How To Be Rich

The first question to ask of anyone trying to sell you a belief system is, “Will it pay my bills or clean my house?” If Mohammed, Jesus, or Tony Robbins starts handing you a paycheck each week, or scrubs your bathtub, go follow him. Until then, just keep working, take Sundays off, and skip the payment to the priestly caste.

(Also, “believers” take note: there is no Biblical edict to smell good. Thus you morally may smell like, but not covet, your neighbor’s ass. Quit wasting water!)

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 Cheery Bug Apocalypse

The cheapest and “greenest” way to kill roaches: 1) Leave the last couple gulps in a bottle of beer. 2) Lean the bottle at a slight angle in a corner or against a wall, near your cockroach nation. 3) Come back in a week. Ick! A pickled mass, a dead party that none can leave. Entomologists and other bug lovers, don’t cry; death comes in ecstatic cockroach rapture, bellies full and stone drunk. We should all be so lucky.

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How many people have jobs that mean anything, produce anything useful, have any intrinsic value? How many wake up happy to go to work in the morning? It is reason to be grateful if you do, even if you’re wiping old people’s butts. Most of us do not. Most paid activity is eternal paper shuffling, mind-numbing numbers, flurries of incomprehensible action, and complex plots to avoid actual work. Way too much of it is completely irrelevant in the cosmic scheme of things. Kiss your mate and kids and dogs at the end of the day, just to be sure you did one thing worth doing.

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The Good And Drunk Housekeeping Institute

   If you put as much effort into house and yard work as you do at the “gym”, you can skip the gym. Plus, you can drink while “working out” if you wish! This makes housework less miserable, and no boss can send you home drunk because you’re already home drunk.

   In a perfect world, everyone who wants to drink and do housework should. Drunken exercise is still exercise. But it takes a lot of booze to make housework fun, and these are tough economic times.

   Thus I would like to announce a new charity, the Good and Drunk Housekeeping Institute. The endless pain of keeping useless possessions clean and maintained is real. Raid your change jar, and help us make the world a happier place. Friends don’t let friends clean house sober. Give, lots, now, to GanDHI.

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Flip Flop Flap

The modern “flip-flop” is similar to the warm-weather footwear of our ancient forefathers, but much lower quality. Named, of course, for the noise it makes as it spanks your feet’s bottoms as you walk.

   I left my flip-flops at my sons’ house far away last week. Desperate to avoid shoes in three digit heat, I asked to borrow another son’s old pair. Boy was I in luck: “Those useless pieces of crap? You can have ‘em.”

   Sure enough, I had to reconstruct one soon, with duct tape. This fix lasted a week, then the other one blew out. Now it is you who is in luck, as I share my wisdom, in three pictures to spare you 3000 words. If carefully taped, no one will notice, and your fashion status remains intact. You’re welcome.

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If words still made sense:

Liberals would be libertarians, and

Conservatives would be conservationists.

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Those who mourned the death of “beat” poet Allen Ginsberg will be glad to know his death was faked. He now sells real estate in Flagstaff. There are worse jobs.

War Profit Litany

To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
in order,
here named the Fathers in office in these industries, tele-
phones directing finance,
names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of the
stockholders of these destined Aggregates,
and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,
representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking
in hotel lobbies to persuade,
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
military, gossip, argue, and persuade
suggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, this
done for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon, consul-
tants to military, paid by their industry:
and these are the names of the generals & captains mili-
tary, who know thus work for war goods manufactur-
ers;
and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,
investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens em-
ployed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
coherent and definite,
and the first form of this litany begun first day December
1967 furthers this poem of these States. 

Allen Ginsberg

The real work is not to judge or acquire; it is to love.