with a resurgent US and UK, and a rising Asia, where labor unions are weak or non-existent. Though paralyzing labor strikes seem to have diminished sharply in the last twenty years simultaneous with the death of Communism, all is not well. Too many people in the US are either filthy rich or filthy poor, falling through the cracks, mitigated only by the vastness of the country and the fact that there are plenty of places to fall. Europe is more egalitarian; it has to be. Europe is probably the next best hope for mankind.
Communism did for measures what Napoleon did for measurement. Hamburgers are weighed and measured in Romania, to prevent hamburger corruption, I assume. An iron curtain hides nothing. We all know what you were doing back there, getting shit-faced drunk and acting Chinese, pretending you’d wait out the tides of history to catch a wave into the White House. You don’t become Chinese by reading a book. You gotta’ be born there. Communism is a perversion of Nature everywhere but China, where it’s the nature of perversion. Slavs are still Europeans even if they were slaves and serfs and slow to leave the farm. It’s as if the Lord said “Go forth and divide”, and the rest is history, roads leading to nowhere, and reasons to follow them to their logical conclusions. The urge to merge occurs only in sex and religion. To perceive divisions in the world is human; to perceive unity takes a mystic.
Communism stops the clock if nothing else. Once the curtain was lifted and the wall came down, it was like opening a time capsule. I missed East Europe in the early days, but Vietnam and Laos were revealing, with their Bolshevik architecture, Minsk motorcycles, and Russian cultural centers. Gray is the color of communism, unfinished concrete and cellblock apartments. All the joy is gone from life in a world devoted to dialectical materialism. Time stands still in a world without profit nor prophecy. Alcohol takes on new importance and sex is more than just going through the motions. You take what pleasure you can find in as much family as you can afford and hope for things to get better.
streaming consciousness... 
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