Fuck the Future, Burn Your Money
I need to fail. When good shit happens it hurts. I asked for a raise. Had to wait two months to know. The whole time thinking don’t freak out. God remove my obsession with money. God let me just show up and be of service. God remove outcome dependence. Let me be patient. But that’s not how it works.
You wait patiently for the bus but it doesn’t come until your patience breaks. Only shows up after you flip out that you’re gonna be late, stomp on your phone. A quantum thing. Can’t have what you want until it means nothing. I’ll find a mother for my kids the day my last sperm cell dies. Get a 500,000 advance for Hot Naked Tits 2 the day Weimar inflation hits. Good for half a heel of bread.
This raise was gonna save me. I got the raise. Then I knew it was nothing. Still poor forever. Eke out a niggardly existence in a town where fire comes out of the tap. You have to drink it because that’s all there is. A town where six foot four single moms from Denny’s fight videos with that weird downy back hair; women with hormone levels like Lyle Alzado beat me. Break my brittle old bones. Rip off my colostomy bag. Empty it on my face. Passing teens laugh at my shriveled penis in the cold. Turkey tendon arthritic hands flailing. Poor old and alone. I can never have kids. College tuition 68 grand a year. About twice the median pre tax income of an American household. Never have kids or if I do I’ll give them nothing. Cycle starts over again. They too age poor. Catheters yanked out in the street by hooting teen mobs from World Star.
Fuck education. College is a scam. But my kids not going to college: unconscionable. I went to fancy prep school. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. The education was seeing how rich people live. 5,000 families in the country get relief from money fear. It takes four generations living off the interest of the interest. By the time the panic’s bred out of them they’re 1/16th owners of islands off the Connecticut coast. Grandfathered in before some law that no man should own that. Dozens of horses in their name. Second cousins gifting them nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars every Christmas birthday graduation that they don’t even notice. It just sits somewhere accruing money and money and money. When I worked in real estate I’d look at property titles. Every single one under some family trust. Wealth must be multigenerational. If you’re not born rich you’ll never be. Unless you’re the sacrificial lamb who grinds yourself to the bone hustling so thankless descendants can forget you. People don’t talk about how fucking hard making money is. Whoring lying hustling to outcompete other hustling liars.
I’m about in the top ten per cent of income earners now. The top quarter of households. But a house in LA costs half a million at least. Rent is fifteen grand a year at least. On a block where if your bike isn’t embedded in a cube of solid steel it will instantly vanish . The median income of a household where I live is like 38 grand. How the fuck does it work.
We do have Weimar inflation. “Inflation” only counts off brand TVs made by Bengali slaves. Not food housing healthcare and education, not taxes upon taxes. It all goes up and up and up until you absolutely must inherit Saudi money to afford a shack. A textbook. A tongue depressor. The government will never save you. Capitalism is pure evil shit but anything the government touches, worse. Public schools just packed with MS13 face tattoo illiterates, grizzly bear sized microcephalic Denny’s fighters who’ll machete my gangly meek children. I’ll get out, you think. I’ll go to Couer d’Alene or some shit but the only job up there is jerking off donkeys. California money moving up into the mountains fleeing Mexicans, everywhere just rich old bastards ruining it. Wherever you go they suck so much out of you that your wage level means poor. To be upper middle class they make you move where the neighborhood association charges 20 grand a year to chide you about lawn ornaments.
I got the raise which means I suck I’ll fail I’m doing a shitty job they’ll fire me. Retroactively suck back my bank account. I can’t work anymore. I fucking hate this job, all jobs, but I need twenty god damn years of money to retire. Every year save enough to live half a year. So I need to work forty more years . That’s alone. No wife.
No kids to get scholarships to fancy prep school, where I learned how rich people are. Also Latin. Reciting the Aeneid . Something to keep my mind occupied the summer after, working third shift in a candle factory. That Cape Verdean bank robber who’d done 20 years for murder said he was gonna fuck me up. I’d lost a trick in the spades game on our 1AM lunch break. He kept glaring. Virgil kept me focused whacking the label gun on crates of Yankee Bayberry votives instead of panicking. Nine dollars an hour minus two bucks to the temp agency. Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris. I’ll have to work in a candle factory again at 80. Be a janitor again. Reach my hand into back office toilets again, dislodge black tar streaks of fat grizzled insurance men’s long thick greasy fibrous all meat diet logs. And every girl asks: what do you do.
This money is a curse. I’ve seen the poor. They’re happy. Every person in the Philippines, a joyous idiot. God give me specific brain damage that renders me unable to work. God make me a drooling twitching vegetable. Vaguely aware that it feels nice when an orderly balms my sores. God let me not dream of freedom. It kills me.
delicioustacos.com
Cover design by Matt Lawrence
mattlawrence.net