C.R.E.A.M.

today, today, today...i need for money to fall like skittles out of the rainbowed sky. i need it to grow como la yerba buena, that once flourished in carmen's backyard in northern california. i need six trees of it, sprouting 100 dollar bills. i need it to multiply, quadruplify, enth-ify. i need more than $34 over the course of 7 hours at the restaurant. i'm just saying. i hear people talk about "getting money." like, they just get it. this has never been my case. i don't come from it, i don't find it, i don't see potential for it anywhere, i avoid it, i hate it, i need it. i try to earn it. i try to attach a dollar sign to my various worths (office assistant, photography assistant, good person, Vassar graduate, ICP graduate, waitress). i need it to live in this room, to travel on the subway, to pay for my internet, to buy toilet paper, toothpaste and not just the travel size, to fucking buy a box of fucking tampons for christ's sake. i need it and i refuse it.

so what am i worth? i joke that my dowry would be worth a donkey...one, long-lashéd, docile donkey...but somewhere else...i am lucky i have this blue passport...am i? and it is only half a joke, actually, about my dowry...

tonight while earning these $34 i was talking to the other waitress. she is 23. she lives with a much older lawyer. she is chiseled, hard-bodied, she is much more mature than her 23 years. she has a classic face that would place her in a period drama, some day...and she is working on this. she auditions. she cooks barley soup. she works at the park slope co-op, she waitresses now and again. this was never an option for me. never ever have i ONCE fantasized about my wedding day, or about meeting a 'man with money,' or even sharing a bank account with anyone, or ever thinking that maybe i'd get lucky and be supported by, again, this man with money. i know i never will, either. not then not ever. on me, it is on me on me on me. while my mother bears the brunt of my stupidity and idiocy, less than 10 years from her retirement she still gives me the monetary shirt off her back...not this week, mamá. not this week.

it began to rain in brooklyn about 10 minutes ago...i've been checking weather dot com all week. i don't know why. i've known for two days it was going to rain on wednesday, after 12 am...but all i hear are those beautiful gotas of water falling on the gardens and rooftops that brooklynites are so proud of (it's a concrete jungle, after all...)...rain is always soothing. it also ALWAYS, CONSISTENTLY WITHOUT FAIL, makes you miss someone...who that someone is depends on the year...so here we are...i am missing a figment of my imagination, listening to rain fall on my rented abode in a town not mine in a year so brutal and spectacular all i can do is ram myself against the corner of my bed where it meets the wall and hide under the covers...plugging my ears...i know the sound of bills falling from the sky would be more like the heavy, deafening silence of snow falling...it wouldn't be candy rain nor quarters nor sand dollars nor japanese yen nor luck nor change nor prosperity nor anything other than rain, snow, water...it's just an element doing its job...if only my task in life was to fall onto everything in my path, and make it grow...i am still mad at the elements...spring makes men antsy, summer turns them free, and fall...fall...fall...a crisp slap in the face...a dry leaf at your feet...and me sleeping through it, dreaming of being a thief, the niece of pablo escobar, a skilled 'contractor,' a stripper, an IT technician, a PhD student, an entrepreneur, a spelling bee champ, a home owner, a mechanic, a teacher, a professional, a consultant...anything but THIS! ...my mother and step-father used to make fun of me...they thought i acted in a way befitting someone who had been a 'princess in a previous life...' (!!!!!)...with an air of entitlement, of quick rage, of indifference and blasé, of gimme!...so here i am, then, family...the reincarnation of that princess, in all my entitled royal glory...hiking through the borough in my worn green keds, shoes which barely support what was once used to nothing less than gold plated sandals, fig leaves and cacao, sunshine and time...time for me, me, me...so now look at me, again...still worth my weight in gold, but eating when my place wasn't set...

Cash Rules Everything Around Me.