Jose Ferrer (background) David Carradine and Bethel Leslie 1969 — Photo by EJ Gold
Do you like surprises? If you do, you’ll enjoy my plan. Most of the very wealthy people I know, including my mother and step-dad who had many millions of dollars, are both bored and boring. What I was looking for was something interesting that transcended all classes and economic levels, something that’s fun for the very rich and yet is accessible to anyone rich or poor. It should also provide an opportunity for the poor to become rich, to satisfy my requirements for a great Work Tool. Read on…
When you’re very very very filthy horribly rich, your time is not your own. Not only are you required to meet your social obligations and pecking-order displays of finery, but your very life is not your own, in the sense that you can’t associate with just anyone, for fear that you’ll be assaulted by a variety of attempts to wring money out of you for one crazy scheme after another.
Then there’s the rest of the family. If you’re rich, you’re most likely to be heavily on-guard against financial intrusions by your brothers and sisters, if any. Rich people don’t have families in fact — they have greater or lesser dynasties that, if they get filth rich and nasty enough, end up with their own lifetime reality tv show where they can shred each other forever in front of God and everybody.
Inheritance is controlled by control.
Kids who don’t please wealthy parents tend to get unceremoniously kicked out into the snowy street to starve to death. Some people, when they are not used to wealth and suddenly get wealthy, begin to go paranoid on their family members. Don’t believe it? Hehe, you ain’t been payin’ attention.
I have this plan to help the poor and also the rich, who need help more than the poor although, while the money lasts and the health to enjoy it is still there, they don’t generally know it. Most rich people don’t get that the joke’s on them until they realize they’re lying on their deathbed.
That’s gotta be a really pissy comeuppance, realizing at your last breath that you screwed up and wasted your life, squandered your money on pursuits of pleasure and devoted yourself to organic things that the jungle will soon reclaim.
You need something higher to occupy your time and attention, something that will serve several purposes:
1. To quiet those inner demons that are howling inside your head.
2. To give you a sense of worth and purpose beyond your own existence.
3. To help others in a real and very big way.
You can accomplish all this and more, including preparing yourself for a place in The Work, but …
You knew there was a “but”. Well, there is.
The “but” is that you really have to actually do it, not just discuss it, think about it and ask others what they think about it.
If you were in military Basic Training, you wouldn’t expect it to consist of a series of lectures in a classroom, conducted over a period of eight weeks, would you?
Military Basic Training means you get down in the dirt and crawl around below the barbed wire at 18″ from ground level, without receiving fire in the form of live .50 caliber ammo on or in the behind.
Sorting coins is something like military training. At least, it can be made to be so by the sorter. It can also resemble meditation on the Lotus in a Zen garden. It’s entirely up to you what you make of it, just as Basic Training can be a totally unique experience, but never mind military training, here’s my plan for sorting coins:
Sorting coins is fun. I can prove it. Sorting coins is financially rewarding. I can prove that, too. Sorting coins in a particular way can help you sharpen your Work Skills. That I can also demonstrate.
The thing is, coinology is a practice, not a business. You can’t be doing it for the money. If you are, it won’t work for you. If you’re not doing it for the money, but strictly for the challenge of the rare, the unusual, the surprises, then you might just as well be a millionaire, billionaire or sitting in a small squalid cold-water flat somewhere cheap to live.
This is one activity that can be equally fulfilling to young and old, rich and poor alike. It’s called “Coin Solitaire” and I invented it a long, long time ago. I invented it for friends who had no money, no job and no opportunity.
But the odd thing is, it’s great for the very rich, because money, coin value, is not an issue. You can’t imagine how freeing and enlivening that is to someone who spends their entire life and fortune seeking some new thrill and not finding any after a while.
Everything gets dull after the first flash. If you haven’t yet discovered how to live past the Honeymoon, you’ve got a lot to learn, and you’d better learn it fast or be left behind in the sandbox while all your friends go on to college.
I can show you how to find the most amazing things in common circulation coins. Think about it for a minute; you’re incredibly rich and you want to sort coins, so what coins can a rich person sort?
Has to be gold, right?
If not gold, then silver, and if it’s coppers, it’s gonna be Colonials, Pre-Colonials and Post-Colonials. The very upper crust will only collect Colonial Gold. La Te Da!!!
What a bunch of horse puckey.
There’s no real surprises in store when you buy coins to fill your collection. You have bragging rights: how much you spent, and where in the Registry your coin falls.
When you sort in-circulation pennies, there are more than six billion potential handlers who might’ve gotten between the Mint and you.
When you work with in-circulation currency, you’re in for some real surprises, real treats and amazing revelations. You won’t believe what can survive the horror of mass circulation! What gets all the way through that Labyrinth of Pain and comes to you can be an astonishing revelation!
And that’s the real prize.
Those once-in-a-lifetime events where something totally impossible turns up. When it first happens to you, you’ll be thrilled. The thing I can promise is that the thrill is never gone. Every coin search in open circulation coinage will reveal amazingly unique experiences. With every turn of a coin, you’ll hang breathless.
As you progress in experience and knowledge, the challenge will be increased further and further, until you collect only three coins per bank box, and you have to guess right, just from the “look” of the box, which ones to take in.
It gets even weirder from there.
Coinology is the best form of penny solitaire there is!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby