Where Have All The Flowers Gone? By flowers, of course, I mean money. Where the hell does it all go? I'm pretty sure I had a fair amount of it just the other day. I suppose part of the problem is that I am constantly forgetting just how expensive this damn city is. Not so much in regards to the big stuff (e.g. houses), rather it seems that it is the little things that seem like nothing but when stacked up as a whole suck cash out of my bank account at an alarming rate. There's nothing quite like going out with friends for an evening and waking up the next morning to find that you ended up going to three ATMs because, goddamnit, you just could keep enough scrill in your pocket. I'm not exactly what one would call a high paying job, but I make a decent salary, and yet I seem to be constantly living paycheck to paycheck. And not doing a very good job of it. The real problem though is that (thanks to my father) I have an entirely unrealistic relationship to money as a whole. The concept of saving is as foreign to me as Esperanto and each time I get money I assume I have won the lottery and couldn't ever possible run out. The way to deal with money, my tiny reptilian brain tells me, is to spend it as though the rapture is just around the corner and you damn well know you're not going to be making that bodily ascent. All the while you hope that by the time you completely run out more will be coming in. An endless loop where everybody's happy. This never happens. Yet I persist in assuming that at some point there will a cosmic confluence of some sort in which it will magically begin to work out that way. With each paycheck I run out into the wilds of consumerism with abandon. I gotta get that new game right? Hey! I haven't been CD shopping in a while, and if you think about it $100 isn't that much to spend on art right? And so on until the end of the month comes, rent and bills are due, and I'm giving the stink eye to all those people who think they're such big shots with their Tom Raman and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Like they're better than me. The moral of this story? The next time you're out for a night on the town, keep an eye out for a rather dorky looking guy in a Thundercats t-shirt buying everybody within a ten foot radius shots. You're pretty much guaranteed to get a free drink out of me.
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