Same as it ever was

[mallorys_camera]

Dreamed I was desperately searching through a stack of musty old library books for a copy of Yeats’ poem Sailing to Byzantium.

Then woke up while it was still very dark to see the Golden Boy off on his East Coast adventure. The woodcutter’s son, the long way round the world – same as it ever was. I like getting up in the middle of the night. Look up and there’s the decrescent moon, brilliant centerpiece to a timeless harvest of stars. The cat comes in covered with spider webs. In a little while the cat will creep out, the fog will begin pouring back in, the distant galaxies will all be gone – because, of course, I can’t believe in what I cannot see.

I wish now I’d spent less time when I was younger pursuing idiot romances and more time flossing my teeth.

It’s difficult to write. There are heaps and heaps of business-related things piled on my desk and they all have priority over my own thoughts. That's the nature of commerce. Last week was very slow plus we got deliveries amounting to something like 2000 bottles of hot sauce, all of which had to be entered into inventory, priced and sorted. Left me feeling drained and wondering about the nature of money. I understand money in a basic accounting sort of way but I’m mystified by the karma behind it. Seems like there’s more money around than there oughta be given that it all derives from basic raw materials that some people have and other people want. It’s kind of a pyramid game and I’m left wondering when it will all implode and praying that I won’t be one of the victims when it does.

Comments

[wailaki.livejournal.com]

My economics professor was from Indonesia, and had a Zen Buddhist philosophy on the concept of money. It is worth nothing, he taught us, we just think it is. And that blind faith is the only thing that keeps the economy from crashing. Oh. Great.

[usedmonsters.livejournal.com]

Funny, reading the post above, I was just thinking of you as the philosophical merchant. And you just toss off these amazing lines, like, "brilliant centerpiece to a timeless harvest of stars." Whoa. I've wondered about the whole game collapsing too. But there are so many out there fighting to keep it alive, to keep the balls in the air. Or some such shit.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's it exactly. Money, the economy -- it's a huge consensual hallucination. And we know that on the macro level, it's all balanced on the assumption that the world can borrow against future value. But what if the future value isn't there?

Remember the zero population growth movement twenty years or so ago? Remember how one day pundits simply stopped talking about it? That's because they finally figured out that unless the world continues to overpopulate, there will simply not be enough people to buy into the shell game.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're so nice! Thanks. The shell game won't collapse in our lifetime, that's for sure. But the guy moving the cards around is gonna shift. In 20 years, he won't be American. He'll probably be Chinese. Consider -- the biggest technological advances that are going on right now are in biotechnology. America can't buy in to this revolution -- Jehovah doesn't approve. So I think it's the Chinese who are going to synthesize the first in vitro human kidney. But just think -- if you were in kidney failure, how much would you pay for an organ that works? Now pretend you're Bill Gates.