Dollars prevent remorse. That may not have been their original intention, but they do.

Why? Because dollars accumulate. They pile up, and all you have to do is wait. Who wouldn't want all of life to be like this? Right now, only age seems to increase itself; even in spite of the holder's wished. But follow me down what if lane...

What if earned laughter could be banked at a market rate. You spend three months, inciting polite chuckles in women with great personalities, and by deferring the ego boost until the next quarter, you could end up with a gaggle of pretty girls all finding you hilarious.

Or inspiration, that fickle rain that switches from drought to flood and back again before you can reach for your pencil. What author wouldn't want his ideas for the year deposited in a low-risk mutual fund, to be parceled out through the seasons in easily manageable chunks of genius?

Many a times, I've been walking down the street with, on my arm, the ephemeral girlfriend. I know she'll be gone in weeks, but as long as she's there, I get an extra glance, up and down, from other females on the prowl. Though the memory of them alone has been enough to get me through cold winter (and even warm summer) nights, what if I could hold on to that sliver of opportunity until I knew it would be most properly taken advantage of?

And this is what dollars prevent. That remorse. Because sure, you could have used that extra dog-in-a-wetsuit line at the Halloween party and then, yeah, you could have ended up on a couch with Christina Kretschen. But if you could just find a way to turn your charm, your humor, your attraction into money (difficult, but this is what we keep SoCal around for) and back again (easy, so long as you know what euphemisms to begin your journey in the yellow pages at), what appreciation there could be! That clothed groping in 8th grade, at a measly interest rate of 4% ends up as a full blown mistress, just by age 55! And who wouldn't want that?

Me. I wouldn't want that. I want my mistresses now. I believe it was Benjamin Franklin, and I'm paraphrasing here, who first said that any man who would give up a porsche to have a 401k ain't getting neither. And if he thinks the pearly gates will reward his forethought, well, just wait till he gets there and St. Peter's at the Tribal Casino, feeding a slot machine with the last few quarters from the pawn shop where he left angelic architecture in capable if dingy hands.

But squandering can happen in either direction. Exhausting resources is no more shameful than leaving them untapped. Even children can only be distracted for so long by the answer of "maybe later", rolling it over their tongue to determine its vintage, its year, and where that slight earthy flavor comes from (before realizing it's from the dirt they've been all the while shoveling into their mouths), and they're Children, for Chrissakes!

No doubt there are many who would rather forget all but the first few of these paragraphs. Wishing to put the red shirt in with the whites, and live their life in dull pink. I say, give me my fleeces, red with enemies' blood, and my oxford shirts, collars starched, as they come. Cause who knows what the bank of fortune has to offer me, and mortgaging it now, while possible locking me in to low interest rates, dooms me to spending the rest of my life tryign to catch up to where I should have been able to be being already by then.

Yes, dollars prevent remorse. But so does carpe'ing one's diems.