What would I do if I had enough money?

Reading a story in the New Yorker and fighting thoughts of jealousy and class resentment,

thinking, how did I end up doing the workshops and getaways and publishing the books in addition to writing the column and thinking, if I had enough money, would I be preparing for the workshop–vacuuming the floor and straightening the furniture and getting ready for folks to come into the living room and read–or would I be sitting in some hotel room writing and playing the guitar and looking out the window, smoking hash? If I did not have to make a living with my writing, would I revert to an infantile, hedonistic, addictive lifestyle? If I had no fears about survival?

To what extent is our usefulness to society predicated on our interdependence? To what extent do we do good things because we know it redounds to our own survival potential?

If everybody had enough money, would society collapse? Would we all just shoot heroin and read detective novels?

Why didn’t I major in poetry in creative writing grad school? Why didn’t I try to write fiction for a living? Why didn’t I become an academic?

It’s always been about scratching for a few bucks.

And being maybe a little stoned about it, not having that far-sighted belief in a stable future and the ability to plan and trust that things are gonna work out which maybe comes of a stable home life and not so much drugs as a teenager … but I mean to go deep with it, what would I do if I had enough money? Maybe I’d do the writing workshops all day long, it’s so much fun, and so interesting, and I’d hire other people to publish the books and maybe I’d mount a whole aesthetic movement to clear out the underbrush of sentimentally intellectual half-thought-out nonsense and the remnants of effete i dunno, maybe I’d just go back to smoking pot and hanging out tho we know where that leads, don’t we?

Can we get serious for a moment? Please? What I mean to say is that there’s an economic component to all my choices, and it’d be great to get clear about that. And I think it’s good that we trade. We enter into these transactions. We do the money thing. I think it’s good and clean. It’s not like being a slave. You can work some jobs that are pretty much slavery. If you’re afraid to leave, and I have had jobs before where I was afraid to leave, and so lived in fear, and took a lot of bullshit maybe I should not have taken if I’d had the sense and the ability to concentrate to schedule out my options, to plan, to not be so impulsive. (This is all in my younger days, you understand, but still, that wild, impulsive, impatient guy is still a big part of me).

But there’s something ennobling about setting up and enterprise where you trade money for services with people you respect and come to know and like and even love. And you’re responsible to each other in a personal, face-to-face way, not hiding behind an institution like a university or public school, but trading what you’ve got for what they’ve got, in real time, in your home. There’s something ennobling about that.