Less than a pint of beer.

That is a truthful and accurate description of why what my dad left me when he died.  (oops, that was quite the typo.. lol..)

Nor can I claim that while he was alive, he gave me the deposit for various houses, shares in the company, a start on the corporate ladder, or anything else.

I was just about to write that “after the age of sixteen, anything that was ‘given’ to me was given in exchange for work, eg training on the job, eg apprenticeship at a trade, eg I bloody earned it“… and then I thought about it, and to be honest it wasn’t that different *before* I was 16.

I don’t mean he was a slave driver or had me climbing inside chimneys at 7, I do mean I had to meet certain expectations, behaviour, chores, so on and so forth.

I can remember being stood outside the door, shivering in vest and underpants in winter, age 6/7, and being asked a simple enough question, did I want to come in to his house, in the warm, given that his house = his rules, eg do as you are told boy… nobody was forcing me to live there, or forcing him to have me live there….

I know there are many out there that will say this is child abuse yadda yadda, hey, I was fucking *there* buddy, it wasn’t abuse, it was teaching a small boy a lesson.

To be sure, it is a lesson that has contributed to a lot of my problems over the years, but then again, it has saved me from an unknowable but undoubtedly huge quantity of other problems, the lesson that whoever paid the rent etc called the shots, if you don’t like it, contribute to the rent or take a hike.

Your input or say in how that “mini state/country” was run was directly proportional to how much of the total tab you picked up each and every month.

Further to that, unless you actually had the ability to pick up 100% of the tab, your role was adviser, sort of non preferential voting stock, you didn’t get to call any shots, ever, or say shit if your vote was simply ignored.

“You paying my rent bitch?” was what I said to the skank upstairs (who now smiles at me) when she came down one Sunday to complain about my music, which is playing as I type this. Not paying rent, no vote in how I live in my own fucking home.

I just stood in my bathroom and ran my hair trimmer over my head, 3mm buzz cut over everything, just let that shit fall on the floor,washing machine is loaded, got some washing up to do and work surfaces to wash and wipe down then run the vacuum around, (which will pick up the hair) and bung the floor mats in the machine for the second load.

Then dive in the shower, fresh clothes, put the towels and shit in the machine, job’s a good un.

Sure, may not be to everyone’s taste, but, I pay 100% of the rent and bills, why should I please anyone else?

If I’m co-habiting with you, sure, I’ll make allowances, a bit of give and take, but ultimately my fall back is living alone, calling my own shots, so that give and take better be a REAL two way street.

I’ve had a few dalliances with wimminz who ostensibly ran their own places, wanted me to give up mine and move in, but hey, I’m giving up my independence, in exchange for what?

I ain’t giving up sole owner and captain of this crappy old 100 foot tramp steamer and throwing all my resources in with you just to be the latest white shirt taking orders on the bridge of your fucking Feadship.. no way Jose..

Which brings us to all the single skank ho’s I’ve been banging this past few years, and how none of them have ever progressed to the co-habiting relationshit status.

Which brings us to how all those single skank ho’s have fared sailing those waters alone, or with a succession of crew / deckhands that come and go on the good ship Venus.

The ones I know something about… not well… not one of them… no exceptions… shades of Cheech & Chong, Basketball Jones…. and Tyrone Shoelaces.. I’m Gwana Kickbooti… bitches are all so in love (Jones-ing for) with some fictional idea of the next chapter in their fucking cupcake lives, that their real lives go swirling down the shitter….

Literally, I mean literally in every sense of the word, going from “two things I said I would never do are gangbangs and doing it for money”…  well 12 months later one of them things is gone and she has had “conversations” with people, several times, about going on the game….  to my mind they are both long gone, hell I paid for it, not directly, but it still amounts to the same thing, even if the hourly rate was about an buck an hour…

Not much further to sink, except renting her own kids out, which frankly speaking isn’t that great a retrograde step from their current lives, either for her or them.

Harsh, but true.

This is the bit where that lesson dad taught me saves me from shit, ain’t getting hitched to *that* fucking wagon… no siree…

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The corporate world isn’t that different, let’s take a place that almost nobody who reads this blog is from, so we can all view it equally, as outsiders… it isn’t any different to here, or the US, or Germany, or India, or China, or Oz or anywhere else… but plenty of readers from all of those places, so they will find it harder to be objective.

Ukraine.

You have between 3 and 7 different business “cabals”, each of which comprises of one or more very very rich and powerful person, and a small close circle of very rich and powerful people with broadly similar aims.

One cabal wants Ukraine in the EU, one wants it in the Euro, one wants it to be DHL for Russian gas, one doesn’t, you get the picture.

Below this level are all the pieces, Tymoshenko Turchynov Yatsenyuk and so on, politicians, lawyers, people who are merely multi-millionaires or billionaires, these people can be sacrificed on the board, usually just taken off the board until the next game, but sometimes actually sacrificed.

Below this level is the State and Government and Law Enforcement as we, the proles, know it….

When people say things like it is all fun and games until someone loses an eye, that is true, but unless it is you, or someone else on your level that loses the eye, that doesn’t matter… it’s not “real” and the games can go on.

In many ways these “cadres” are the true terrorist organisations, and they are as hard to act against as it is to nail jelly to a wall, they aren’t an army, or a company, or even a family, in the way we of the common folk understand it.

Amusingly, I don’t think this is all *inherently* bad, the very same attitudes that were behind the English enclosures acts and the discovery and simple taking of America and Australia and the dividing up of oil resources below the Arabian gulf are a good thing, if they are applied to new resources….. apply them to “discovering” Mars and “dividing” up the resources in the asteroid belts and they become essential and beneficial for mankind, apply them to a finite and shrinking (due to increasing population density or per capita energy use) pool such as English common land and they duck donkey balls.

Outright wars of attrition between cadres are rare, M.A.D. y’see…

Cadres aren’t the illuminati, (there ain’t no such thing) nor are they everlasting and unchanging… sure, the British Royal Family are still living off the gravy of all they stole at spearpoint and pass down through inheritance, but in the real scheme of things they are also ran’s now, bit players, not world makers and shakers, but the steam age created new cadres, the electric age ditto, the oil age ditto, and to a certain extent the digital age.

This is not a million miles away from saying the so called Dark Ages weren’t actually that dark, except from the perspective of someone who loved empire and meticulous record keeping….

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The plight of any European country after the fall of Rome and the start of the so-called Dark Ages can be compared to my dad dying and leaving me insufficient estate to buy a single pint of beer.

It doesn’t actually fuck you up, so, anything you get in the future, you have to earn it yourself… big deal…. is that really such a *bad* thing?

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, just by being prudent and careful, my dad could *easily* have made me an overnight millionaire the day he died, and not just millionaire, but CEO too.

Tell me, who else on the planet lost out because he didn’t? And really, what did I “lose”, something I never had, a bunch of extra power and money that I couldn’t handle anyway…

Shades of Jesus being offered an Iron Cross by Adolf, if Jesus will let him in to Heaven, so Jesus goes and asks his dad if he can let Adolf in, and God says to Jesus “Nah, tell him to fuck off boy, you couldn’t even handle a fucking wooden cross, much less an iron one…”

On the contrary, what I would have lost, had dad left me a few million and a company or three, is the chance to learn, to be one of the common people, to have no burdens except those which I managed to trip over myself.

The cadres are as trapped by their situation as we are, the shark cannot stop swimming, the bear cannot stop eating, the elephant cannot stop moving to find fresh grazing…

The CEO cannot go down to one plant and speak to one worker and try to make his job and his lot and his work on the company product better… the only tools he has are blunt and crude and massive.

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However, none of this presupposes that anyone at any level is doing the best they can, or knows what the fuck they are doing, or is largely a victim of circumstance.

What would you do if I handed you US$ 250,000,000,000 right now, to do with as you please?

Funny thing is, once you get past the shit about “buy the company and sack the boss” and “buy a lambo” and “hire Van Halen for my next birthday”, funny how NONE of these cunts end up doing the things we all say we would do, living our own personal dreams.

Let’s say your personal dream is doing a Bogey, buying an old tramp steamer and wandering around the south china seas as the whim takes you, plying your trade.

Fucking try it…. that world ain’t there any more, and if there is no trade, you may as well make it a Feadship, and if you do that the relationship between you and the crew is different, and with the pirates, you can’t be one of the old school and have a few .50 cal brownings on the bridge wings, so suddenly you are basically floating around restricted seas in your gin palace, no more real freedom than you had when you started out.

That’s what the sci-fi books always get wrong too, because it always comes back to human nature and society, the independent space ship captain, they always were an anachronism, even back in the day before society and technology got organised enough to eradicate any niches that they managed to inhabit.

Those that were there were part pirate, part thief, part honest man, part drunk, and mainly trying to get a break, away from the glamour of the silver screen, it wasn’t all that.

It still isn’t, independent private hire self employed taxi guy vs Stagecoach + Virgin Rail + British Airways + DHL, all of whom work together and publish fixed schedules and so on.

He does it because there are fuck all other alternatives, not because he could have been Greyhound…

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When my dad died and left me not quite enough money to buy a pint of beer, I did, literally, the only thing I could do, I fished in my own pocket for some coppers until I had enough to buy a pint of beer, went into the nearest pub, bought that pint of beer and drank it, here’s to you dad…

You know what, that ain’t such a bad thing.

Less than a pint of beer is more, much much more, than several million pounds.