Have you ever noticed that people who profess such deepness and profundity that they don’t care about their own money always seem to have an inordinate interest in other people’s money? Up here in Aspen, this paradox thrives.

There are two kinds of people here: The ones who are rich and care about their own money and the ones who are not and care about the same money.

The rich ones can be annoying. For the most part, they are friendly and generous to a fault. But is it really necessary to pay other people to wash your car, clean your house, fetch your skis, wipe your butt and scratch your back?

I say it’s not. And the fact that they pay through the nose for those services doesn’t make me feel much better about it. People should be self-sufficient. They should wash their own car, clean their own houses, fetch their own skis, wipe their own butts and find a friend to scratch their backs in exchange for scratching the friend’s back.

Some of the Aspen rich are trustafarian types or successful gold diggers (and I’m not referring to the miners who died out last century). But most made it on their own. How did they navigate the business world successfully if they need help to find their skis?

The answer, of course, is that Continue reading →

“You lied to me!” So said my 6-year-old daughter to me one merry Christmas.

We always made a big deal out of Christmas. It was the one night that I did the cooking, and that alone made it interesting. We lingered over the food, drank wine and eventually moved on to the entree that’s my specialty, the single-malt scotch.

After the guests had eaten enough of my dinner that they could plausibly pretend they were full, our tradition was to open gifts. We thought that the gifts, and one another, looked better in the dim Christmas Eve lights with a few drinks than in the bright Christmas Day lights with a hangover. The kids often put on a little play.

Eventually, the party ended and the guests went home. After the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, the kids would nestle all snug in their beds in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. Hallucinogenic visions of plums and whatnot danced in their sugar-infused heads.

When not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, the curtain lifted on my own little play. Continue reading →

Let me get this straight: You’re real cool and edgy.

You think global warming is the greatest threat to America, Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare, people with more money than you have too much and big government is suited for every task except the task of defending the country. Oh, and you’re way into, like, several Eastern religions.

To which I say, “Yawn.”

Come on. You think exactly what your college professors told you to think, exactly what government bureaucrats told you to think and exactly what your friends told you to think — all because your goal in life is to be exactly like them.

And I’m supposed to give you credit for being edgy?

Let’s take a little historical journey into edginess. Continue reading →