There has a long period during which the amount of money was fixed and inadequate and then at
a specific moment in a specific hour there appeared an excess, a flood of money. I did not change throughout this period. In other words the amount of 'me' remained constant as an entity, there was no weight loss -no change in height or eye color -food preferences or other of my likes and dislikes, no increase or decrease in I.Q. or personality. No, it was only the money that increasingly decreased and then suddenly avalanched in increase. The effect of the sudden increase was for the most part that of a low level but continuous feeling of muted euphoria -accompanied by the quiet rush of a sense of release and freedom and then on the second day steadily growing kind of confusion and imbalance which felt secondary to the mind and body rushing about in a form of moderately controlled delirium in pursuit of a limitless cascade of possibilities, the sudden availability of numerous wishes and plans previously stalled and frozen and now all competing simultaneously for immediate realization, a delayed Christmas wish list of seizure size desires suddenly dumped on my door from a dormant out
of shape disoriented Santa Claus.
I had slowly adapted to a continual mental landscape of worry and frustration and anger that occasionally heightened into a perceived crisis and then back to worry, frustration and anger again.
I had lived for so long with the gradual accumulation of decrease -of being unable to be able to generate movement and finally its subsequent cousin, motivation, that a part of me had lost the memory and reflex of how to use those powers that connects the mind to its belief in itself, in its ability to engineer the outcome of even moderate desires through simple willing and this, combined with the intoxication of the now dizzying surplus, produced an odd vertigo, as though I'd climbed to high too fast, the room of the universe was spinning with possibilities, giddy with wanton glee, yet pregnant with an ominous sense of imminent nebulous peril. How odd that the fruitful should fragment.
I had lived for an extended period during which I internally observed the gradual erosion of the sense of self that comes with watching your teeth fall out, the utility shut off notices pile up, and the wolf packs of my countrymen circle closer and closer to my house; to see and feel the disappearance of the invitations to the party of life happen as my clothes and general appearance became frayed at the edges and worse than any of it, not being able to share the whole misery of the experience with present or former 'significant others' who were still basking under the sun of good fortune, to see their embarrassed awkwardness at the slightest leakage of my situation, not to mention, any hint of rage which would bring forth immediate behavior correction, self control or moderation advice, effectively deleting the notion that your deepest human emotional response to your situation has any useful currency.
And then, as if the result of some playfully perverse 'presto' - a drunken Wells Fargo security guards error, a bag of gold coins falls off the stagecoach from having the horses take too sharp a turn and the money appears in an account in my name. 'Presto,' I am magically restored to my rightful title, from profligate to prince, insufficient to sufficient, fit to not only kiss Snow White but to sweetly fuck her senseless. I am again a citizen of the world, I suffice.
And all the while my attention's fascination has been fixated and focused on the simple absurd mystery of money. There isn't a drug known that can rival it for the silent stealth of its absolute dominion over human behavior. And its all in the mind's mind, we are the ultimate pusher, money is our Machiavellian Moriarty.
"Good taste is the death of art." Truman Capote
Monday, June 25, 2007
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