Читать книгу The Meerkats’ Book on Money - Ilinda Markov - Страница 2

We know, we know, you are flat broke, desperate, in between anxiety crises, your last excitement dates from the day when you took your auntie shopping for clothes pegs, so you need us, a gang of bonkers meerkats straight out from the Kalahari desert where Cape burrowing scorpions are the friendly creatures.

It will get your knickers in a knot over the crazy things people do over money. Big money, fast money, heaps of money! You don’t need to be academic to figure out that rich people have always had it good: good life, good food, envious love affairs, expensive youthfulness.

From the old movie scenes with Mr Fat Purse lighting a cigar with a burning dollar bill, to the hipster rave: drinking vodka from an ice sculpture, it’s all about a show-off of money. Even if you are a non-smoker and vodka gives you a headache, you still need money to pay the bills breeding like mice in a kitchen drawer. Money might not always buy love and happiness but buys things that make one happy. Like paying those bills and paving the road to financial freedom. The literary legend Charles Bukowski labelled once as slavery a life like “…leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight the traffic…”just to make ends meet. Financial independence is beneficial for the health, the self-esteem, and last but not least to one’s posture; given our trademark role of watch guards, we, the meerkats, are particular about postures. Have you seen Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch? Full of purpose and protection. That’s what we are telling you that money worries can give you ulcer, back pain, heart palpitations, depression, anxiety and what not.

The privileges for the rich date well back in the obscurity of history. If you were rich and lived at the time of ancient Egypt for example you were entitled to be mummified, plus given a copy of the Book of the Dead, which was more than forty feet long, so you knew your way in the afterlife. If you were a pharaoh, you’d order a pyramid to be built with chambers full of gold and goods that would keep you fed and happy during your time as dead. Some ancient tribes, though, like the Chinchorro people who lived in what is now northern Chile around seven thousand years ago were more democratic: mummification was for everyone, rich or poor.

If an average person thinks of sex every eight seconds, (sex is banned in our gang, it’s only the alpha couple’s business) it’s also believed that people think of money every two seconds. Thoughts last more than two seconds, so one is thinking continuously of money. That doesn’t help much making it. There are no free lunches or other nano wishes that circle in the head along with fantasies of Gatsby parties, overnight bitcoin hits, mammoth gold nuggets finds or windfalls of cash, that classic and infallible lubricant of people’s relationships. The reality is that money is a feral thing, that’s why we know its nature better while you never stop wondering how it is so that many are doing better in life, and with all the wealth to grab out there your purse is parched with continuous draughts. You ask yourself what kind of an app you might need to spruce up your life and find the river of money.

All you need is us, devious Kalahari gangsters in possession of good knowledge of foraging the desert where the sky is full of birds of prey, we are talking here hawks and eagles and from behind the bushes hyenas strike and Cape cobras are lurking in the sand.

Perhaps you are arrogant enough to still ask what meerkats have to do with money, after all among ancient coins there’s none with my snout on it. A lot of bulls and lions and other brutes but not meerkats. Meerkats appear though in modern South African and Rwanda gold coins: 24 karat gold is used for showing our gang in our trademark watchful stance, stretched high on our back legs to observe all and sundry on the desert’s horizon. 24 karat gold! That tells you something, dude. Who will put your portrait in 24 karat gold? No offence meant. Besides we are not cats as you might think reading that meerkat is the Afrikaans version of Marsh Cat. Marshes in the Kalahari? Ridiculously ignorant! Suricats as sometimes we are called sounds better.

So let’s start!