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agreed. rich people don't stay rich by spending like MC Hammer.the real inbred bluebloods/boston brahmins here will never go broke, they won't buy bottled water because it's too expensive and they can be worth over a hundred-million and drive the same 4matic E-class deisel wagon they had in 1996. that kind of thrift allows them to hide the occasional product of a gene puddle in the guest house or send them to mclean's with james taylor or slyvia plath.




So true. About two years ago, I came home to find a note in my mailbox from the condo building's mailroom. There was a gigantic box of vitamins, sent to a relative, c/o me. After hurling it into the bathtub and stomping on it awhile to flatten the dynamite, I looked inside. Hundreds, thousands of fucking vitamins. I don't think I've taken this many pills in my entire life and, by God, I've taken my share.

I check my voicemail and there's a message from a relative asking me to lie about the value for customs and ship them to him overseas. This guy used to give my sister and I $10,000 for our birthdays, in cash--just "Here, enjoy yourself" and he tosses a wad of bills at us so thick that we're knocked through the fucking drywall from the momentum. Not only is he loaded, but he's generous too.

Now about every two months there's another fucking box of vitamins (the retail value is usually about $800 to $1100), and I drag it down to FedEx to spend an hour filling out customs forms so he can save a total of about $20 in customs duties. This is the lesson: nothing comes free, especially not enormous wads of cash when you're 11 years old from seedy old relatives, but if I have to ship vitamins to this bastard every two months until one of us dies, I'll still come out of it better than his own kids, who will be changing adult diapers with their hummus-scented contents several times a day until he croaks, only to discover that he probably left his fortune to some leper's colony or some other pointless charity.
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