Too Much To Swallow

I find it exceedingly difficult to view life with the iron fist of restraint. We absolutely live in a world of money and capitol, where possession is defined by our value. What remains entirely confounding through this process of monetary exchange is just how little value a life can retain when it’s lost to the bullet holes of life’s unexpected rampage. It’s in this world of endless finances that I ask the question plaguing my generation: Have we lost sight of true possession?

My mom always told me that it was best to save. Life has a tendency to come flying at you like a speeding bullet, so relentless and quick that you can’t see it coming. I guess that’s unless some asshole corners you with a gun to your head. In that case you may acknowledge that split second when they pull the trigger, then WHAPAM, your fucking face blows to bits and pieces. That’s if you're lucky, I guess. Life’s not usually so direct. Rather, some even bigger asshole shoots the gun and misses the point completely, merely wounding you in the process in some vain attempt to play God. The unqualified idiots of the world, every one of us, can only hit or miss our targets. Which is why it’s always best to save. You know, for those unexpected moments when life fails to take you out completely.

My first piggy bank was your stereotypical pink ceramic pig complete with a slot in the back. I can’t quite remember what his name was, but he undoubtedly had one. Almost everything I owned had a name and I can guess his was probably something obnoxious like Oprah Oinks or Bacon Belly, that being my style. Dad set the piggy bank on my windowsill and stuffed a crisp dollar bill down the slot in Pinky Pig’s back. Being my tremendously impatient self, I was scouring the house for lost change. All I could find were pointless Nickels and Pennies, scrap metal that had already lost its glamour in my mid-nineties infantry. Having no income, the piggy bank was beginning to feel slightly obsolete in the broad scheme of things. So I popped Princess Pork’s plastic plug and found not one, but two crisply folded one-dollar bills.

Keen as I was, I had discovered the key to long term Piggy Bank investment; If you leave one dollar bill in the Pig then it turns into two, and fuck all those silly pennies (but leave a few for their customary jingle-jangle). Five years old and I’d already learned to diversify my portfolio.

My piggy bank continued to fund my daily trips to the seven-eleven where I spent much of my time in serious debate over candy selection. I thought myself a candy connoisseur of sorts - tried them all. I’d scour the lollipops for the wrapper with an Indian shooting the star with his bow. That always meant a free lollipop the next time around, which meant a second piece of candy, and I’d still always have my dollar. I grew addicted to the doughnuts for a short time. A complete glutton to sweets and coming off a particularly good Piggy day (Curly Chops left me three bucks that day!), I bought the largest doughnut they had. Glazed cinnamon swirls with sweet molasses paste, deep fried to the point where every bite was as wet and crunchy as a mouth full of French fries. It was heaven and I ate it all at once. “Don’t you want to save some of that for later?” Mom inquired, seemingly concerned. “You know, my mother always told me not to eat anything bigger than your head. If it were bigger then your head she’d say, ‘don’t eat that, it’s bigger than your head.’” “Mom, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Does though. Never eat anything bigger than your head. Mid-shit and entirely unprepared, my stomach gave in to the colossal doughnut. The room was ablaze with the most awful mix of sticky sweet meets sickly sour, the floor carpeted with bile and molasses paste. I screamed Bloody Mary, “Mom! Dad! Anybody!” Five years old and my first OD - ass on the toilet, face in the sink (after my move to New York, I’ve yet to top this moment). For a long while after that night even the slightest smell of doughnuts made my stomach numb with unease.

Dad wasn’t too happy to find Bountiful Boar without any real bounty at all, save a buck of course, and a half-handful of pennies for that novelty clickity-clank. We’d even bothered to smash the damn thing with a hammer, I guess unaware that my toddler fingers could easily sweep the pig clean. Shit out of sow, that’s what I was. I guess I’d known the whole time that the money was meant for some grand culmination, but it seemed rather pointless to sit and wait for some need or reward to stew, isolated, in such an ugly display of ceramic.

My only other self-guarded bank was a taunting three-foot Crayon. I figured in a perfect world that some young kid would fill the crayon with dollars and change, then twist it open at the middle letting all the pennies and quarters and dollars spill out onto the floor. My crayon merely became a solid weapon of choice when fighting with my sister; blunt and rigid with no excessive pain in its hollowed punch. No pouring sea of financial independence. I had nothing to wait for.

- - - -

In a city like New York, it’s hard not to recognize the necessary role of money in everyday life. Money is survival, and surviving comfortably is ideal. Aristotle would have a field day in New York’s new millennium of constant excess and deficiency; one man eating rice out of a puddle with a spoon while another tosses a cigarette from his government issued Escalade. Yet I can’t help but wonder if Aristotle just got it all wrong while getting it all right. Despite his and Karl Marx’s fetish with the inevitability of the rise of the masses in the mean, isn’t human existence in itself already testing the limits of nature by seeking the excess? Survival? Since we no longer have spears and loin clothes, the latter a disappointment, we now have dollars and bling. We’ve got to divide somehow, and since it’s no longer socially acceptable to kill someone unless you can do it without getting caught, we may as well develop a new method for valuing one another. Ta-dah! Money is born.

Mind you, I’m not a complete pessimist in this worldview. It is entirely possible to live within the means and seek the happiness that neither monetary victory nor defeat seems to bring in this market economy. It’s not, however, in the slightest possible to remove oneself from the society we’ve created, one that is powered by the excessive elite as the world careens out of control to preserve the human existence. Are we looking for too much while saving every little piece of nothing? What happens when the world just fills to the brim and we have no other place to go?

Maybe we’ll make like empire penguins and huddle together, shoulder to shoulder, regurgitating our waste from one another as we slowly waddle through the masses to keep warm. But even in a society of penguins, everyone gets their turn to rest in the warmth and comfort of the middle. Do we each get a turn?

The universe may have no horizon. The ultimate goal of organic life could possibly be to utilize the tools of endless expansion to master survival. It still seems rather unlikely, within this newfound optimism, to expect endless expansion can continue without endless consumption. We’re consuming at the sacrifice of something far more complicated. If the world can fall apart at the hands of man, can’t the galaxy? The universe? How far can we run from ourselves?

I had a frightening dream the other morning where mother earth had grown arms and legs and, wearing plastic medical gloves, proceeded to shove my three-foot childhood crayon piggy bank up my ass. She told me to “save up.” I woke in a sweat, and realized I was only sleeping on top of a beer bottle. Classy, but what did it all mean? Was the whole globe telling us to take our sordid aspirations and shove ‘em?

It’s always interesting to me how willing people are to foster the preservation of some self-proclaimed purity while remaining ignorant to our constant consumption of the natural world. “Man should sit with man, woman with woman,” proclaims the homeless man in the corner of the subway car. Wearing a Santa hat and sporting an upturned broom with a plastic bag on top, he was a messiah with a scepter. “That way there’s no confusion. Nobody can see me sitting with a young girl. You’ll get arrested if you’re dating girls. Love your husband, wives. Wives should love their husbands, husbands their wives. Boyfriends love your girlfriends, girlfriends your boyfriends.” He fell asleep in his wheel chair and began to piss himself. The grade on the Manhattan Bridge proceeded, allowing for an exciting rush hour game of who can avoid the flowing river of piss. Thank you MTA for locking our only escape between cars. And thank you homeless messiah, you have preserved the dignity we’ve all so desperately needed.

What are we saving up for? Likewise, why are more and more of us slipping into life’s debt? Whether it’s a feeling of utter futility or a sense that life is just a prolonged march toward the inevitable, some of us are taking life’s gun and shoving it down our throats. Many still remain unsatisfied with the closure at hand, so a vain attempt to find solid conclusion follows. We just can’t quite force ourselves to pull the trigger. Not yet at least. We want life to take us when we’re ready to take ourselves. Every crowded street in Manhattan is dotted with people charging from point A to point B, their hand on a gun and a gun in their mouth. They are the wealthy, the poor and the rest of us, all just waiting with guns to fire at whatever target seems implicitly provocative.

Life in the means ain’t all that bad, folks. No, Humans may never find that ideal balance. Our lives have quite obviously become a product of the sordid associations of a species that wants to have its cake and eat it too. But it’s too much cake! We’ve got to share before we lose it mid-shit, wishing we’d never had a piece of it all to begin with. Is any of this possible? The optimist in the means can’t rationally answer that question, especially if he is in question as to why we exist the way we do in the first place. But what remains increasingly apparent is that we humans are trying to eat something much bigger than our heads.