A Yankees-Red Sox Exchange of Epic Proportions
I received the following e-mail from a good friend at Yale called Sean Campion (all you need know of him is that he's an embittered Mets fan whose come-lately support for the Red Sox is couched in a hatred of the Yankees evil-empire in much the same poetic way that his support for John Kerry is couched in a hatred of Bush's evil-empire).
"Hey… I’ve been meaning for a while to IM you, find out how jolly ol eng has treated you and whatnot, but midterms, sloth and the mesmerizing beauty of Johnny Damon have prevented me from doing anything productive for weeks. Hence, hasty email.
Anyway, I’m sure that Jen kept you up on the details of the most humiliating collapse of any team in sports history. I enjoyed it thoroughly, mainly because I won’t have to listen to Ronan Tynan for another year. Did you know that he added a new verse to God Bless America? It made him approximately 33% more jingoistically irritating. And mercifully, we’ll never have to hear another “who’s your daddy” chant from Yankees fans to the “let’s go Yankees” beat. Game 7 was like a maury povich moment when the paternity test comes back, and it turns out that david ortiz is actually your daddy and he rampages through the studio overturning chairs, only that now he hits monstrous homeruns of Javier Vasquez. Did I mention that I enjoyed this thoroughly?"
To which I responded:
"Camp--
Jen and I made a conscious decision to carry on with our lives as if there were only one team in New York and its postseason fate had been decided in April. That being said, I paid 15 bucks for the postseason package on MLBTV and saw every assfucking moment of it. And if you think that's not bad enough, try the fact that of the dozen other visiting students around here (whom I have to eat with, mind you) ten are from Tufts, Boston College or Brown. Not to mention a cadre of wicket-hitting, Pimms-drinking Englishmen who are rooting for the team NOT called the "Yankees". (The only Tory, or Marquis de Lafayette if you will, is my Politics tutor who, being from Boston England, has a bone to pick with tourists from its Masachussets cousin who find the quaint fishing village in the Eastern Midlands to be a bit of a disappointment).
Nevertheless, all of the Americans agreed after Game 3 that the likeliest outcome would be for the Red Sox to come back and win three games and lose in Game 7 in stunning fashion. It might have even happened if Joe Torre hadn't trusted the start to a 40 year-old Faulknerian man-child who throws instead of pitching and whose last postseason appearance saw a four game sweep of his Padres. That--and his decision to bring Vasquez into the middle of an inning instead of letting a reliever take the hits and have Vasquez start the third--is what cost the Yankees Game 7. That, of course, and the Sheffield/Rodriguez Dante-esque descent into oblivion after Game 3.
I will say the following about your proxy-team however: On the negative side, what the fuck goes through Francona's head? Take Derek Lowe out after 88 pitches in game 4? Use Pedro Martinez in relief in a game seven? Musical chairs with the bullpen every nite, let Foulke throw 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 pitches? NOT start Pokey Reese in game seven after Bellhorn's Knoblauchian performance? I think it was truly one of the worst managed series in the history of baseball. But Torre's mistakes were only in Game 7, Francona's were more consistent if nevertheless successful (I'm FIRST-guessing, obviously, not second). Of course, I think its Millar who describes his Red Sox team as "a bunch of idiots"; in a way I'm glad they finally succeeded at cranking out that manuscript of Hamlet. And not a moment too soon, either. Thirteen free agents next year. Hmmm. New York needs a DH, and there's a hitting machine in the AL who plays left field (not very well) and he's said he's always wanted to be a Yankee. Also a disgruntled shortstop in Chicago who'd probably make a fine second-baseman in the Bronx, to further guild the Yankees infield. You cannot stop us Sean, you can only hope to contain us.
On the positive side, a hundred years from now my great-great-grandkids will be able to go to a Yankees/Red Sox game at the stadium and chant with a sense of history and pride: "TWO-thous-AND-four""
So who won the exchange? Cast your votes.
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Social interactions are inherently funny. Perhaps this is because humans are essentially oversized, hairless rodents. But I think it's also because, when you get right down to it, we make no sense. My favorite, and most vexing example comes from two friends talking together:
Guy friend: Man I miss sex.
Girl Acquaintance: Me too.
Guy: ...
Girl: OK, good night.
If this is not immediately absurd to you, try replacing "have sex" with other phrases, like, "gain intimacy", "engage in a meaningful soulful discussion" or "continue this conversation for more than one sentence." My point is: mutual desire is a quorum in all these circumstances.
To clarify, allow me to gloss the above conversation with my favorite metaphor for physical intimacy.
Guy: I want waffles.
Girl: Funny you mention that, I happen to have a giant surplus of waffles, personally.
Guy: (suggestively) Y'know, you could give me some waffles.
Girl: No, that would be weird. I'm going to go try to give away my waffles. Bye.
Only two things have changed here. One, the suggestion is now voiced, whereas before it was implied. But you don't want to be hooking up with a girl who can't read ellipses anyhow. And second, replacing sex with waffles. And if you think that substantively changes the discussion, well then, my friend, I think you haven't been having the right kind of waffles.
Friday, October 22, 2004
Theses on Bentley's Theory of History
Author's Note: I've decided to fashion my response to Bentley's recent work in the time-honored and celebrated form of aphorisms. The reasons are manifold. For one thing, as Bentley is decidedly more proactive than I am, he has written the thesis on which I can only, in a sense, comment. For another, Bentley is a historical figure whose ideas have had a marked and lasting influence at The Enfranchised and should be come-to-grips-with before any meaningful departure from them can take place.
1. Signifiers as memorials are aimed at evoking a sympathy which can not, by the loose and overlapping 'laws' which govern the human mind, be produced ex nihilo in an unaffected subject. One way of putting this is to say that memorials are signifiers which reinforce the primacy of the (insert unit of political aggregation here), or sustain and reproduce various "imagined communities", whose decay or absence would undermine the prevailing discourses of power. A more sympathetic and slightly less...Continental way of thinking about this, is to say that memorials as signifiers give an otherwise disparate and indifferent set of individuals a common frame of reference from which to motivate certain moral judgments and beliefs which they would otherwise be unmoved to issue. I give you the Le Monde on September 12, 2001: "Today, we are all Americans."
2. We will allow, and indeed assert, the kind of point that Bentley makes about the all-too transient nature of historical remembrances. The Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, all fade with time and are replaced by the likes of Mai Lei, Tianamen and September 11 (notice the degree of ex poste facto reflexivity and cosmopolitanism associated with the first five that the last, as of yet, lacks). The sheer biological fact of man is that his sympathies fade with spacial and temporal distance. Hume conjectured this in 1740 and it has been confirmed by 150 years of anthropology and social psychology. But this doesn't seem to be all we can say about the matter.
3. Material and institutional remembrances are of two discrete kinds: Those which aim to commemorate and reinforce a particular act, belief, or mode of behavior deemed to be useful and/or important to a given society; and those which aim to emphasize a particularly disuseful or distasteful act, belief or mode of behavior so as discourage its repetion in the future. To acknowledge this distinction is to acknowledge that to say "Support our troops" is something quite different--not just in context but in kind--than to say "Never forget the Holocaust." This, of course, in no way precludes the possibility of a remembrance appealing to both the reinforcement of a positive and the admonition of a negative--as say, the Gettysburg Memorial is both a testament to the bravery of American soldiers and a warning about consequences of deep civil divisions; or Martin Luther King Day is both a celebration of the life of a great American and a warning against the kind of ideological pathos that led to his assassination.
4. Bentley calls on us to "stop deceiving widows and orphans: your loss will be remembered for as long as it can be, as long as it is still useful to remember, as long as it doesn't cause more loss as baggage than it reminds of joy. We are sorry if this compounds your loss, but it has only been by telling this to the generations before you that you even now can walk through streets without weeping at the undiminished loss of those who came before." This is an accurate and thoroughly unattractive conception of the facts. It nevertheless gives the lie to Bentley's broader skepticism. For Bentley, this call to action stems from the moral repugrance of a political end. And while we will not assert that that which is morally impermissible is in someway politically permissible, we will reluctantly but forcefully assert the political efficacy of something that is not impermissible but morally counter-intuitive. By this I mean that the broader social grief and remembrance outlined in #1 is and ought be distinct from the rather more personal and permanent grief and remembrance we can attribute to those "widows and orphans". Whereas the latter are all-too-human reactions to the loss of loved-ones, the former are at least in part practical social tools. I say "in part" because some of the public reaction to 9/11 was no doubt rooted in a universal human sympathy (the existence of which is beyond our present scope). I say this sympathy is in part a "social tool" because it and its material manifestations (memorials etc.) are of one of the two types mentioned in #3. As signifiers subject to distribution via the global media, they remind peoples around the world of acts, beliefs and behaviors to be approbated or admonished. (Notice too that the very same material signifier can and does signify different things to different cultures, e.g. coverage of 9/11 on CNN vs. coverage on Al-Jazeera).
5. Hegel saw history as the acts of a metaphysical agent he called the World Spirit, or, in facile German, the Weltgeist, whose teleological Idea was the substantiation of human freedom through the dialectics of historical change. In Hegel and many of the thinkers of the late Englightenment, there is a kind of almost absurd belief that the history of the world tends toward the better, the greater, the more just. This is what seems so alien to us in the 21st century (and to Bentley and his sympathizers), both about the thinkers themselves and the prevailing social structure to which their ideas gave form. Of course, now we know that it is not inevitable that things get better. In the very least it is contingent. At worst, if one believes in a sort of social entropy, it is inevitable for things to get worse.
6. This knowledge sheds light on a salient and complex feature of history as we have come to understand it: namely, that while things can get better and worse (and while the prevailing discourses of power can be both progressive and reactionary) history itself cannot, in a very important sense, move backwards. It can't, that is, only so long as we remember. It doesn't necessarily matter which particulars we remember, or which images and persons we choose to immortalize, it only matters that there survives a recorded overlapping consensus (with all its inevitable contradictions and subjective interpretations) of what HAS BEEN and WHAT IS. It is of chief importance to remember, even transiently, because remembering is the stuff civilization is built on. Its artificiality need not inspire cynicism in us; its artificiality is essential to its purpose. Society, ideology, material culture, all of it IS artifice. It is the scaffolding to which we cling to keep our collective noses just inches above the raging sea of fundamentalism (and I use that term in its absolutely broadest sense) that threatens to drown us in the pre-historic anarchy, in a life which Hobbes aptly describes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
7. The human capacity for language, its opposable thumbs and precision grip, as well as a handful of other evolutionary upshots, have given us rational and material capacities sufficiently rich that we can Represent. And if we can Represent we can Remember, and if we can Remember we can Learn, and if we Learn we can Change. It is my hope that it won't be viewed as ugly humanism (and if it is, so be it) to say that man can lay claim to at least some part of the stake in his own teleological end which, until Ozymandias (for all his arrogance and irony), was solely the province of Mother Nature.
D.R. Foster
Pembroke College
Oxford
Erratum
i. Homo Erectus was by definition a hominid, not an australopithicoid.
ii. Signifiers and signifieds? Derrida is dead, may he rest in peace.
Author's Note: I've decided to fashion my response to Bentley's recent work in the time-honored and celebrated form of aphorisms. The reasons are manifold. For one thing, as Bentley is decidedly more proactive than I am, he has written the thesis on which I can only, in a sense, comment. For another, Bentley is a historical figure whose ideas have had a marked and lasting influence at The Enfranchised and should be come-to-grips-with before any meaningful departure from them can take place.
1. Signifiers as memorials are aimed at evoking a sympathy which can not, by the loose and overlapping 'laws' which govern the human mind, be produced ex nihilo in an unaffected subject. One way of putting this is to say that memorials are signifiers which reinforce the primacy of the (insert unit of political aggregation here), or sustain and reproduce various "imagined communities", whose decay or absence would undermine the prevailing discourses of power. A more sympathetic and slightly less...Continental way of thinking about this, is to say that memorials as signifiers give an otherwise disparate and indifferent set of individuals a common frame of reference from which to motivate certain moral judgments and beliefs which they would otherwise be unmoved to issue. I give you the Le Monde on September 12, 2001: "Today, we are all Americans."
2. We will allow, and indeed assert, the kind of point that Bentley makes about the all-too transient nature of historical remembrances. The Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor, all fade with time and are replaced by the likes of Mai Lei, Tianamen and September 11 (notice the degree of ex poste facto reflexivity and cosmopolitanism associated with the first five that the last, as of yet, lacks). The sheer biological fact of man is that his sympathies fade with spacial and temporal distance. Hume conjectured this in 1740 and it has been confirmed by 150 years of anthropology and social psychology. But this doesn't seem to be all we can say about the matter.
3. Material and institutional remembrances are of two discrete kinds: Those which aim to commemorate and reinforce a particular act, belief, or mode of behavior deemed to be useful and/or important to a given society; and those which aim to emphasize a particularly disuseful or distasteful act, belief or mode of behavior so as discourage its repetion in the future. To acknowledge this distinction is to acknowledge that to say "Support our troops" is something quite different--not just in context but in kind--than to say "Never forget the Holocaust." This, of course, in no way precludes the possibility of a remembrance appealing to both the reinforcement of a positive and the admonition of a negative--as say, the Gettysburg Memorial is both a testament to the bravery of American soldiers and a warning about consequences of deep civil divisions; or Martin Luther King Day is both a celebration of the life of a great American and a warning against the kind of ideological pathos that led to his assassination.
4. Bentley calls on us to "stop deceiving widows and orphans: your loss will be remembered for as long as it can be, as long as it is still useful to remember, as long as it doesn't cause more loss as baggage than it reminds of joy. We are sorry if this compounds your loss, but it has only been by telling this to the generations before you that you even now can walk through streets without weeping at the undiminished loss of those who came before." This is an accurate and thoroughly unattractive conception of the facts. It nevertheless gives the lie to Bentley's broader skepticism. For Bentley, this call to action stems from the moral repugrance of a political end. And while we will not assert that that which is morally impermissible is in someway politically permissible, we will reluctantly but forcefully assert the political efficacy of something that is not impermissible but morally counter-intuitive. By this I mean that the broader social grief and remembrance outlined in #1 is and ought be distinct from the rather more personal and permanent grief and remembrance we can attribute to those "widows and orphans". Whereas the latter are all-too-human reactions to the loss of loved-ones, the former are at least in part practical social tools. I say "in part" because some of the public reaction to 9/11 was no doubt rooted in a universal human sympathy (the existence of which is beyond our present scope). I say this sympathy is in part a "social tool" because it and its material manifestations (memorials etc.) are of one of the two types mentioned in #3. As signifiers subject to distribution via the global media, they remind peoples around the world of acts, beliefs and behaviors to be approbated or admonished. (Notice too that the very same material signifier can and does signify different things to different cultures, e.g. coverage of 9/11 on CNN vs. coverage on Al-Jazeera).
5. Hegel saw history as the acts of a metaphysical agent he called the World Spirit, or, in facile German, the Weltgeist, whose teleological Idea was the substantiation of human freedom through the dialectics of historical change. In Hegel and many of the thinkers of the late Englightenment, there is a kind of almost absurd belief that the history of the world tends toward the better, the greater, the more just. This is what seems so alien to us in the 21st century (and to Bentley and his sympathizers), both about the thinkers themselves and the prevailing social structure to which their ideas gave form. Of course, now we know that it is not inevitable that things get better. In the very least it is contingent. At worst, if one believes in a sort of social entropy, it is inevitable for things to get worse.
6. This knowledge sheds light on a salient and complex feature of history as we have come to understand it: namely, that while things can get better and worse (and while the prevailing discourses of power can be both progressive and reactionary) history itself cannot, in a very important sense, move backwards. It can't, that is, only so long as we remember. It doesn't necessarily matter which particulars we remember, or which images and persons we choose to immortalize, it only matters that there survives a recorded overlapping consensus (with all its inevitable contradictions and subjective interpretations) of what HAS BEEN and WHAT IS. It is of chief importance to remember, even transiently, because remembering is the stuff civilization is built on. Its artificiality need not inspire cynicism in us; its artificiality is essential to its purpose. Society, ideology, material culture, all of it IS artifice. It is the scaffolding to which we cling to keep our collective noses just inches above the raging sea of fundamentalism (and I use that term in its absolutely broadest sense) that threatens to drown us in the pre-historic anarchy, in a life which Hobbes aptly describes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
7. The human capacity for language, its opposable thumbs and precision grip, as well as a handful of other evolutionary upshots, have given us rational and material capacities sufficiently rich that we can Represent. And if we can Represent we can Remember, and if we can Remember we can Learn, and if we Learn we can Change. It is my hope that it won't be viewed as ugly humanism (and if it is, so be it) to say that man can lay claim to at least some part of the stake in his own teleological end which, until Ozymandias (for all his arrogance and irony), was solely the province of Mother Nature.
D.R. Foster
Pembroke College
Oxford
Erratum
i. Homo Erectus was by definition a hominid, not an australopithicoid.
ii. Signifiers and signifieds? Derrida is dead, may he rest in peace.
Memories Fade. Sacrifices are forgotten. And it's endearing how we pretend they don't to reassure. Not to reassure those we remember (if they need to be remembered, whether they are or not is little solace), but those whose pity pushes us to make promises. Even if it soothes momentary tears, it's better to not make promises in the first place than to inevitably break them, even if the pledge could be maintained for 100 years.
And so, let's accept this. Let's accept that there's only so much any one person can know. There are limits. Remember the
Of course, it's nice to save space in the brain, but it's awfully hard to sleep there. Which brings us to the real estate of loss: memorials. Chipped away from marble or cast in bronze, the monuments of today are meant to last. And last. Until they start to show their age, not gracefully but by dilapidation. Hinges break, windows warp. Fewer visitors run eagerly through the turnstiles, until the ones who might come are put off by the overly insistent and too damn helpful gaze of the curator whose day consists mainly of rereading scraps of 18th Century parchment. And soon enough, we are not remembering the memory but the monument. Our efforts turn selfish but with a pretense of philanthropy, the most vile of motives. Some superintendent's wife takes up the cause of preserving the local treasure, without realizing the irony of watching the watcher. I can only thank the stars I live in a country too young to have preservation societies fragile enough to need protection themselves.
And if you might doubt that the attention of the public is so easily turned from signified to signifier, I ask you this: Who was Cheops and what did he do? I don't know, to be honest, and neither do you. But you still hope one day to travel to
Instead, let us build proportional memorials. The greater the loss, the greater the structure. For that wonderful loaf of bread you forgot to eat in a timely manner, leave a pile of dust on your way to the car, to be washed away by the next rain. Keep the last small present your ex-lover gave your prominently on your desk, to warm you with its fond inner light until a house pet or co-worker absent-mindedly confiscates it. Fill the
Even better than reminding other people or yourself of a loved one departed, in one circumstance or another, is making something of that. Be better because of their memory. Drive safer, in remembrance of Cindy. Build a better mousetrap as a tribute to Fluffy, God Rest His Soul. Eat healthier, and let your toned abs be dedicated to your fourth grade teacher's infinite patience and compassion. For extra credit, combine creation and retelling. They Might Be Giants immortalized our 11th President in a song with a silly melody. Shakespare's 18th sonnet is an admirable attempt ("So long as ... eyes can see,/ so long lives this, and this gives life to thee").
But English will sooner or later go out of style, and TMBG's alternative-nerdy-indie-pop-rock style still hasn't quite made it. So what was the last time that remembrance gave us something permanent? Some people say ideas stopped happening in the Renaissance, some in Ancient Greece, but I say that even ideas can fade. So look further back, from thoughts to emotions. At some point there was a first human. And a few years later there were other humans, and then loss started. And there was one instant, when a Homo Erectus walked away from her mate. If you had been there, you could have looked into his Australopithecine eyes and seen the first hurt, the first numb acceptance that you'll still notice if you look closely at anybody recently without their companion.
And a few years after that, some hunter dragged home a Mastodon carcass to find his proto-spouse shtupping a gatherer, and he invented betrayal, forever to be invoked with a debt of invention owed to him, and by him to her. In due time came jealousy and loneliness. But it was only with the addition of these pangs that allowed someone to create an emotion not after the loss but instead of it. And he knew of how awful things could be, and that convinced him that what he had truly was as great as his heart told him. And he left to the world not bitterness, but the first true love.
Biologists may disagree with my phylogeny, but in my eyes, he was the first true Human.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Here's a little ditty for the philosophy majors out there:
In conversation with yours truly,
Ethics Tutor: "Your paper [on moral subjectivism] is lucid, thorough and quite good. There are, however, some elements of unargued dogmatism. Its very...Continental."
Worst...........Insult.................Ever
In conversation with yours truly,
Ethics Tutor: "Your paper [on moral subjectivism] is lucid, thorough and quite good. There are, however, some elements of unargued dogmatism. Its very...Continental."
Worst...........Insult.................Ever
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
In response to my associate's previous post, I quote the following from the archives (check them out, there's good shit in there).
"Bentley, I offer this in friendship:
Cry on the outside and laugh on the inside.
Cut a stitch in time, pick up a penny on tails.
Procrastinate.
Masturbate.
Imitate.
Grab the bull by his balls and then run away.
Examine a gift horse's molars.
Wear white after labor day.
Ignore every bit of practical advice ever given to you by Benjamin Franklin.
Don't allow yourself the luxury of pondering all of Oscar Wilde's bittersweet musings.
Recognize altruisms as all-falsisms.
Disregard any list compiled by an ametaur that attempts to undo 5000 years of common sense.
Find your own fucking ethos.
Piss into the wind.
Eat with the wrong fork.
Eat with your hands.
Eat your hand.
Shoot your Ch'I all over her tits.
Publish a manifesto.
Don't listen to Emo.
Kiss the bad guy, save the night and kill the girl.
Ride on in from the sunrise.
The only way to become more interesting is to become more interest-ED.
--Fosteyricon."
Can you count how many rules he broke, kids? If you get it right, you win a shiny new New Jersey Turnpike token.
"Bentley, I offer this in friendship:
Cry on the outside and laugh on the inside.
Cut a stitch in time, pick up a penny on tails.
Procrastinate.
Masturbate.
Imitate.
Grab the bull by his balls and then run away.
Examine a gift horse's molars.
Wear white after labor day.
Ignore every bit of practical advice ever given to you by Benjamin Franklin.
Don't allow yourself the luxury of pondering all of Oscar Wilde's bittersweet musings.
Recognize altruisms as all-falsisms.
Disregard any list compiled by an ametaur that attempts to undo 5000 years of common sense.
Find your own fucking ethos.
Piss into the wind.
Eat with the wrong fork.
Eat with your hands.
Eat your hand.
Shoot your Ch'I all over her tits.
Publish a manifesto.
Don't listen to Emo.
Kiss the bad guy, save the night and kill the girl.
Ride on in from the sunrise.
The only way to become more interesting is to become more interest-ED.
--Fosteyricon."
Can you count how many rules he broke, kids? If you get it right, you win a shiny new New Jersey Turnpike token.
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.
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.
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