Money Changes Everything

An old friend that I've known my entire life sent a message through my Mom
asking me to call him. Unless I mean to be found, I cannot be found, but, I am really easy to get a message to. We have the same phone number that we had when I was in Kindergarten.
Mom said he was telling her how he'd bought a place on the river and that he's got the yacht on his own dock. He's been running an antique business and apparently it's doing pretty well.
He told Mom that he would pay for me and Thomas to come home, just call.
Well, I am ALWAYS suspicious of people's motives, but never more so than when they're slinging their money around to achieve them.
He and I have had discussions in the past about how we've wasted more money than most of our school mates will ever see. That we've had charmed lives. We've both survived near death events that, (and this bit is one of our really weird shared coincidences,) landed us in the same hospital, on the same ward, just a few doors down from each other, on the very same day.
He had been electrocuted by a power line whilst doing yard work for some lady, and he'd thrown his Hudson sprayer up in the air, not really paying any attention to the fact he was under the power line.
The sprayer's hose wrapped around the line and just hung there. The woman came out bitching up a storm and demanded he get it down. This fella is lucky in ways that only the seriously stupid get lucky. He grabs some implement and begins trying to dislodge the sprayer. I don't know what he thought was going to happen, but he lit up like a Christmas tree and started shooting plasma from various parts of his person. His knee, where a metal snap on his shorts was touching his skin, his wrist where his watch was, and a few other places I can't really recall. And in the process, his internal organs are cooking with the 26,000 volts or something to that effect, that was coursing through him. Another friend of ours happened to be driving by at this precise moment and saw what was happening. He jumped out of his car, grabbed a huge tree branch that had just been cut that day, and knocked him loose from the current.
Nobody knows how he survived this. When they opened him up in surgery, (I was in the surgical theatre next to him at the time having my life saved,) they said some bits looked like they'd been seared in for flavour, ready to pop in the over to cook the rest of the way.
The following months was a tricky phase, he had some health problems and wasn't sure if they would ever resolve. But, they did eventually.
A friend of ours who was a former State senator now practicing law told him he needed to sue the woman. Her homeowner's insurance probably payed it, I don't know. I don't see how someone telling you to do something stupid after you've just done something stupid is THEIR fault if you lack the sense to not do it. I am sure the grammar of that last sentence is all kinds of wrong, but I'm willing to let it go if you can!
So, anyway, he got this unbelievable amount of money and blew through it in less than six months.
But, he's made and blown a few million since we were 25.
He used to drive a truck and would call me in the middle of the night from all over the country telling me what he was looking at was making him think of me.
He has always told me that I had so warped his expectations of what he wanted in a woman that no other woman has ever done it for him. That's really sweet. I love him to pieces, but I know what he's aiming for now. It was the same just before I left to come here.
He was going on and on about me having his children and us living in some fabulous old house that he'd finance getting it just the way I wanted it. He wanted to buy me a Karmenghia, and a Land Rover Discovery for the farm. He inherited acreage when his Dad died.
I broke down and contacted him on Faceplate.
Right after he said Hi, how are you, he sent a picture of him at that very moment with about seven thousand dollars fanned out like cards in his hand, eyes peering over the top.
I said, "OHH, you're a rapper now! Cool."
"No," he said, "It's just how it is!"
I have never been moved by money. It's not enough to bridge the gap between liking someone and not being able to live without someone. If I am going to be with someone, I prefer to require them to live and breathe properly. I wanna be in love. I like being adored. I need that almost as much as I need to adore the person I'm with. But, it can't be the placeholder for my undying affection.
I've had loads of opportunities to be a money grubbing slag, but it's just not my style.
I'd rather make my own money and call my own shots AND be head over heels in love with someone. I couldn't even talk to him after that.
The conversation was so terse, all coming from me, not him. I just signed out and went to bed.
Why can't I be shallow and self-serving and do something that would benefit my boys.
Why isn't it enough for me to be loved, deeply, by someone?
Why do I always prefer some tortured genius who is completely preoccupied with something other than me?
Maybe I'm the lucky idiot.
Passing up an opportunity to be happy because happy isn't really what I'm after.
I guess I am addicted to my melancholy.

Comments

Yes
 
Somewhere along the lines, I began running parallels between happy and ignorant.
I thought in order to have substance, it meant taking perpetual stock of the miserable realities of life. This has proven a difficult misunderstanding to quash.
I am working on it.
I laugh a lot.
Grief and laughter are so closely related.
It must be the hysterical element!
 

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My Only Weakness
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