Incredible get rich quick overnight with a skull full of subjective cash!

Would you love to have pockets full of little green pieces of paper with pictures of dead white men on them? How many do you want.

1 billion? 2 billion? A kazillion American dollars? A kazillion Euros? A googolplex of Yen?

Do you want the secret of the laws of attraction to make your pockets so absurdly fat that you get stuck in doorways?

Do you want to get a neck problem from the number of diamonds on your hip bling?

Well I am sorry. I can’t help you with that one. I probably have less of those green pieces of paper than you do.

I am in poverty, at least as far as it is defined economically.

When I met Amma on her visit through Seattle, she shared a story about a ship that was sinking because it had sprung a leak.

There was a banker on board that had a locked chest stuffed full of the finest riches imaginable. While everyone was escaping to get on the lifeboats, he went to his room to lug the massive chest along with him.

He went to the edge of the ship and the chest started sliding. He was so attached to it that he didn’t let go, and was dragged by its massive weight down into the ocean.

By the time he realized that he wasn’t going to save his precious booty, it was too late, and he drown while panicking his way back to the surface.

In the book “Galapagos” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the economic system throughout the world crashes because, as Vonnegut puts it, “People slightly revised their opinions about the little green pieces of paper.”

Money is often thought of as an objective measure of what something should trade for, but when you go and have a miserable time at work for an hour, does it feel to you like that hour of your life was worth $7.95? Are you doing $6.55 worth of help to the planet when you are serving somebody coffee? Or when you are pumping gas for somebody’s SUV? Or how about is the world $5.85 more fun when you spent an hour stuffing advertisements into a newspaper? How about when you call people on the telephone at dinner time asking them if they want to donate money to saving the gay whales from nuclear proliferation? Are you doing $100,000 dollars worth of good to the planet when you are using your engineering skills to build better killing machines for the government that will be sold on the black market and used to commit genocide?

I wish to put forth a radical proposition that the value represented by cash has NOTHING to do with the values that we hold deep in our hearts. It has NOTHING to do with the long term survival of our species. It has NOTHING to do with the things that make us genuinely happy.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use money, or that it is inherently a bad concept. I’m just saying that it doesn’t have to work the way it does (or doesn’t) right now.

This country is full of young, able bodied, brilliant people who are working jobs that fuel the system that is accelerating into a deep depression. Not merely an economic depression, but also a deep seated depression of the spirit. As long as work doesn’t mean anything on a deep level, there is little joy in showing up for it.

I recently joined Americoprs. so that I get paid a small stipend to help struggling young students with reading. I know I’ll be dealing with lots of bureaucracy, but at the same time I feel that literacy is a need this country has. I will be helping make lives better by fulfilling that genuine need.

I wish I had more solutions to report than problems. There are programs out there that are working to revise money and what it means to us. One major example of that is the local currency system of Ithaca Hours that was started in Ithaca New York in 1991.

Money should change and morph to fit the whims of our dreams and aspirations and needs. We shouldn’t have to sacrafice our needs and dreams and aspirations to fit the whims of money.

If you hold true to what you value on the inside, you are wealthier than anybody with a barrel full of dollars. Especially when the dollar falls so low that it is more useful to wipe ones butt with than to pay for toilet paper.

Are you in the Manbox?

Are you in the man box?

I was at a Hot Mama’s pizza on capitol hill.

While I was inside enjoying my food, a guy who was hanging out with his rowdy group of friends handed me a bottle and told me, “You gotta put this shit on your pizza.”

It was some weird combination of olive oil and red pepper.  It sounded good, so I tried some.

“No no, dude.  Don’t be a pussy, just drench your pizza with it our else your not in the man box!”

I had to ask.  Apperantly this is a set of ways you must think and behave, or else you are not a man because you are not being “manbox.”

To get a sense, I started probing.

“If I wake up at 4 am completely hung over with a terrible headache and heartburn from drinking too much beer, and I go to my medicine cabinet to grab antacids, is that manbox?”

“Thats totally man box!”

“If I slap my girlfriend and say, ‘bitch, go in the kitchen and get me some pie,’ is that manbox?”

“Dude, only if you make her do it naked and wearing pumps.”

Appearantly being miserable is a requirement for the manbox as well.  I think I got the concept, so I asked him one last question.

“How about when I find myself naked in bed with four other men.  I go to jack off but I miss and end up getting the guy next to me.  Its okay though, because everybody reaches one over and we are all taken care of. Nobody looks one another in the eye, and nobody says ‘I love you.’  Is that still manbox?”

The guy got up out of his seat, with a vein buldging out of his forehead and screamed, “Thats fucking sick dude.  What the fuck are you doing in bed with four other guys!”

Screaming about how disgusting gayness is in a restaurant on capitol hill is not the best idea.  He and his friends were promply kicked off the premises.

Manbox has been a term that my friends now use to describe a certain dogmatic caricature of masculinity.

Outside of the cops and cowboys, soldiers and ninjas sort of ideal fantasy of what men are supposed to be, it seems to me that I am part of a generation of men that are struggling to find a concept of what real, honest to goodness men are supposed to be within the framework of an information hunter/gatherer society.

It is almost as if it is up to guys my age to start defining it and building it ourselves.

The John wayne Alpha male archetype doesn’t seem to be able to cut the mustard.  Look what happened the last time people decided that “manbox” is what we need: