From Here To Qeternity

descent of the damned

Acting in solidarity with those unfortunate enough to have money deposited in Spanish banks, I decided   to cash out my spare change box, while the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters it held still had some kind of value.

LSP savings and loans

I'd use that money, I figured, to buy some epoxy and blue tape to bed the barreled receiver of my Lee Enfield Mk. III sporter. But quickly! Before tape and steel putty cost a bergan full of worthless magicke currencie.

With a sense of fiscal cliff urgency I drove to the local supermarket, box of change in hand, and loaded it into Coinstar, which turns your metal money into a redeemable IOU, for a fee.

how much does it cost?

I didn't care about the fee. I just wanted the money, fast, while it could still buy something. So I emptied the box into the machine. Clang, clunk, went the cash. $53.65 went the Coinstar, on its screen, and then it stopped working. "Sorry, I've seen your money, but I can't give it to you," stated the mechanical thief.

"Customer Service" was no use because the talent was busy talking to a policewoman about a picture on his CCTV (close circuit television) and I began to panic. Would I ever get my money? Will I get arrested for asking? I got the cash and avoided prison, in the end, and by some miracle Coinstar Currency still had fractional buying power.

oh. dear.

But don't worry. If we print enough money then everyone will become rich!

Just like in Rhodesia Zimbabwe.

LSP

That's the Spirit, Spirit of the Age!

that's the spirit

You know how it is, one minute you're humming along to Quark, Strangeness and Charm and the, er, lab-coated guitar genius that is "Baron" Brock, when all of a sudden a philosopher sends you a quote. A quote that gets right into the spirit of the age. Here it is, from Eric Voegelin's essay Immortality: Experience and Symbol.

And with the seventeenth century begins the incredible spectaculum of modernity—both fascinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and depressing, tragic and grotesque--with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow, at the expense of old worlds that were new yesterday; with its destructive wars and revolutions spaced by temporary stabilizations on ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order through natural law, enlightened self-interest, a balance of powers, a balance of profits, the survival of the fittest, and the fear of atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness; with its ideological dogmas piled on top of the ecclesiastic and sectarian ones and its resistant skepticism that throws them all equally on the garbage heap of opinion; with its great systems built on untenable premises and its shrewd suspicions that the premises are indeed untenable and therefore must never be rationally discussed; with the result, in our time, of having unified mankind into a global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.

That was written in the 1960s and I think it's pretty much right on the money, especially in its madhouse aspect. But what about "stupendous vitality"? Some would say that's on the wane. Let's see what survives the not so slow moving train wreck of ponzi scheme economics.

Feet forward, heels down, ride on.

LSP