A Christmas Story: The Nature of Wealth

Grikdog, Left Eye Dominant

Douglas Adams' recipe for wealth was "Bang the rocks together." And the point was, things begin to happen when you do that. Sparks fly. Flint flakes. Fire becomes portable. Hands shape hand axes. Etc. The climb begins. Nature terrifies less. Children laugh more. Civilization, in about two million years, inevitably arrives. Where wealth was two rocks in the hands of an ape, wealth is now thick walls and fine furs and fabrics. Wealth seems to have become intelligence and accumulated experience. So much so that guilds arise to protect the secrets of their craft.

In the case of TV sportscasters, the "secrets of the craft" are especially glib, the art of motormouthing. The motormouth gives things away: "I never finished high school, I played golf. I won, I grew old, I announce golf on the LPGA circuit."

My favorite quote is from a notorious sports whore who famously (and obsequiously) reeked of Wimbledon Tennis royal aftershave, who said that something or someone was "packed like Sardinians in a tenement!"

Tourette's Syndrome, so fabulously bent it entertains a certain kind of cruelly internalized sentiment, can be wealth, I suppose. Occasionally, it supports a flattery of flacks who wear a magisterial cap and bells.

My life might someday be distilled into a flagon of plum picaresque scintillation, but not yet. I'm still a smug bastard who looks down on uneducated golf announcers making thousands more than ever I did, or would, or ever will. If I simply announce my resume, bare line by line, my auditors may sometimes be impressed. I shot my birdie. Once was enough. I picked up another pebble, and another. When, I wonder, will my jackdaw pile ever be sufficient? My wealth, like so many other ordinary lives, lies in my family, my friends. I was twelve years old my whole life long, like rock crystal sugar on a string, gone in minutes, in a flash.

I need time to crush a story from all that. Just not yet. Not yet. Wealth, I think, is meaning, e.g., December belongs to Mary and all simple lives, but I am a Buddhist, looking for bodhisattvas. I find them everywhere, and I almost worship Christmas.

^{Yup, snow this morning, and a two-hour school delay. I gather a bit of a homework reprieve because of it, because there are only four more days of school before the (*caff*) "December" break.}