Why doesn't money have a better sense of humour?

Let me start this blog by saying I am the World's most perpetually broke human being.
It seems like I have some sort of lactose intolerance for cash and when ever I get a sniff of the folding stuff I start dry heaving like a fat wrestler with a turpentine hangover and my skin breaks out in oily exploding hives.

i don't know what it is. I quite like money. I find it quite useful. I like it's jingly sound and the lovely way it stops you freezing to death in Winter.
I like the color scheme, the size is quite carry friendly and The Bank doesn't seems to ring me up at odd hours of the night to say Big Herbert is coming round for my liver when my account is in the black.
I don't seem to have anything against money, other than it avoids me like bald ducks in Peking avoid those bird baths full of orange basting sauce restaurants put out in order to cut down on prep time.

It's not even like I'm a hopeless muggins who can't do anything worth exchanging currency for (stop that sniggering up the back).
I can teach, play guitar, write, remove thistles, say comforting things to loved ones, organise shin digs and be generally quite helpful.
I've had a number of very interesting jobs in which I did quite well at. (Except for that burning restaurant thing. Oh well......)

But it does seem like my Mother told some Gypsy midwife to "put out that stinking fuckin' incense and stop playing yer fucking horrible guitar" during my birth and thus caused me to be cursed with some sort of Romanian evil eye that causes money to cross the road whenever it sees me.

All of my friends seem to be cashed up the yin yang. I really don't know what they do or how they do it to be honest.
Most of them seem to sit at computers and push buttons.
I picture then like some sort of Russian submarine person with a rubber tune that bellows orders out in a digital language that only computer people understand.
Stuff like "Full steam to Java! Hoist the upload to full micro dot! All motherboards on deck! Set Mp3's to propellor!" and stuff like that.
I don't know what that means in proper words. I suppose that's the point. If everyone could "RAM something up a gigabyte" they'd all be out of jobs.

A friend of mine told me recently that his job is to make the space in the non existent world where people put up web sites.
From what I gathered, there is a giant computer turtle floating through the endless phone lines on which four elephants stand and on the back of these elephants is the Internet.
My friend apparently goes there in a magic boat made out of old keyboards, fights off indigenous 1's and 0's with a flat screen six gun, then plants a flag where web designers can go and form a covered wagon train.
These wagon trains eventually get turned into houses where you can digitally nail up posters selling anything from real turtles to frozen sperm and people pay him thousands and thousands of real people's dollars to do this.
He has enormous amounts of cash. He is ten years younger than me and could buy my spine without my permission if he wanted.

Another friend of mine has a job where he makes dick heads sound plausible. It works like this:
People apparently buy things now to simply stop you annoying them so the people with crap to sell go to radio stations where they keep all the truly annoying dick heads in a box.
The man at the radio station then shows the person with crap to sell all the boxes with dick heads in them and tells them that the more annoying the dickhead, the more money it will cost to get the dickhead out of the box and poke it with a stick to make it say things.
They agree on a price (and a dickhead) and then they poke the dickhead with a microphone until it says the most annoying things it can about the crap needed to be sold.
The dickhead will rave about anything. Cheap hats, exploding bedspreads, festive jam. The dickhead doesn't care. It just opens up it's dickhead yap and starts yabbering on like a terrier with a clothes peg on it's balls.

My friend is the person who pushes the brightly colored button on the magic tape recorder at the other end of the microphoned dickhead.
My friend has told me the secret to dickheads successfully selling crap is that (as part of a American Presidential campaign in the 50s) scientists invented a fabulous button which they named "Credibility X" .
This button changed the world due to the fact that it can make dick heads sound very important.
The recorded music industry, radio and television would explode like a balloon having a heart attack if they didn't have this button.
I am led to believe this happens all over the World now. This button manipulation involves a finger to depress it and then the sprightly removal of the finger.
My friend gets paid a lot of money for doing this job.

A third friend has the oddest job I've ever heard of. Her job is to complicate things until people give up. It works like this-
People who do cool things like paint pictures or write plays or sing songs about fuzzy felt boyfriends in the wide eyed hope of making the world a generally nicer, shinier experience go to her and ask her advice.

She then nods politely and hands them a huge pile of paper written in a language that was made up by one of those Russian monkeys that came back from space in the 60's.
It asks questions like "Will mad people get better when they see your painting?" or "What do you think a complete stranger from another Planet might get out of your play?" or even "If we give you money will you spend it on hiring spoons? If so, what type of spoons? Does your spoon hire take into account people with no fingers? What do you think a finger-less person would get out of a spoon encounter?"

This sort of gibberish makes people who just wanted to paint a picture of a horse with an umbrella enjoying itself at the beach or write a play about a happy pepper grinder who becomes a disco king give up wanting to do these marvellous things..
They stop being creative people because this pile of crazy paper seems a grim and forbidding Matron of horrible rules and pointy finger pokery that drills at your brain belly.
The people who make creative things leaf through these piles of rustling nonsense and then give up, as they are baffled by this answerless paper interrogation, just as an elderly Clydesdale would be if you asked him to play Abyssinian scrabble.
Some little spark snuffs out in their sparkley souls.
They get drunk and go on the internet to see if they can't trade themselves in for something useful, like mowing goat lawns or bringing fat people more dinner.

My friend, whose job is to confuse and dispirit people with bad fonts, gets paid a huge amount of money for doing this from the Government.
They think she is tremendous because they are convinced that beautiful things make people wonder why tax doesn't come with better lyrics, causing difficult questions for all involved.


I do things like play relaxing music and say funny things to cheer people up.
Apparently, even though my jars of home made funny are very good and my macaroni and glue concerts do make people feel better, I am often chortled at by racy types for my humble road side stand operation where my marketing strategy is to give stuff away to people I like.

I even went so far as to rectify this by doing a 8 week course in how to make a proper business.
I had brightly colored cards with my name on it made and everything. I bought folders and a lamp.
I paid some invisible notice board $80 dollars so I could be called "Mr Awesome's Rag Time Coolness Business Groove o-Mart" and then watched as about $3000 of bits of paper arrived in the mailbox explaining the more money I paid, the more legitimate I would be.

It was baffling.

In truth I'd be quite happy to cut out the cash thing all together and just go around and play concerts for the people at the Gas Company.
I figure that as I'm quite good at playing the guitar I could just knock out a gig every three months and we'd be cool.

In fact I think it would switch things around so I would start looking forward to my gas bill. I'd get to see old friends. I could bake something.
The people at the gas company could stop typing out notices to various court officials and just sit back and listen to lovely music.
I wouldn't mind if they wanted to dance. Or even had a little snooze.
We could exchange gossip and miss each other during the not-gas-bill-paying times.
I could even go in and do a gig just to say thanks. Maybe they would just be happy to have some nice music in the tea room.
I wouldn't mind. Gas is cool.

Or write maybe I could write a funny story in exchange for toast. Surely bakers must like to be amused.
Or maybe pay my rego in listening to people. Give out positive advice.
Maybe I could be the guy who helps single women in Insurance agencies decide if their bottom looks big in things.
I I could have a go at that.
It's actually a very tricky job because if if you say "Yes" in the wrong way you could end up in casualty.
(I talked to an old guy once who said he went back to blowing up things in Chinese mines deep underground rather than endure another freeziod stare from a big bottomed lady whose bottom, unfortunately, did look big in everything. "It was a big bum" he said.)

There should be a form you can fill out when you leave school that says "Are you very good at making money out of jobs?" and if you tick "No" you should be able to do something else.
Honesty I'd be happy just sit on a street corner and play snappy tunes. In fact that's my dream job.
I'm no good at money. I spend it all on lollies and fun.


'Til next time

Mick "Happy to be adopted by rich relatives" Dog