...
Many years ago, I was an innkeeper in Mendocino. One of the fifty times I tried to leave the law office for good before I was finally successful. It was a darn pleasant place, with a gorgeous garden and directly across the highway from a cove where the ocean would barrel in and onto the rocks during storms and make it sound like canons going off in the soupy brume. If I'd owned the place you'd never have heard from me.
But I didn't, and the guy who did had a girlfriend who drove me batshit crazy. I tried hard to have a good relationship with her, but one time, the two of us out to dinner at the Albion River Inn, she admitted to me that she had fantasies of having a devoted friend, a maidservant-like friend, someone devoted enough to her to do things like draw her bath and attend to her laundry, that sort of thing... errands... cleaning... all the tedious stuff.
I told her those kinds of "friendships" are usually salaried, along with room and board.
She agreed the friend would have to be paid, but it would have to be somebody who adored her, looked up to her. Tricky to arrange, and silly to even need to admit, but there it is, she said. I agreed with her, though "silly" isn't the half of it.
Every time I try to get through this thing I keep thinking of that vain piece of work who thought she'd landed herself a live one. She had, in fact, been waylaid by a pathological liar not even partly considering having anything approximating a permanent relationship, but I let her find that out for herself. I think of all the wannabe aristocracy the psychopaths have charmed over the course of human history, all the average everyday people who leap into their maw thinking they'll be joining them at the top whenever they, say, decide to create a housing bubble....
It's not just "them". It's also all the secondary psychopaths they have doing their dirty work, and all the tertiary psychopaths conditioned to leap on it if they ever get a chance, to take the bones thrown, the scraps missed.
I think of the Saturn Death Cult guy who theorizes that money was invented by some of the survivors of the cataclysms that ended the Golden Age, when life was not hard, when there was plenty, and it was easy, so that they could still live like that on the backs of others. It took a lot of mindfucking and descendants trained to uphold it, but it has taken hold damn firmly here... to the point where it isn't just taking their power away that is needed.
We have to stop turning into them when we realize we can get our equity out of our houses and use it to start buying spec houses to flip or use it to start day trading instead of working... just basically getting into the making money on money thing instead of keeping it real... ending up on the street when the banks call in the notes... leaping at the chance to help them suck all the wealth out of every corner of the economy, out of all of us.
Catherine insists we can do money so that it is good for everyone. There is no reason for poverty. We can make a wonderful world. And since I know I have no hope of talking everyone out of money itself, I'm giving myself over to helping make that wonderful world.
always and any time....
