Friendly Money 
 
 
    Looking back on my life, my personal contact with earning money and 
spending it always presented me with an economic drama which radiated 
friendliness. Except for the three years I spent being feminine, I have known 
a world that mostly grits it's teeth in grim tolerance of me unless somehow 
money gets involved. I mistrust the depth of the friendliness but the warmth 
has really touched me anyway toward a bias to admire what I call the device 
of money. It is the magic music which can lift for a time the fog of bigotry 
and self-pity that often seems to rule my otherwise alienated local 
society. I have heard that money is the root of all evil but I have never 
seen it. In fact, quite the opposite, money looks like the root of 
everyone's life hope, of finding a happy place in the dance of humanity. 
    Significantly I don't recognize a form of shared money or unowned money. 
I think of food in the belly as equal to food on the way to the belly. I 
also need my associates to define their psychic sensitivities in courageous 
and unambiguous terms, such as private property, instead of isolating 
themselves or going ballistic after accidentally inviting my offense or 
rationalizing gross neglect in order to avoid both. 
    I have seen again and again evidence that sovereignty must be honored to 
get anyone to be kind and generous with me in a reliable way, even someone 
who overtly denies the concept. In my life money in limbo draws enormous 
attention and becomes the focus of a catfight until effective possession 
resolves on somebody. I see money as an inescapable aspect of individuality. 
    While I was feminine I was unable to focus on pure mechanical relation 
that way without getting estranged from everybody else and seriously 
depressed, so I gave everything only symbolic significance in my life. 
Perusing a meal was like doing a dream interpretation. All mechanical 
devices and effects became magic in my image of my life. Money was no 
longer a device; it became a gesture, a symbol of command that often seemed 
self-propelled in a sinister way. 
    I lost, for that time, an ability to perceive the boundary between my 
own motivations and those of everybody else, so the term "the economy" no 
longer had a useful meaning. I took on the look of apparent stupidity and 
startling competence that I've been baffled by in women all my life. I had 
no perception of technical worth of anything, only technical effect, so my 
spirit couldn't be captured by advertising, only my attention. 
    I think this perspective is the root of the media presentation of 
money, especially advertising. My belief is that nearly all purchasing is 
initiated by people for whom their feelings are their identity, what I call 
being feminine. But I find the symbolic view of money quite bogus. The 
reason to stand back from a bottle rocket has nothing to do with magic or 
symbolism if I'm looking at functional definitions of things. I call money 
an accounting device. 
    I really don't like symbolic or expressive use of money. That I can 
recall, it always feels quite sinister. The feeling strikes me just as 
strong even if the clear intent seems to be a gift meant kindly. I have a 
bad feeling about what I call the general industrial nightmare, and 
especially an invitation to participate without direct conscious awareness 
of the real cost, both in effort and in the decisions about what will be 
lost or compromised. Ideally I avoid even trade, to preserve a more direct 
contact with the true nature of my avarice. 
    I believe that money has become a symbol of something bad due to it's 
use as a symbol. All my life I have seen struggle with people who decide to 
use trade involvement for badhearted expression through scapegoating, theft, 
revenge, escape from spiritual awareness, the possibilities of confusing 
people with accounting complexity, and pretending friendship to close a 
deal. In my current life money is pretty absent and in this absense of money 
the same badheartedness gets expressed through other means to the same 
degree as I've ever seen in my life when money played a bigger part. Having 
money directly present has been a very useful handle for assessing the 
emotional risks involved with a new friend or with the public. 
    My image of my parents carries, most strikingly, the memory of the 
shortcomings in their maturity rather than an appreciation for the 
origination and massive running start that they both gave to my life. I 
think that money gets scapegoated like that, condemned for being worthless 
in some ways, like a fork when I'm desperately looking for a flashlight. 
After I finished putting my current home together my car sat out in front 
on the street for about three years, registered and insured and almost never 
driven anywhere. I am hugely sentimental about it, and marvel at it's 
machinery that I tinkered with so much back when I really had a use for it. 
I gave it an honored place in the backyard. I start the engine and turn on 
the antique tape deck every six months or so. Sometimes I even drive it 
around the yard. I imagine countless other people have this same dilemma 
about the device of money in their life. They used to have a place for it 
and now must force fit a place for it so that the sentimentality that really 
rules their life can be satisfied. 
    Money also looks to me like the main subject of politics, thereby 
getting it's name used in vain a lot. My personal wrestle with finding a 
sane relation to money has inevitably involved settling a sane relation to 
what I call political pressure. 
    I regard politics as a big scale form of childcare in which nearly all 
Citizens are unable to genuinely comprehend the mechanics involved. This, 
in my experience of childcare work, makes successful management possible 
only if those Citizens who get irrationally hysterical, from their own 
confusion, are bullied or deceived into being harmless to the social 
structure on which they are dependent. 
    I noticed in my youth that this necessary lying and bullying made me 
even more hysterical and thus more an object of it. I deliberately arranged 
my life to have minimal emotional and technical dependence on agreements 
between strangers in any form; that is, I distanced myself from any need for 
political relating. My hope was that if I became hysterical in any situation 
I would get evicted by those who had responsibility there, instead of being 
lied to or bullied out of a need to protect the social order. 
    I've given my own hysteria a lot of study. More than all other concerns, 
I want to be what for me is a kind and interesting person; mostly because I 
have to be a companion to myself 24 hours a day, but also because I've 
noticed that if I'm hysterical in any sense I'm far more accident prone, I 
get the flu, I forget my dinner's cooking and I can't sing on key at all. 
Being hysterical feels thus like the worst of all possible trouble. 
    Coping by preventing interpersonal reflection through lonely isolation or 
a drugged condition or a continual dose of hypnotic economic activity has 
failed me. Hysteria wrecks my life whether I see it happening or not so 
I've taken the matter the opposite direction. The political policy I've 
settled on is to maximize voluntary sharing of the politically volatile 
stuff in my personal life and minimize pushing anyone else to be consciously 
involved, especially people I don't know. Thus I keep a fairly friendly and 
steady mirror of my ego expression among people who will encourage me to 
think about what I see and make sense of it. 
    As a result of this I've evolved into becoming a sovereign Citizen, and 
also what I call a Tory. I recognize only myself as the sovereign of the 
story of my life and I can live fine with the King or the bloated U.S. 
government or even the Mafia. They are to me like the King of beasts, 
leaders out of predatory punch and a proper part of my natural world, but 
not a model for me to aspire to or a society for me to share my heart with. 
I don't see myself as a jungle leader. I make my self expression in that 
limited arena that I observe no senseless squabble for; making an overt 
grant of all the rest to everybody else, particularly my friends and 
associates; a sovereign Citizen living outside of commerce by all 
definitions. I don't carry a conviction of having inalienable or civil 
rights that I am owed through Divine rule or the Constitution or business 
contracts. 
    My Land Patent declares my sentimental attachment to an amazing gift from 
my violent heritage, not my intent to continue that tradition of violence. I 
accept the gift but I will not fight to keep it if the thugs that sold it to 
me return to take it back. 
    I really don't emotionally need a hill to be king of. I need a hill which 
I am permitted on at all, without the compromise of being compelled, by 
traditional escapism and traditional loyalty to belligerents, to get confused 
and lose sight of myself. 
    Money has evolved in my imagination into being a very reliable and easy 
symbolic handle for labeling potential causes of hysteria. In my life the 
potential friendliness of money has warned of an equal and opposite 
potential strife, either out of managerial bad luck or from the subtler but 
more depressing loss from something sentimental being assigned a brutal role 
in a practical effort. Well organized and in it's proper sphere of influence 
I embrace the use of money with a whole heart, but where I see it show 
randomly I get real wary. 
    Exchanges and contracts and even the amassing of great wealth have caused 
me much less unnecessary heartache in my personal relationships than the 
simple handling of money. I believe this is solely because my recognition of 
a cash value poisons my own sentimental feelings about the object of 
valuation, rendering it much less meaningful to me. I imagine this 
happening to everyone else too. Feelings of meaning are the root of all my 
life initiative. I lose a little bit of spunk with every random cash 
valuation of something I haven't commercialized yet in my own imagination. 
    If I get concerned about efficiency in work or use of resources, the 
pondering involves cash valuations, even without money in the matter. I 
enthusiastically embrace a money approach where it promises to be a real 
answer to my worry. Generally I get worried this way related to any interest 
in which my experience is harsh or lonely or dangerous and my drive is coming 
out of my feeling a desperate need for the result. 
    Thus the absense of money issues looks to me like an excellent tracer of 
my true heartsong, what I think of as my nobility, and the presence of money 
issues defines for me my 'beast' or commercial aspect. 
    Trying to use the same labels in getting to know other people has been, 
for me, pretty messy or even worthless, due to huge differences in values. 
Nearly everyone I've met in my life gives noble reference to what I call 
their beast aspect, and lives with what for me would be a quite bewildering 
amount of focus on goals, or recovery from losses and fatigue. And, to many 
of them, I look focused that way, in a manner that they abhor. 
    Almost all my meetings with others occur in what they appear to believe 
is neutral territory, where I can easily minimize feeling reflection, by 
keeping the place out of my personal dreamworld, and so can they. I 
cooperate with this for their sake and unabtrusively make the territory 
sacred to me through including it in my timeless time, so that their presense 
will offer me reflection of my dramatic presense. Since as a proprietor I 
would feel disrespected by a timeless person hanging out at my business (and 
occassionally I get thrown out) I try to stay in public space or at 
somebody's home. While many people have expressed to me objection to any 
adult being timeless anywhere, I can generally cooperate with some kind of 
stereotypable image that excuses me, such as pathetic homelessness or 
shopping or waiting for something. Thus a money issue can be used as a 
disquise. Having used them a lot for that I tend to doubt their reality in 
the lives of others and occasionally get in serious hot water over my lack 
of empathy. Largely due to this sort of needless heartache I tend to stay on 
or near my own property where nearly everyone can accept my timelessness 
undiquised, regardless of their values. 
    What looks to me to be the biggest clash of values relates to what I 
call theft, using the word in the broadest possible sense of taking 
possession of something of cash value in a manner that disrespects someone 
else. Women especially fuel this sort of disaster due to their complete 
disinterest in the structure of anything, making them easy unconscious 
advocates of the massive robbery of the common resources of the earth and 
of the goodhearted stockpiles created by other people; and the enslaving of 
everyone's timeless time. 
    As a child I was forced, by my youthful incompetence, to survive by 
robbing my parents. They expressed nonverbally some fairly obvious illwill 
about this but I had to somehow rationalize my robbery because I saw no way 
around being thus a leech. Intellectually I gave importance to the ways in 
which they were in fact leeching off the society around them and the natural 
world. This I assessed as the law of the jungle. I decided that my 
responsibility was limited by biology to be no more than some realistic 
minimizing of my loading of my local system, and to the restriction of 
taking only what no-one else held in a sentimental way. 
    All the women and most of the men I've discussed this with have instead 
redefined theft more narrowly to be only a taking for which they could be 
arrested. Even many of those who really feel and cry about the big scale 
effects of the industrial machinery will still maximize their part in some 
form of pillaging. I have the impression that by rationalizing the robbery of 
their parents the majority of people have established a self-concept that 
includes being limitlessly disrespectful of other people's assets and numb to 
the pain they cause. I'm thinking of, for example, the evolution of a police 
system that enforces the public will using fines instead of seduction or 
bullying, and the widespread acceptance of hiring services for a fee instead 
of presuming that service should always be a genuine gift inspired by 
recognition of the nobility and permanent social relationship of the server. 
    Nearly all my roommates have been a challenge this way. In discussion the 
motive for theft always emerges related to hurt feelings involving nothing 
economic. Oddly being actually ripped off doesn't seem to inspire a financial 
revenge. The hurt feelings are generally a clear case of innocent stupidity 
on the part of whoever created the first illwill, often just with semantics. 
These kind of feelings inspire most of the material I've read rationalizing 
sovereign Citizenship, evoking a lot of disgust for the concept on the part 
of those who disagree. 
    I am often offerred money for service that I'm expected to perform on 
demand under conditions of gross disrespect. I have many skills that inspire 
this. I can do all sorts of building repair and construction, do car, bicycle 
and appliance repair, provide housing and storage, write computer programs, 
and lead cleanup work of all sorts. If I refuse the offer I am always hated. 
Oddly, if I accept and answer the need I am hated even more. If I refuse 
and then answer the need I confuse everybody involved but I am appreciated 
and am granted a place of honor in their lives. When I've mixed honest work 
and collecting money to pay expenses with the service effort the result has 
been friendly when with a friendly person and nasty when with someone 
carrying an unrelated grudge. I've decided that confusion is the root of all 
evil. 
    And, along with a lot of other people, I've decided that evil is any 
expression of disinterest in spiritual awareness, which I call escapsim. 
This is what I believe is behind the war on spiritually educational drugs. 
I define a drug that way if it puts a person on the boundary of where their 
conscious spiritual awareness can go. Nearly everyone I've seen do that has 
taken on the look of spiritual disinterest, due, I presume, to being hit 
with too much new awareness at once. Once they're back to normal though 
they're psyched to try again anyway. 
    That look of being overwhelmed by life awareness has drawn me some major 
bad vibes. I only took acid once and ate a marijuana brownie once and under 
totally tame conditions so all of my experience with the anti-drug harshness 
has been while under the influence of deliberate spiritual focus. I have no 
interest in drug induced awareness because I find it so much easier to ride 
the intensity if I'm in direct control of it and I'm much more able to learn 
from the events. Ironically, when I've explored spiritual awareness in the 
realm of constructive activity, such as honest work or conversation or 
theatre production, I'm often the only one not using a (legal) mood altering 
drug or media device, and I get too overwhelmed by uncontrolled awareness and 
have to exit. To cope with this I use the sedative effect of eating a large 
meal just before I enter the scene. This problem of required drug use has 
forced me into a lifestyle of minimal employment and minimal social events, 
for which I am often chastised as a copout. 
    From the economy I seek food, shelter and experimental apparatus. Any use 
on my part beyond that feels like a mistake, compromising my feeling of 
meaningfulness, so beyond that I am a copout from the economy. To the economy 
I have decided I owe a deliberate effort to increase the ego expression of 
some specific other people whose art I can sincerely admire at least somewhat. 
I have decided to assess the value of this at $12 an hour for dangerous or 
high stress work and $10 an hour for all other work. I declare to myself that 
the money I get is an overt honoring of my contribution by someone else. If I 
determine that the honoring is a lie, or the art I am promoting with my work 
shows a sinister aspect, then I refuse further work. 
    The copout problem is still unresolved. To me it is actually part of the 
larger question of determining the meaning and purpose of my life. I need to 
have a contented life involving some kind of majestic artistic sharing for 
me to feel that my life is meaningful and I define the purpose of my life to 
be to know myself. 
    The word art I use a little differently than my dictionary defines it. To 
the dictionary, and maybe to many people, art is anything not made by nature. 
To me art is any object or gesture which, for the beholder, is endowed with 
emotion, which conveys emotion. A pebble from a giant beach becomes art after 
a long walk carrying it, tossing it back and forth. Once three friends and I 
noted three stars alone on the horizon that formed a giant birdlike 'v', and 
in our banter it became art to me. Contrarywise, almost nothing at the auto 
parts store strikes me as art. For me art must have some component of 
experience that it at least appears to communicate. A spark plug fails 
somehow, it lacks intent, or it's function is so much more noticable. I 
call it a technical wonder instead of art. 
    Significantly actual coins and bills meet my definition of art, whereas 
a postal money order doesn't. A silver ingot fails but some of the one ounce 
silver medallions are quite touching. So I propose that the paper money is 
not a con game, but actually a form of honest limited edition collectable 
art intended to be used for trade. I think it a much better trade unit than 
heavy commodities such as metals or uncontrolled collectable art such as 
postage stamps, though not as stable in value and ideal as gold and silver 
certificates. 
    Apparently what happened to the hugely successful use of certificates 
in America was that the U.S. government, in 1913, got desperate to borrow 
money, perhaps for World War One, and was unable to get any buyers for the 
interest promising Treasury Bills that it sells to raise money. So some 
bankers made an offer.  In exchange for the following the bankers agreed to 
buy the Bills: 
 
  -- Permission to form an illegal monopoly form of trust guarantying that 
     most U.S. government borrowing would be from them. 
  -- The signing over as collateral all real estate held directly by the U.S. 
     corporate government or any property in the U.S. for which all interest 
     has been formally released and not yet formally claimed by the party 
     released to. 
  -- The declaration that everyone with a federally recognized U.S. birth 
     certificate would be beneficiary and obligor to the contract. 
 
    The bankers agreed to buy on demand any amount of Treasury Bills using 
certificates printed by the Treasury but issued and designed by the bankers. 
The Certificates were titled "Federal Reserve Note" but they also stated a 
promise to pay on demand in gold or silver. In 1934 the wording was changed 
to add that the money was "legal tender for all debts". Based on this 
contract I decided to formally deny my birth certificate with a County 
affidavit and secure a Land Patent on my home. 
    In 1963 the promise to pay was dropped. This was the year that John F. 
Kennedy somehow got legislation passed that allowed the Treasury to print 
collectable art money to be issued directly by the Government; interest free 
fiat money, taxation by inflation. That I know of that was tried two times 
before, in 1776 and 1863, both times to finance a war. The first time the 
government didn't yet have the power to tax so, with no promise of 
government recognized value, the money got devalued to near zero inside of 
a few months and got abandoned. The second time, Abraham Lincoln pushed it 
through. He was shot and the scheme abandoned in favor of regular cash loans 
from the European Banks. I see a cause and effect there. Kennedy also got 
shot. This time the fiat, collectable art money was cheerfully issued, but 
by the Federal Reserve Bank, in trade for Treasury Bills as always. I 
believe that the Federal Reserve Bank has been unable to back their new 
issues since way back, but after 1963 they made no more pretense. 
    "One U.S. dollar" is legally defined in the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 as 
one troy ounce of silver or 1/35th of an ounce of gold. The Reserve Notes say 
that they are dollars, but six "dollars" worth of them are required to buy a 
one ounce piece of silver. I believe they are collectable art. 
    The value of trade art seems shady to me because the market can make it 
vary so capriciously and, like a computer program, the market value appears 
to have no relation to honest efort. Also Art antiques over time, eventually 
dropping out of circulation when its market value becomes much greater than 
its casual trade value, or it suddenly drops in value if the producer adds a 
new batch of identical art. Money art gets a more stable value through a 
government declaration of value for payments to the government, maintained 
against antiquing by adding identical new copies to the market and freely 
exchanging old for new. 
    If the federal government declared Star Trek trading cards to all be 
worth $1.00 each in payment of taxes, and unauthorized reprinting to be a 
felony, there would be a huge outcry about the unfair windfall to the 
company that has the copyright. The Federal Reserve does look to me like a 
bad-hearted con. But I'm not at all sure that there really is such a thing 
as a good-hearted mortgage. I don't see any saints in the picture to defend. 
    The dilution factor with money lacks real control due to avarice on the 
part of the everyone involved in national politics, in and out of the 
government. Everyone seems to want the U.S. government to sell more Treasury 
Bills for more of the fiat money, so every year there's more of it. A lot of 
sovereign Citizens think the Federal Reserve Bank people force this, but the 
debate in Congress seems sincere to me. I'm almost the only one I know who 
isn't in debt, stressed about it, and quick to jump at any chance to borrow 
more. I don't see an international banker conspiracy, I think this is 
majority rule. The lawful money of America has all been spent so the modern 
currency is regulated collectable art, sold to the Federal Government for a 
promise from the U.S. Treasury to pay for the art, plus interest, some day, 
with "lawful money". Lawful money still means gold and silver. 
    But I'm up to the market challenge this mortgage presents. Dilution is 
routine in the whole art market. Seriously intense copyright enforcement 
keeps independent agents from diluting the market with even vaguely similiar 
copies of money. Every art producer seeks to supply as much of each of 
their items as the market will offer a good price for. I consider every 
trade item to be a gift of the market, not an inalienable right. I paid $300 
for my car in 1986 and that's probably its current value, but no-one would 
argue that I deserve to have the universe preserve that value. Its just the 
luck of the market. Investing in a new computer is a major disaster 
financially but nobody is getting self-righteous about it. 
    I think the same of the art dollars. It would be possible and probably a 
real good idea for the federal government to legislate a limit on dilution 
printing of the art dollars but it makes more sense to me to suggest that the 
offerring of credit using anyone else's product, such as art dollars, is a 
bad idea unless the interest rate is very high and the term short as with a 
pawn shop deal. I think the U.S. government has done real good at keeping a 
fairly stable product value. Also I see little difficulty in using regular 
unregulated collectable art for savings. The value always goes up as long as 
there's no damage, compensating for dealer markup, and converting to dollars 
is generally no hassle. 
    I like silver medallions myself, because they're indestructable as well 
as artistic. Their actual value stays the same though so converting back and 
forth is a loss. Some sovereign Citizens like to use them for trade units, I 
think because they're so indisputably worth something and yet they still 
have the collectable art look of regular money. Oddly the lawful money 
dollars that were made out of silver have antiqued to quite a high price, so 
they really were collectable art as much as the Federal Reserve Note. 
    I wonder though about all this accounting complexity having been left 
out of my high school education. I think that a high school diploma should 
include a look at this material, and perhaps the essentials of real life 
maintenance such as building wiring and a guided hit of LSD or mushrooms, to 
reduce voter hysteria and hypocracy. 
    The false friendship that business inspires in a lot of people has 
caused me considerable heartache. By the word friend I mean someone who I 
can casually share territory with. I am very easily fooled by a pretense of 
it and I end up sentimental about people who really don't appreciate me at 
all in a human way. What someone intends to express towards people in 
general I take personally. 
    Even the generosity of otherwise personal associates often spooks me 
this way. This has been a major incentive for not being a consumer, or even 
being dependent in a more direct way. For this reason I have caring and 
dependence completely divorced in my dreamworld; someone's deliberate intent 
to care about me personally at their own expense, through effort or a gift, 
generally fails to touch my feelings in a positive way, unless, in my eyes 
the giver is radiant with inspired energy. Otherwise I presume the giver 
either coerced by misfortune or intending to purchase the coercion of me, 
either way a sad story. 
    The giving of money strikes me as the purest form of this; a gift 
completely devoid of personal artistry or style, entirely at the expense of 
the giver. Likewise someone expressing their appreciation of a business 
deal, through a thank you note or a fond remark while drunk, actually 
thwarts my ability to establish real mutual comprehension and trust in the 
sharing of territory, by confusing me about their dreamworld. So whether 
money is the gift or money is the motive I take it as an overt warning to 
keep a formal distance. In this way money can offer me a benefit in getting 
to know people more safely. 
    I also take a money gift as a mockery of my satisfaction with my 
economic life and a mockery of my wish to walk softly on the earth, so I 
call this a religious problem. I really want to know myself so I get to 
feeling hurt over this sometimes when I've become the object of unanimous 
ridicule by a group of women over this. 
    I observe that women in groups invariably unintentionally promote what 
I call confusion and poverty, generally using words and money, and enlist 
men as allies for technical assistance. I define confusion as the need for 
greater wisdom and poverty as the need for more wealth. The wish for both 
feels harmless and natural to me and an amazing source of art but, converted 
into need through white lies and borrowing, I see confusion and poverty 
inspiring a torrent of bitterness and self-pity. 
    In myself I cope with this chaos through embracing solitary apparently 
real drama to upstage the corrupt shared drama. Significantly corruption 
has shown me most of what passes as my wisdom and isolation makes work 
extemely efficient. This is what I define as religion. I see no harm in 
this as long as it stays solitary. Shared it invariably creates more 
corruption and bizarre estrangement, so in reaching out again I leave it 
behind. 
    The purpose that inspired me to get a house and a bunch of roommates 
was to create a place where anyone could actually completely settle their 
sense of need and make their life into art. Almost all the men who have 
lived at the house have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity, though 
many have also been major saboteurs of it through expressions of bitterness 
and self-pity. Fortunately men never sabotage this way in deliberate 
psychically powerful groups. They are always heedless victoms of tradition 
or false friendship. They act alone and if they overwhelm my effort to 
reason about it I throw them out. 
    For me the most striking side effect of life being art has been the 
emergence of dreaming as a deliberate art. Apparently the wish for wisdom 
and wealth arises out of a wish for dream material and I see a little go a 
long way. Robin Williams made a movie called What Dreams May Come that 
illustrates what I refer to. In the movie, the period between lives 
involves interactive dreaming in a more overt form than occurs while alive 
and has the more obvious possibility of running out of material, requiring 
the players to return to regular life as new people in order to recharge the 
story, much as what compells me out of bed in the morning. 
    In the movie the two main players were a shock to me as their new 
identities in a new life. I get very used to how someone else is. This has 
proved equally important to others, that I maintain as fixed an identity as 
possible, but every morning the question reopens in my imagination, who or 
what shall I be? 
    When I reached the limit of my period of being feminine I was living 
alone in the woods on the edge of my town with a very simple campsite that 
I entered only to cook or sleep. Without a drama of other people and 
without any noticable practical needs, my need for an identity subsided. 
This I found to be very good for establishing a new one unhurried and with 
little or no defensive focus, definitely closer to my idea of art. I am 
convinced that almost anyone could benefit from a rebuilding of their self 
image without the naivete of childhood. 
    A self-realized fellow in my town strikes me as being different than 
other people in solely this way, that he has granted to himself, with total 
sincerity, the option to take on any identity or character in the human 
repertoire. I believe the feeling of freedom is real, visible in his 
countenance even when he's disqusted or indifferent. There appears to be no 
particle of apology to himself in his being. Even though I don't 
particularly like his stylistic choices of ego expression I feel no bigotry 
rise in me at all. In the absense of commercial intent, I am even entranced 
by an antagonist. 
    And so my hope with my household has me trying to adapt to every 
person's pattern of financial coping in whatever way will take the panic out 
of it and hopefully inspire them to put it in the background in both their 
life and their relation to me. Many times I've seen a financial gift 
apparently get inspired by that wish, to try to take the panic focus off of 
money by trivializing it. I've never seen what I could call a clear success, 
even when the giver was also the receiver, but I appreciate the driving  
wish. Live music often looks like the same wish. 
    I consider this wish to be the opposite of competition. I spontaneously 
encourage competition in a commercial effort, either as a team member or by 
myself. It makes the whole affair a delight if I can temporarily suspend my 
ecological sensitivities and the subtlty of relationship development. And 
especially it makes for astounding efficiency through a sort of artificial 
solitude. The formality of money enhances this solitude so I and many other 
people find it wonderfully mesmerizing in a commercial effort. 
    Money often serves as a scorecard for the team or the individuals so 
for me money almost means competition and also that commercial competition 
must have money to measure it with to really go well. In my religious 
focused efforts, and the artificial solitude of commerce, money has taken a 
beneficial role as a vehicle for what feels like hugely positive drama, 
quite as much as any drama or art in my household. I still find it 
believable. The competition plays the same role as the slap my dentist 
gives me just as he puts the novacaine needle in. 
    I only meditate on agony when I'm a worry wort, not out of common 
sense, so I hold no regrets when I get caught on a wave of narrow 
commercial focus, a delight in the wonder and usefulness of gadgets, and a 
hope about production, a striving for technical excellence. My sole 
philosophical concern while working is to insure that the toboggan of my 
effort has a sanely conceived route invented in my other condition as a 
worthless simpleton, where my conceptual ego image protects me from 
hysteria and where I have my broadest awareness.
    This concern gets the biggest challenge from what I call a temporary 
tribe, a sentimental group in a workplace. I get fired or driven away from 
a lot of work situations by this. The artificial fidelity of employment 
seduces almost everyone into falling in love with the group and then the, I 
think, inevitable political corruption scrambles everyone's true artistic 
spirit in a game that includes defense and revenge. I attribute the illwill 
to the commercial exploitation of the artistic spirit and the hiring of 
seriously lonely people. 
    Several of the group households I've been in were businesses of this 
sort in disquise and I feel a business consciousness with many of the men 
who have lived in my present house. I think a lot of people would rather 
live in a business. I attribute this to their preference for the lack of 
emotional accountability that a formal setting makes possible and I'm 
fairly easy with it as long as I can be left out of the game. 
    I've seen people at work, who are really committed to formal elegance, 
make a technical marvel of the group phenomena, so I'm sure it can be 
entirely a good thing. I've seen the same people be utterly in their formal 
characters on the stage of commerce and yet casually intimate when they're 
off the clock and have a beer. As much as I actually have a sane use for the 
money I like to do my best to fit into such a formal dance. The formality 
seems to answer my loneliness artificially by inducing a substitute drama 
that works as good as solitary religious drama for dodging politics, without 
pushing me to forget myself or get sentimental with people who I share no 
warmth with. 
    But I hate having a psychic barrier up and too often I get pushed by a 
temporary tribe to ice an outsider emotionally because they're not with the 
technical program and sometimes I'm expected to encourage someone who picks 
on me. My hope for trust with such a person feels poisoned thereafter by 
their confusion about what to expect of me.  
    So money looks to me like a fairly peaceful formalizing of the law of 
the jungle. Passivist wimp that I am that has enormous appeal.
 


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