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.}

Cold Lard

Yep. I finally realized what is like Retirement. Lard is like Retirement. Cold lard. Strap it to your feet and skate around the house. The dogs may howl, the cats may sample delicately before looking at you in betrayed disgust, but it gets the crumbs off the floor.

Merry Christmas. Don't leave crumbs.

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In a more Sirius vein, I never carry a watch to church. Why is that, you ask? Well, think about it.

Religion for most people is about The Afterlife, which is personal being, living, existence, extended on a cosmic scale through the next billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years. Aside from the obvious inconvenience of Time measured from the point of view of a cold, lifeless cinder that does not revolve around its absent star, most people can't sit still for five minutes without dying of boredom.

You want your personal lease extended through the heat death of the Universe, that's your problem. Christmas morning, though, that's Timeless.

My Xmas Rant

My wife heads up a branch of one of our local medical labs, so she's been exposed to the H1N1 virus since last September — i.e., she's been on the front lines meeting sick public. Today (technically, I'm writing this Dec. 2) she finally got FlüMiste^™ (or something) up her nose. A bit late, although nobody in Linn County should take the rap for what they didn't have and couldn't get.

Everyone alive today is descended from survivors of the 1918 H1N1 Spanish flu pandemic (20 million dead), the 1957 H2N2 Asian flu (2 million dead), and the 1968 H3N2 Hong Kong flu pandemic (1 million dead), plus the various H1N1 mutations circulating since 1977 — survivors, that is, either by dumb luck, immunization or sufficient natural immune reponse to fight off the disease and its complications. Because there's something we can do about it, immunization factors large.

That said, the production and logistics, favoritism and irrationality in the distribution scheme for H1N1 immunization drugs is a bit weird. I'm not sure the H1N1 pandemic ranks with Katrina, but if this is an example of  "public be damned" free market economics, somebody's means of non-production needs to be nationalized.

Here's what I want for Xmas. I want my daughter immunized. → [Update 12/3] Might happen. There's another clinic scheduled to begin next week.