The Doctor Is Still Here, Broke

Story by Dr. Rodger Entwistle 

| Published Oct 28, 2008

Guess what? I’m still alive. And I didn’t even get fired!

Damn it!

It’s mind boggling, the kind of events that had to line up in order to keep me alive and employed.

I don’t really want to get into them here, but shit, just know the very fact that I’m alive and the university still employs me is amazing in itself.

My bookie told me that the odds were about 260-1 of me winding up dead, fired or both.

Whatever.

I hate money. I’m serious. There’s nothing good about it.

You struggle your whole life to get it, and in the end, all you’re left with is a want for more.

Money is completely temporary; you can’t take it to your grave, and if you do, it will only rot right along with your body.

The pieces of green paper we hold so near and dear can rise and fall in value at random, and who is to say they are or were ever worth anything in the first place?

I've been struggling for money my whole life. After my parents died, if I didn’t want the state to take me and put me under the care of some child molester, I had to pay all the rent and bills my parents built up in order to make it look like there was still a family living in our tiny little house.

That meant working all night at the meat mill, school all morning and a farm job all afternoon.

It was that farm job that gave me a love for growing things and a hate for the people who grow them, but I won’t get into that now.

This is about money.

I hate money because I need it. I NEED IT! And this isn’t some sort of greed thing; it’s the literal fact that I absolutely fucking need it.

I actually need money to pay my rent. I actually need money to buy food. I actually need money to fuel my car and to heat my apartment and on and on and on.

And, you all certainly know, booze is expensive.

It’s a fact of life. I, you, we all need money. It’s unavoidable.

It’s a romantic notion that we could avoid all of this by fleeing to the hills and living with nature, but if you think about it, you’d be living on someone’s land.

They’d find you, and they would either kick you off or make you pay.

And if you just wanted a private little tuft of land, and you generated your own electricity, grew your own food, etc., you’d still have to pay taxes on your little plot.

Money money money money. We need it. It looms over us constantly, no matter who we are or what we do.

There is no escape. It’s just like the cruel embrace of life. I can’t seem to shed that one off either.

I could go on and on and on about taxes, but I won’t, because then I’d be both of the current presidential candidates.

Fuck ‘em.