Do you suffer from a lack of laziness?

(Another ad pasted on top of another ad; my apologies.)

Dear diary,

I just don’t understand the concept of ownership. Maybe I never will. I ride my bike down the road and I see a guy exit the front door of his mansion and begin to walk toward his shiny boat. Many of the houses in this neighborhood that I’m biking thru have boats either stored at their side or parked in the driveway. So I think to myself, “Why does this guy own a big house and a boat, and I myself only own this little bicycle?” And some other part of my mind tries to answer the part of my mind that posed this question:

“It’s cuz he, that guy with the boat, took the initiative to go beg the bank for a loan. If you yourself, dear Bryan, wish to own a boat too, you could go to the bank and make an appointment with a loan officer. It’s just that simple.”

And so the questioning part of my mind asks this know-it-all “How does a loan make one an owner, tho? Isn’t the bank the actual, real, true owner? Cuz if you don’t keep up with your payments then the bank repossesses the boat as well as the house. And in order to make your payment, you must rent out your body & mind to a corporation; so, in the end, it seems that you don’t even own yourself!”

And then I realize that I’m not covering all the bases. There are gaps in my argument — big, gaping gaps everywhere. My hypothetical, as the old joke goes, has more holes than swiss cheese. Cuz I haven’t considered the possibility of being independently wealthy: THAT could be the reason that this dude owns a boat and a mansion: He was born into money.

But how does one get born into money? First you must find parents who are well-off, which is to say: wealthy, right, prosperous, opulent, loaded, flush: sitting pretty. Thus the solution only circles us back to the problem:

Well then, how did thy parents, O thou boat owner, grow so rich?

— And here we could take our thots in many directions:

We could say that the fellow’s parents got rich by finding oil on their land. When you find oil on your land, a representative from the oil company pays you a visit and offers you a lifetime supply of luxury. Then the oilmen come and suck out all the oil with straws, and haul it away in a giant cylindrical canister on the trailer of a truck.

Alternately we could say that our subject’s parents grew rich from plain, hard work. Perhaps the father worked as a glover, that is: a maker of gloves. And maybe the mother worked as a seamstress: a woman who earns her fortune by sewing. We could even imagine these two souls working as a team, since their careers both basically center upon the fashioning of garments. They might set up their own establishment, a mom-&-pop outfit called “Glove Shop”. The father designs each pair of gloves, & he also raises & slaughters the cattle whose hide provides the material that the mother sews together (for these are high-quality leather gloves we’re talking about — you don’t become multi-billionaires overnight from manufacturing shoddy products); and the mother, in addition to sewing, is also adept at metallurgy, which is useful for styling the snaps and fasteners.

So those are all the ways that one can get rich.

And I don’t wanna make this entry too annoying by continuing to ask questions of myself, but, since we’re trying to get to the bottom of the concept of ownership, I now also wonder how this husband-&-wife conglomerate acquired their livestock. Cuz it’s not like cattle are free. Did they just happen to find, while out on a stroll, one lonely cow (a fully grown female animal of a domesticated breed of ox) grazing in a field somewhere, unclaimed; that is, without a brand name on its flesh; and therefore they (the human parents of our boat-and-mansion owner) simply claimed the beast as theirs? And then, later that afternoon, while out on a second stroll thru a wholly separate field — or, say, rather a meadow this time — by chance they met a raging bull (an uncastrated male bovine animal) which was also unbranded? And thus they arranged a wedding feast for their newfound beasts, and the cattle luckily liked each other enough to consummate their marriage that very night and bear thirty-three calves into wedlock for their proud owners.

All this reminds me of these lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Where the hay-rick stands in the barn-yard, where the dry-stalks are scatter’d, where the brood-cow waits in the hovel,
Where the bull advances to do his masculine work . . .

So I guess I ended up answering my own questions about ownership; where it comes from and what is its function. I conclude that it is necessary, otherwise civilization fails. And civilization consists of banks and warfare. And the concept of ownership derives from people walking thru green pastures and lying beside still waters and then espying unclaimed animals in nearby wildernesses. You hold ’em by the horns and lead ’em back to the barn. Place your score near the hay-rick, and say a few choice words while waving your hand over their heads, then announce to Michelet “You may now kiss the bride.” Give ’em some privacy and you’ll soon be happified by an increase in wealth: for Vica was fecund.

I should end this entry here, but I don’t wanna leave it. I love this entry: it worked out just the way that I wanted. My loyal readership knows that it’s not normally like this. In most entries, I struggle with a theme, the words get away from me, and it’s like the composition has a mind of its own. But this one I nailed down with force. I showed this entry who’s boss. I was somehow able to fit into it all the things that I’ve always wanted to put in an entry: the truth about ownership; a happy billionaire and his loving parents; even a bovine wedding replete with 33 offspring! The only thing that’s missing now is a moral. So let me try to finagle one…

I say the moral of this entry is that if you work hard in an imaginary land, such as this dreamscape where my hypotheticals transpire, then you can bring forth parents that are able to procreate boat-owners; “Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same” [“Song of Myself” again]; and you don’t even have to abandon your love of wildlife. You can think about cows and bulls; and, while you’re doing so, they themselves might even be thinking about YOU. (For anything that’s owned surely tries to love its owner.)