Long before the invention of money there was trade. The sandal maker would trade a pair of sandals for a sack of barley of a certain size with the farmer. And both regarded the transaction as “fair.” In fact, other sandal makers and other farmers traded sandals of the same quality with barley sacks of just about the same size. There was a market, and a market price that allowed sandal makers to have barley and farmers shoes.

I just had mocha coffees with Carrie Click (a former People’s Press collaborator) at the Redstone Inn. She lives in Redstone now, on the boulevard, with her spunky 11 year-old yellow Lab Joe and is the editor for the Crystal Valley Echo, the local paper here (publisher Alyssa Ohnmacht is my neighbor). Carrie is also writing for the Denver Post, with two stories to her name so far, and launching another local paper in the Battlement Mesa/Parachute area with Alyssa. Seems perhaps a strange time to be launching newspapers when they are closing down in droves around the country, but perhaps it is local news people are hungry for. I saw a story recently how a couple of newspapers that publish only mugshots of recent arrestees is doing remarkably well. We do need more information that helps to inform our daily decisions, and realize we live in small communities more presently than we do in global ones.

The chimpanzee trainer raised chimpanzees that could be harnessed to plow fields or killed and skinned to make sandals, thus having value to both. She goes to the sandal maker and asks to trade sandals for a chimpanzee. The sandal maker says, “I’ll trade you fifty sandals for one chimpanzee, knowing that, with wastage, he can make eighty sandals from the chimpanzee’s leather. The chimpanzee trainer agrees that that is fair, but says that she needs to talk to the farmer before closing the deal. The farmer, realizing that he can plow three more acres with a chimpanzee than without, and that those three acres would yield enough grain to trade for sixty sandals. And he offers that many sacks of grain for the chimpanzee.

Trade became abstract with money as its abstraction. And that made everything weirder. It is easy to see this with George, much of whose money came with the disassociation of labor and goods. The money was passed on because of his birth and then it became his task to figure out what to do with it. To his credit, he spread it around in many buckets. Most of us must work, receive payment, work, receive payment, invest if we have made enough, work, receive payment, and so on. There is an immediate connection between action and reward. And we must decide how far we will go or not go to receive our payments, or how we will survive when there are none.

The chimp trainer goes back to the sandal maker and says, “Then I’ll trade you a chimpanzee for fifty sandals,” and the sandal maker says, “But one pair of sandals lasts me for a year and I do not need fifty sandals at this time.”  The chimp trainer says, “Then take the forty nine that you do not need now and use them for trade for other things that you need.” And the sandal maker says, “You are the trader in chimps, and I am the trader in sandals; I do not know your business and you do not know mine, let us try to keep that truth and still make a deal.”

I often think George carries a paranoia regarding those who work for him and expect payment in return. As if he is asking, “Why must you work for an immediate return and not take greater risks for an even greater return?” And although I have heard him say that so-and-so must work to support his or her family, there is always a disconcerting edge to the comment. Yes, George does work for the underdog, for the less privileged, for the silenced, but he also projects a kind of distaste for monetary exchange, as real as he can intellectualize its relevant importance it may have been more of a burden than a blessing to him in the final analysis.

The sandal maker says, “Then I will provide you sandals far into the future. Give me the chimp and I will give you one pair of sandals each year for the next fifty years, and thus you will have your fifty sandals exactly as you need them.” The chimp trainer says, “but if I die tomorrow what good are these sandals? If sandals that are cheaper next year then I have made a bad bargain.

Now that any stock reserves I once had are wiped out and I can no longer depend on my parents for what I once perceived as a financial safety net, money means more and less to me at the same time. A rich girl I no longer am, although I haven’t really been since leaving my parents’ home twenty years ago. There is still a little here and there, like cashing out a life insurance policy to pay for self-employment taxes, but that’s not what I’d call real luxury.

With all my education and exposure here I sit, dependent on another man (my husband) for my lifestyle. If I were not so cloudy as a young adult I would have assured this never happened to me, and not brushed off those jobs that I once held that may have turned into “something.” And yet, either because or in spite of or a combination of both, I still made it here, trying to etch out a life doing what I love to do.

If Guar learns to make sandals from elephant leather that last two years, then I am stuck with an inferior product. No, fifty sandals one year at a time are not enough for a chimp, I want, let’s with my wife needing shoes too and pregnant with a child who also needs shoes eight years from now I will accept 2 shoes per year for the next eight years from now and then three shoes per year for the following forty two years (a total of 140 shoes!).

As an unhappy child, I learned that money has no value, which is only partly true. Money matters, but it does not bring happiness, peace, love, or real security - it matters in that it allows us to function in our current society.  Within these rules, these games. And I am forever battling my desire to play or not, partly convinced that I have a choice.

Ah, the future is indefinite; a sandal later has less value than a sandal now if one is not the greatest sandal trader who can dispose of his entire stock on a moment’s notice. The chimp trainer accepts immediately, having calculated the delayed shoe payments to amount to a little more than 5% interest. Even without money there is a discount rate on any future payment. It’s built into the very idea of trade, of markets.

I have long thought that time could move backwards, some theoretical physicists agree, and I still do, but I visualize it as moving backwards - consciously. We arrived at this point of time unconsciously, abusing each other and our fruitful land, but what if we found our way back to simplicity appreciating its value as greater than the value currently placed on excess, power and inequality?

There’s a discount rate too for comfort, happiness, or pleasure. “I’ll eat the eggs now because I’m hungry, and who knows what there is for tomorrow.” I’ll get drunk tonight, and the hangover won’t be until tomorrow; screw now and hope I don’t get pregnant.” The great and immediate four F’s of evolution; feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking. Frugal can’t stand amongst these giants. 

If George were making financial sacrifices for living his ideal life, he might have more empathy for those of us trying to figure out how to live our ideal lives without money getting too much in the way. But bills must get paid, even while we try to eliminate them, while we try to live smaller, more compactly, more responsibly.

Yet provident, saving, and accumulation does stand in the second rank of survival strategies. This stuff is innate and has little to do with trading sandals for chimpanzees, now is simply more important than tomorrow, tomorrow more so than day after tomorrow, and so on.

I am all for a contracting economy to save ourselves, but it’s not going to feel so good. And the more it’s been expanded, the more pain it will inflict as it contracts. There is a side of George’s bitterness towards money that I understand, that I can feel in my bones. But had he lost all of it completely, unable to benefit from its creature comforts, he would be in a better position to fully visualize the entire cycle.

There is the theoretical - hence, the chimp trainer and the sandal maker - and then there is today - buying new sneakers for Ruby’s growing feet: I hold on tightly awaiting news of JP’s next project…

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