prime+4.95%

what is the human cost of happiness
is it prime+4.95%
like the newspaper ad keeps telling me
I want it. I want it. I want it.
money, they say, will fill that void.
just invest in us! we give you happiness
in the form of quick little convenient
dividends.

humanity has strange ways of calculating such
dividends.
prime+4.95% cannot be expressed in the
gloomy ceremony of green and gray
that hung over the prairie on my drive home
from home
the green bubbling lava lamp doesn’t understand
GICs or stocks or the ownership structure of an unethical credit union
it understands slowness. it understands neon.
it understands how to grab my attention, and that
is equivalent
to prime+4.95%.

pretty ridiculous, the way we chase sports scores,
movie debut performance,
investment quarter percentages that are shed like the
human dignity of those thousands of ipod manufacturers
or the environmental impact of these pollutants that fuel
our way to the store.
there’s something nasty about what is not recognized
as real in prime+4.95%.
I understand the 4.95% very well. I know what growth means.
but the primal urge to be a human is nowhere better felt
than when I can latch on to some meaning to this money
beyond its endless growth for endless purchases for endless attempts at buying, what, happiness?

simple answers, simple solutions.
growth may or may not be good.
enhancing my mutual fund portfolio is a lame attempt at knowing what is good in the business world.
balancing my finances at the end of the month is a pathetic grasp at connecting to real people in real jobs and real work.
and simple calculations
like prime+4.95%
never reveal the whole picture
of what this life’s goal really means.