Money and Stevie Nicks poetry

I never used to think about money. My parents did. I remembered being upset as a kid if I didn't have something but I didn't think in terms of money. I always believed when I was older that if I did the right thing then the money would come. I never thought of getting the money first  and then doing the right thing. I never considered one right thing versus another right thing in terms of money.  I took jobs because I wanted to learn something at first and naturally was happy to be paid. I wasn't negative about money. I worked to get money and didn't like debt. My parents had taught me that good people avoided debt and if they were in debt they paid their debts.
I remember consciously considering work in terms of leadership and taking orders when I was working in my first construction jobs. I thought I'd rather go to university and get an education and have a higher level job than spend my life working for the kinds of people I was working for.  I had one particular boss who was stupid and ill mannered and slightly sadistic. I thought I could avoid working for such an individual by getting an education and getting a superior position in the hierarchy.  I was wrong about this.  Hierarchy's always have that sort of individual throughout and at different levels.
Rags to riches in three generations and riches to rags in one.  So the genius in a family may raise the family wealth to high level but the idiot belligerent bully might reduce the wealth within their one generation. The bottom line is folks individually and as families go up and down the hierarchy.  Hence you can't get away from the idiots by going further up the ladder since there may be an idiot on the way down.  I didn't know this when I entered university.  I thought education and intelligence would 'elevate' me.
I remember consciously thinking that there was a difference between chess and poker. I thought that the element of 'chance' was reduced with chess which demanded greater skill whereas poker always carried a whole lot more 'luck' options in it.  The casinos certainly know this.  I was a chess player. I liked skills.  Chance was something I 'trusted' to a large degree and equated more with my relationship with God. The closer to God I was the more likely I'd have good fortune however I was also concerned that the saints often met gnarly ends and I knew a lot of good people who I wondered if they weren't making a 'virtue of necessity' because they seemed good and spoke all manner of religious platitudes but didn't do much good it seemed and weren't much blessed.
It's not very clear what one does exactly to be a success.  There's a multitude of competing opinions when one is growing up and especially when one enters university.
I loved learning.  The reward in learning is not money but learning.
I considered pure science and pure arts and was concerned that if I got a phd I 'd not necessarily have a job. I would have learning and I'd possibly have a greater understanding of life and all manner of good friends and such but I wouldn't necessarily have a job.  I was pragmatic when I was younger. I wanted my education to be associated with my eventual work.  To this end I considered what did the world always need and what education was necessary for survival in a community.  I remember thinking that sciences were more necessary than arts and that there was a lot of politics in arts whereas science was more what I called 'hard facts'.  I remember thinking that the arts were a lot about 'fashion' and who was the winner decided what fashion was in.  I realized that we were a product of military might and that if the Nazis or Commies won we'd not be calling ourselves the 'free world' and enjoying the freedom to consider whether to go on to be a playwright or a scientist.
I remember praying about this.  I was meditating a lot when I was in university. I was a different person not easily fitting into any 'group' and yet mixing well enough with a variety of 'groups'.  I always seemed to have my own agenda and that agenda was tied to learning something and usually helping someone. I liked to take on causes on behalf of others. I really believed in service.  From a young age I was raising money for charity by organizing friends to do carolling. I 'd go on to organize coffeehouses, improvisational teams, plays and adventures.  Later I'd employ people in small businesses and organize folks in building and creating things.  I was a leader from a young age but not particularly interested in leading. I was mostly interested in learning and seeing how something worked.
I had a 'calling' to enter medicine. It was a product of prayer in the University of Winnipeg chapel.  A series of events followed that put me in medical school. I thought at the time that this was good because I 'd concluded I couldn't be a renaissance man with my own laboratory in my home because the cost of technology was too utterly exorbitant but I could write in my home and work in a lab in the day. I loved medical school learning. I loved biology. I loved quantum physics and biochemistry. All of the exciting things we did studying electron microscopy, X-rays, and surgery seeing the parts of the body anatomy at work was exhilarating to me.
But I remember thinking that while I was living utterly poor as a student taking jobs to buy books and stethoscopes and living in a bachelor suite studying around the clock, I felt that I'd have a 'job' when I graduated.  It was comforting to be studying 'applied sciences'.

Law is 'applied arts' in the way that medicine is 'applied science'.  I was happy with the money I was making as a doctor too not really considering it though my wife was very involved in wanting a house and fixing it up.  I had friends who were millionaires then but I didn't really register that their car was a bmw and mine was a chevy or that their house was in a better neighbourhood and bigger than mine.I was thoroughly happy with what I had and wholly involved in trying to save the lives of my patients. All night long I was studying and I had a wife who was emotionally disturbed as I saw it .  I thought it was my job to 'keep her happy' and 'please her' and 'make her life easier' and get her all the money for all the things she wanted. She always wanted more money and more things and I was enjoying my life but feel excessive demands from her for things.
I remember married I wanted more money, but I didn't do more than work longer hours. I didn't decide my future based on money.  My fwife left me when I went into psychiatry. She was always more aware of money and more capable of getting it than I was. I'd started out in surgery but when I went into psychiatry the writing was on the wall. This is from this slice of perspective.  Our divorce is best described as a product of my irrelevance and irreverence.  There's no 'pat' explanations for love and war.  She was a saint. I'm interested here in the issue of money.  I was mobilized then by what  I wanted to do.  I wanted to go to Mexico so I got some money to go to Mexico.  I had a job which allowed me to buy a house and have a a car and work and have friends. I was a comfortable yuppie at the university but I didn't think about money much.  It followed the 'right decision'.
After the divorce I thought about money. The divorce caused a horrendous debt and I couldn't work for months because simply 'a broken heart to a psychiatrist is like broken hands to a surgeon'.  Women are devastating.  Actually girls are devastating.  Boys and girls destroy, men and women create.  There were no children. Children are associated with couples and individuals wealth. The wealthy have children though so do the poor but in my world the children have usually moderated the parents and made them more likely to consider money and security and such matters.  Most men I know are really a whole lot happier working for their 'daughter's' than their wives and no woman will work as hard for her man as she would for her child.  I never had children.
I took care of a lot of people.  When I stopped drinking I was in a treatment centre and everyone there with criminal records and major drug and alcohol problems told me how much they enjoyed people like me because I was a 'mark'.  People loved to let me pick up the bar tabs, the restaurant tab and play poor in my company and encourage me to support them. I've picked up bar tabs for the poor and the millionaires.  I have always paid my way.
Each divorce left me with a debt burden that all bankers and accountants told me I should simply declare 'bankruptcy' and start over over. I didn't. I paid off all the debts the girls had run up and all the losses that the divorces occasioned.  In retrospect I probably would have been a multi millionaire today if I'd taken the advice of the 'money' men, declared bankruptcy, screwed the creditors and got a clean slate and started over. As it was I made a fortune for people in the 'interest' I paid.
It's said to be 'character' building.  I remember saying to women, if we make this investment , we have to be together for 5 years or we'll lose our shirts. Under no circumstances can we break up or whatever'.  Naturally I gave them sufficient reason to rue their agreement but I was the one who lost my shirt.  They'd say they lost their pants.  I was interested in sex and love and rock and roll all my young life.
It really was a good time.  I can't say I have regrets except for the hurt I caused my parents I suspect. I really didn't give them more time and love though they were very impressed with me as a family physician and no one has ever understood what I see in psychiatry.  Even today everyone tells me I should stay away from the addicts and drunks and schizophrenics because they're trouble. Lawyers and beurocrats and bankers and accountants tell me to keep my distance from the mentally ill.  Our medical profession and the legal profession is all about telling us to erect boundaries and put in bigger desks and spend less time with the downtrodden and the losers.
Smart people don't do what I do.
I identify with the losers.  I'm like Jesus in that way. I wash the feet of the poor and a whole lot of the time make a save in an impossible place. My friend works with the dying and she's a Christian. The 'money' isn't in the dying.  The money is in the funeral , right after the death, when people are feeling guilty.  The surviving have the money. The dying often use up their resources in their last days.
I think about money these days. I began thinking about money when I turned 60.  I realized I didn't have a pension. I realized that I was tired more often than not and I realized that people didn't care for the old and sick like they once did.  I worried which I should n't do.  I'd hired a couple of women and they'd cost me $50,000 by their lies and theft.  I smiled when I learned that Leonard Cohen's manager had stolen 5 million from him and at 70 he was down to a hundred thousand net worth.  I don't think my net worth is that today because I have rapidly depreciating vehicles like motorcycles and boats which fascinate me with the motion and travel. Buckminister Fuller got me interested in the means of travel. And I was fascinated how flying into a city altered wholly my perception of the city as compared to sailing into a city or riding in on a bicycle or motorcycle.  I'm fascinated by the experience of travel and travellers before me. Canoeing I was forever considering the coeur d bois and sailing into Vancouver Island I landed where Captain Vancouver landed and was engulfed in the richness of human history.
Im more interested today in spiritual things. I'm interested in money as a spiritual energy. I remember my friend thinking rich people were bad .  Possibly he'd 'identify with the aggressor' as commonly we are receiving that which we're attracted to whether through hate or love.  So many people become like the ones they hate. They're literally caged in their emotions so that the revolutionaries just switch heads for tails. The feminists did that promising us a better life after he revolution but only switching heads for tails and saying the world was better. I 'm watching every little group go for the Pink Floyd meat grinder and getting a little bored by the repetitiveness of it. But then I see a child learn to ride a bicycle for the first time and I'm as exhilarated as I was when I did that.  So it's okay if I'm the audience. I"ve been the audience most of my life.  Sitting listening and watching. In latter years I chose to share wisdom, actually tell people what I was thinking. It seemed that I was of an age with sufficient experience that I could impart wisdom, save people from errors that are so obvious to the older, detours that lead no where. I like working with addictions now. Getting people back from the abyss and restarted on the journey around the evil people, the drug pushers.
I saw Stevie Nicks with Fleetwood Mac this weekend. I later googled the net worth of the band members.  There's this site, celebrity net worth.  I'd heard a joke this weekend.  'What are a group of millionaires sitting around the tv watching the NHL called? " the Canucks and I was thinking about millionaires. I've made millions but never been a millionaire. My brother was here this weekend and he's wise with money, never spending it unnecessarily because he knows it's value in work and would rather go for a walk than sit at a desk taking orders.
I found that Stevie Nicks net worth was "65 million'.  I always love how the feminists convince us all that women all are poor especially in Canada where we still have a Queen and she's one of the richest humans on the planet.  My wives were richer in the end than I was so I have lost sympathy for social communist causes where one group arbitrarily calls itself the 'proletariat' and the other group is the 'beourgeosie'.  I think there are rich men and women (period).  Only a fool would think that Eva Brawn had nothing to do with Hitler's evil.  Had Hitler been married to Mrs. Churchill we might never have had WWII.  Power is more often to do with groups and technological advantage.  I am impressed over the years looking at various groups like the Bloomsbury Circle and the Huxley Family.  Individualism misses the core of things. We are our relationships.
Bill Gates said his success began with being born in the Pacific Northwest.  We grow from our roots . Whatever success I have today is as much a product of my parents and teachers as it is mine.
Fleetwood was a friend of George Harrison's.  That's a fairly elite group. He and John McVie worked together half a life time.  Fleetwood's net worth is in the 80 million range with McVie's in the 40 million range.  The amazingly talent singer, guitarist, writer, producer Lindsey Buckingham has a net worth of 50 million.  I listened to Stevie Nicks individual records. They're great but not the magic of the groups production.  There's something 'family' and 'applied' to the Rumors album. We heard it with the Beattles and though we love George Harrison and McCartney, Ringo and John Lennon and Paul McCartney it was the group that was the magic.
I like the movie and story of the baseball players and the cornfield. Build me a field and the game will come.  I think that Fleetwood Mac and the Beatles were greatest when they were poor and had a vision. When they were rich they were still good but I still believe that if being rich was what created riches then only Elvis songs would be played today, the ones he did in Vegas, not the ones he did when he was a young man with a vision.
Money is a spiritual energy.  I just looked up Stevie Nicks 'net worth' because Fleetwood called her 'our poet and angel'.  As a poet, among other poet's we are always bemoaning the fact, we believe that poets aren't paid what they are worth.  But there's Stevie Nicks.  65 million dollars. Not bad for a poet.  I was a poet before I was a doctor and left poetry for medicine.  Maybe if I'd stayed a poet.
I say this because life is as much like poker as chess and there are kids out there causing their parents to pull out their hair because the kid just wants to be a rock star or a hockey player.  I think they should be thankful. Things could be worse. Their kid could want to be a poet and end up with 65 million net worth. Not bad for a poet.