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Chapter 15/Page 3 |
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My Master Card imploded from the last minute trip to Chicago. Yeah, that was money well spent. Oh, well. Nothing ventured. I’ve never been very good handling cash. Like planning in general (as I’d just proved), it’s a skill I’ve never developed. I can go out with twenty bucks in my pocket or two hundred. Either way, I’ll have a great time and come home with nothing left and no idea where it went. For a Taurus, I’m a real shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing in my life would ever get done. The only way I can complete anything is to impose a deadline on myself. Need to get a band together? Book a show. Voila! Suddenly, I can focus. Without a target of some sort, I tend to wander aimlessly through life. I think I lack discipline. Great, give me a minute while I add that to the list here. I come from a family of Libertarians, and though I tend to agree with a lot of the freedom-speak they harangue me with every Christmas, there really need to be more laws to protect me from myself. In my early twenties, I was besieged with incredible offers from credit card companies. Every time I took one of them up on their incredible offer, another one sent me an even more incredible offer. The incredible offers came so fast that in one six month period, I was pre-approved for more than $200,000 in credit. Two hundred fucking thousand dollars! I must have been doing something right. Did I mention that I was young and stupid? Here’s what I figured: The credit companies know how much money I make, how much I pay for rent, and how much I spend at the grocery store, thanks to the little surveillance card they give you that records every purchase into a massive database that holds everybody’s permanent record on a super computer housed in a climate controlled cave two hundred feet underground somewhere outside of Topeka. They keep very detailed records of the brands, the quantities, and the frequencies of my purchases. They analyze my profile. They follow my trends. They know the real me. They also know how many of those little plastic cards I have and what the sum total of debt I can acquire is. Surely they take all of that information they gather year after year and perform precise calculations of how much money I have available to give them. Certainly they wouldn’t over-extend their incredible offers, risking that I might get upside down in debt and be unable to continue giving them my money, right? Once I ran all my cards up past the point of no return, I became terribly confused because I looked around my apartment and couldn’t recognize anything that I might have spent the money on. A specialist’s diagnosis revealed a severe case of credit card amnesia. Something had gone horribly awry. Contrary to the credit companies’ calculations, I didn’t earn enough to keep giving them money and live. No matter how many times I did the math -- and I was even using spreadsheets -- the numbers kept coming up negative. Drastic measures were in order. I had to muster all the discipline and focus I could and get myself out of this jam. No yard sale was going to get me out of hock. The only things I had to sell were body fluids and guitars. The Red Cross didn’t want my blood because it was tainted with the drugs I took for eczema. Yes, I checked. I had already sold all but two guitars. In the event I was ever able to face that part of my life again, I should probably hold onto them. At the very least, if the DWP shut off my heat, I could burn them. The only other thing I had of any value was the one possession absolutely essential to survival in Southern California: my car.
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