Instead, on the odd occasions that the God of Chaos stumbles drunkenly into the game of my life, rolls a hazy six and I end up with expendable money (as the God of Grinding Fiscal Normality storms off in a huff) I’ve always proudly squandered the coins on ‘experience’.
‘Experience’, of course, adds up to little more than getting drunk somewhere different to normal – at a music festival, or in a Cuban youth hostel, or between the prickly thighs of a nameless prostitute on a bed of desecrated tulips in a Turkish graveyard (never again…).
A wreck less, selfish bout of sententious whimsy comes over me whenever I receive a windfall – I always want to defy the significance of having money by immediately blowing it, not on something tangible and practical, but on something I romanticize as being ‘better’ or ‘more important in life’ than the dough itself. It’s the same idiotic rebellion that causes me to stuff fivers in charity boxes when I know I’m approaching the end of my bank balance - I think I try and defy money because I’m afraid of it ever controlling my life, a high-minded notion I hope I outgrow long before I come to reproduce.
How exactly this daft relationship with money applies to today’s visit to the dentist is something I’ve been pondering, mouth in hand, ever since I left the sour-faced receptionist counting out my two-hundred sheets onto the tabletop of her unfulfilled, Formica-studded life.
I’ve had a dead tooth in the front of my smile that’s been bugging me for years – winking at me in the mirror and gate crashing flash photographs and making me look, to all intents and purposes, like I’m chewing a dead wasp. It’s ground me down, over time, and so it was vanity, simple vanity, that lead me to spend such a princely sum on what can be considered a ‘commodity’ for the very first time in my short, shabby life.
God knows, lying back in the dentist’s chair as a pair of distant eyes ground my front tooth to a sharp spike ready for its new ‘cap’, I knew that for once I hadn’t paid for ‘an experience’ – unless the experience was the novelty of getting a woman that close to your mouth without first listening wide-eyed to her hopes for the future and subtly plying her with Chardonnay.
As an experience, it was vile – as a commodity, it will function to make me feel more complete and attractive as human being. A shiny new tooth. Is it really any different to purchasing alloys for my (non-existent) car, or a touch-screen mobile phone, or a pair of sunglasses with Somebody’s initials built authentically into the frame?
Where do I go from here, now I’ve entered the murky waters of cosmetic improvement? When Chaos next kicks me some money, will I find myself cruising the aisles of a nose supermarket, or flicking woozily through a penis-enlargement catalogue? What happened to the man who has been previously so resistant to aesthetic improvement that he’d bought no new clothes in two years, and regularly denounced bars of soap as part of the ‘beauty industry conspiracy’?
Maybe it’s the first step in developing a mature relationship with money. Now, rather than impulsively spunking any I have on the slippery notion of living a life worth living, I’ll use my new tooth as a building block to bigger and better things.
‘Things’ being the operative word. As shaky recollections of unremarkable hedonism dwindles, tangible wealth will sprout up around me like the well-kept blades of safely fenced lawn.
Food blenders, and digital cameras and nice suits will keep me indoors to bask in their warming presence. As the digits in my annual salary steadily roll upwards they’ll unfurl an infinity of glistening trinkets to sooth the natural impatience of my soul.
And at the centre of this circus of objects, I’ll be grinning, with my two hundred pound tooth wedged firmly in my big, empty head, as the Gods roll 6, 6, 6...
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