seriously don't do what this says.

Almost sort of apropos, considering they are getting around to trying Lay and Skilling some few years later.

It happened when I was preparing to pay my state tax bill, which the fucking internet tax service I prepared my return with at nearly the absolute last minute was supposed to automatically pay, but didn’t, with my credit card. And I thought, man, I should be paying this thing with cash, not some wretched virtual lien on my future income. And I thought: yeah, but you know how it is, I gotta protect my cash flow, just at the moment, ‘nuwuttamean...

And I thought damn, man, that is a piece of fiscally irresponsible newthink worthy of Enron, ya dumb mofo.

And at that moment I had a very dangerous realization. Now, I’ll lay it down flat: I have had a stupid decade money-wise. Like most USians I have lived beyond my means at the cost of a nasty little credit card bill, nay, a mean little posse of bills. You know what I mean. If you don’t you are blessed, my child, blessed indeed. Little being the operative lie. There’s nothing little about it...

Until, of course, you compare it to close to four billion dollars of shareholder value that Worldcom just recently let investors know was currently residing somewhere south of the toilet. Oops, go and let an essay sit a couple of days, make that 7 plus billion. Hey, It’s just money.

And that’s the thing. I broke the rules but the rules didn't go away: I’m paying for all my sins because - get this - I FEEL RESPONSIBLE. And me a liberal. So to speak. I’ve been leaning more to describing myself as an anarchist. Yes, so I will divest myself of my obligations by - get this - PAYING THEM OFF IN FULL.

And I should feel bad about it. The long hiatuses (hiatii?) from work, trying to “find” myself (damn, here I am like I was all along). The stereo that on some level I feel like I still haven’t paid for. All those days I should have been living like the pauper I was, and instead went to a nice restaurant for a very pleasant meal. The cash advances. The four track recorder I never really used and then loaned to a more ambitious man who made the use of it its circuits deserved.

But I don’t. And you know why?

Because of Enron.

I could be a case study in a remedial personal finance class of how not to handle your money. Honest, if I had a nickel for every nickel I’ve pissed away I could pay off those credit cards. And yet magnify my foolishness tenfold and still it pales in the face of the sort of massive, wanton, egregious destruction of apparent value that Enron and its corporate ilk committed in the fabulous nineties, the decade of the Dumbass Supreme. Such is the legacy of the myth religion of shareholder value (and for more on that can only be gleaned for those benighted souls that wait all breathless for the miraculous revelation of THE PENTAGON FILES TRANSCENDENT MANIFESTO, which will be revealed right here in an innocuous hyperlink SOMETIME in the year 2003 (what the hell happened to the August 29 deadline, the righteous ask? Fuckin’ ask Ken Lay, alright?).

I say: go buy a 35 inch plasma television with the platinum card those dumb bastards at Citibank (biggest drug money launderer in the world, some say) just let you have. Buy a 35 foot SUV at 0 percent financing. Go buy a hideous piece of art and smash it to pieces with a five pound sledgehammer you also bought on credit. And you still won’t be as anywhere near the kind of dumb idiot that these wall street bandits were. Why not. I feel like a financial genius compared to Enron. I’m the goddamned Thomas Alva Edison of finance compared to Arthur Anderson. I feel like buying a thousand dollars worth of tickkytack jewelry on the Quality Value Network. I feel like leasing a BMW Cockcompensator, or whatever the hell their “E-Z Rollover Option” truck thing is called.

The tragedy is that they’d let me do it all.

So why the hell shouldn’t you? At the very least you can rest easy in the knowledge that you aren’t screwing thousand of people out of their pensions.

So why shouldn’t you?


this is what is up with this.