Monkey Days

03.26.06
It’s weird that all you need is money to go places, see places, and to do pretty much anything you want to do. I’m on the way to LaGuardia airport in the Connecticut Limo, and it costs me ten bucks to get to the Limo office center using the local taxi and then sixty-five dollars for the ride to the airport. Sixty-five here, ten dollars there, it’s just money spent to make my life easier, and it’s not even my money to begin with! Somehow by some means, I feel that something terrible is going to happen to me. I’ve been fortunate for far too long and feel that my time is about up, that my dues are about to come, that some sort of life payment will be asked of me. I feel like I owe someone or something something. I look at my colleagues and their wastefulness, their lives being too easy, their spoiled manners and habits, and I wonder how far off I am to them. Something has to give, and days like this one in particular, I wonder if I’m pushing my karma buttons even more than I should, testing the limits, and ultimately causing greater problems for the end for me. I’m becoming ridiculously more superstitious as I age, and yet, I hypocritically ridicule those who act the same. I even challenge them, but then I’m the one carrying around a monkey with me to ward off evil spirits from this Dog year that we are in. This monkey business started one day after the New Year when my mother called me up and said that I needed to surround myself with monkeys. I started to laugh and she said in that stern motherly voice, “you laugh now and you’ll see….” Then there was an eerie ten seconds of silence. So then I asked what kind of monkey. She wasn’t too clear, which is normal coming from her as she probably only heard the gossips around her work. She only knew that the Dog Year was a bad omen for me, and I needed to surround myself with monkeys. Great! So that weekend, I spent some time in toy stores looking for a good monkey. I had to look at the monkey for a whole entire year so it had better be cute. I didn’t realize that there were so many foul looking monkeys out there, some rather menacing and very scary. But eventually I found a Curious George one that was super cute. Then I printed out pictures of monkeys and placed them up at my desk and in my apartment. I also put a picture of a monkey on my cell phone, so every time I got a call and opened up my phone, I’d see the monkey. I put Curious George on my work desk, and he stared at me in delight. Later on my mother gave me a jaded monkey necklace to wear. I attached it to my inner book bag’s compartment knowing that I pretty much carry that darn bag everywhere I go. I had little interest explaining to people why I had a monkey around my neck. Later on, I thought about listening to the band, Monkees, but thought that was going way too far. The thing is if it won’t hurt or require too much work on your end, so why not just follow the nonsense and take precautions? It could only help, at least it could just be neutral overall, so why not. At the very end of all my monkey business, it did do what it intended to do, which is protected me from the evilness of the world. Well so far! But when too much good comes along or when nothing bad has come about for awhile, I begin to wonder if it can continue on like this, especially when all your life you’ve been on the losing side or the side that barely breaks even. Which reminds me, so I found a dollar yesterday or maybe it was the day before, but it just came rolling towards me like an ordinary piece of paper blown right into my paws as I bent over to pick it up. It came right into my hands, and I deposited it right into my pocket just as quickly as it came to me. Then I looked up the street expecting more and thinking how great it would be if it were like in the movies where money just starts coming down from the sky because some bad guy, that’s newly turned good guy, decides to dump a bag of money off the tall building to prove the point that money is meaningless and their ways have changed, and I’m on the bottom collecting and saying “yes, money means everything” and greedily stuffing my pockets in glee. For the next two minutes I anticipated someone to holler about their missing money, a dollar in this case (lets not get too upset here), but no cries heard, and not much time after that, I spent it on a hot bowl of soup at Ivy Noodle. You know, I think I’m going to really like these monkey days.