I attended a dinner at a fine Italian restaurant with a group of older mostly retired people who made their money by long term stock market investments. They seemed totally upbeat and enthusiastic about “the market”. Little do they know, I think.
I was sort of an outsider,having zero money and only attending because of my parents. We took our assigned seats as I met “John”, a regional sales manager for an investment firm. His mannerisms were, well, rehearsed but my first impression was so powerful I will remember it until I die. The black emptyness of this man’s soul literally shook me. (Mind you I have been on occasion getting these psychic like impressions from pictures of late. Alberto Gonzales scared the crap our of me.) God, this man needs more joy in his life. Two young children he has, yet the mundane conventional conversation topics prevailed. As dinner progressed I sensed he knew not what to make of me, an engineer eating pollo continental style but talking about horses. I didn’t watch that “big football game”, I was with the horses.
Horses are prey animals so in learning about them one learns also the ways of the predator, that’s us, in their eyes. After a solid year of untrained horse and untrained rider the joy of accomplished man horse communication far and away beats the black soul of a money manager.
Since the dinner though the thoughts of money have even gone to my mother’s head. You see in this country having money simply means you are married to it. It is actually not yours. It belongs to those you hire to manage it, the lawyers you pay to craft documents you have no chance of understanding to protect “assets” that will change next year due to new laws and tax implications. It is literally an entire industry of bullshit.
The real deal though is that even with an entire lifetime of saving, not spending and even my father collecting cans for the deposit here in America, land of the free and home of the brave you get squat from government. All of this lifetime of savings is for the possibility of nursing home care. The land of the free and home of the brave is searching through seven years of detailed financial transactions of its’ senior citizens in order to enter the nursing home.
Now even if I croak, a penniless homeless person I intend petition the Lord himself one last return to earth to mount my Apocalyptic horse, snicker at all the soon to be smitten and say, “I told you so”.
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Love this brief essay.
Your shorthand here says so much. I grew up riding horses, have been away since going east to moneyland, and there’s a learning moment here for me.
Now we’re down in Mexico where people still ride horses on cobblestone streets, and I might add, the most beautiful gaited animals I’ve ever beheld (you get that, Montana, my home state?). I love what you’ve written about horses:
Priceless!
I keep working up steam for a diary something to the effect of “the revenge of art upon money” because as someone with a lifetime training in illusionism, I know a mirage when I see it. And like you say, it’s all debt in the US, that’s the joke. People tisk-tisk at Mexicans as poor, and I wish they’d come down here and learn a thing or two. One, these people are so much more infinitely happy than up there it’s off the charts, two, they own their “hovels” and land and livestock and agriculture free and clear. I keep saying: what we’ve got is a highly capitalized tenant (i.e. mortgage-holding) class pitying an almost entirely uncapitalized landholding class, in relations between NOTB/SOTB. Once the mortgage industry burns to a searing pall, we’ll see which side of the border is more desperate for pity.
But they think they own all the bank-financed toys. And they’re so damned unhappy up there. And ever more slanted goes the playing field, and no one ever identifies the invisible (FED) hands tweaking the cat’s cradle of a finance-based society. In the end, all that is left of the US economy is debt – sales of debt instruments is the number one business going anymore. And people like “John” don’t get it. They actually think there’s life to the market.
Meanwhile in Mexico statistics say, statistics say, but tell me how one gets statistics on a people who are called by bankers “the unbanked” because they refuse to put a peso into a bank? Some are poor, some are not, but you absolutely can not tell by the looks of a house. Case in point, our friend lives next door to one very wealthy Mexican who brings in roughly $8,000/month leasing his lands. He has no indoor plumbing, and anyone from the US would cluck their tongue and call his home a hovel. When our friend laughs and asks him why no indoor plumbing, he asks her: why should I? I’ve lived this way all my life, what’s wrong with it? And for that matter when the daytime temperature hovers around 80 all year long, big deal if you have to walk across a small courtyard to the latrine. One doesn’t have to chip ice here to get outdoors in January.
A much happier people. Let me know if you ever decide to relocate here among a people whom I know you would love. We’ll do all we can to help you out. You hardly fit in up there in money-worship-land… as if I needed to tell you.