It’s 6:00 am and you turn off the alarm clock for the last time. Despite the need to relieve yourself you pass out again, the night has been haunted you. The expected sleep never came because the Greenback Devil has been visiting your nightmares sabotaging your effort to rejuvenate. And now, even as you wake, you can swear you saw him just at the foot of your bed and you bolt upright with cold chills; the chance of further sleep now completely gone.

If you do not have the Greenback Devil working for you, days can become tortured events. The ringing of a phone marks a battle between you and one of his imps, dreading who may be on the end of the line. The mailbox is filled day in and day out with his imps who make you agonize as you open that unidentified mail. Even knocks at the door could be something other than the pizza you ordered. It gets so bad that you wonder if maybe the imps aren’t making off with your things so you check too see if your car is still sitting in its’ spot several times a day.

Finally, still sitting in your bed, covers pulled up to your chin you come to the realization that you must accept the Greenback Devil for exactly what it is, a merciless taskmaster who tempts you with your daily creature comforts. You want these monstrosities, the wide-screen TV, the leather covered furniture, the fast car and such, but to get them you must accept the Greenback and the hold it will have over you.

As you finally go about the routines, you face your wallet, the abode of many Greenbacks and his impish minions, Visa, Amex, Discover, and of course their leader, MasterCard. Your wallet is unfortunately not loaded with the Greenbacks that you now realize hold his followers at bay and who can cause so much torture. You instead fold it and stick it in a rear pocket content with squeezing the Greenback and his minions between your ass and the seat. Now you realize why men carry wallets where they do, out of site and inflicting some of your own torture on the unfeeling demons that reside within.

Sitting down at the table, Captain Crunch mocks you with raucous noise as you chew and titillates you with sweet flavors of maple and corn. It is your last bowl, the Crunch dust is floating on the milk, you’re going to need more Greenbacks to buy more Captain Crunch. Then it hits, the Greenback Devil has invaded every part of your life. The breakfast cereal, the dishwasher detergent, the toothpaste and even the medications you need to stay alive and in health all force you to work for Greenbacks. You are hooked and the world around you does not even notice that it has been taken over by a fiction so pervasive that it is invisible.

But it is worse for you, you are not part of the Greenback Generating Machine, you are unemployed and Greenbacks come with little or no frequency and the imps are starting to take their toll on your life. You can find no solace in the fact they you are not part of the fiction that rules the world, in fact the world considers you less than human because you are not hooked on the Greenback fiction. Friends leave you because they cannot be bothered with someone not part of the shared delusion. Opportunities seem to slip by you for you are not acclimated to the Greenback way of doing things.

You understand now, as you stare down at the last of the Crunch dust laced milk in your bowl that you have grown in a way that is outside of the common perceptions and that if you are not careful you could be labeled by the deluded masses. You could be labeled “Insane”, or even “Malcontent”, or possible “Vagrant”. You could be labeled a lot of things, “Deadbeat Dad”, “Tax Evader”, “Rebel Rouser”, “Communist”, “Disaffected” or “Public Enemy Number One”. The masses will do anything to maintain the illusion for themselves and if you are not careful you could become a victim of the fallacy.

But you know that your point of view is not without merit. You know that you have turned down opportunities because you did not want to feel like a hypocrite. You have refused to do things you feel are wrong, like defrauding seniors out of money. Why? Because you grew a conscious it alerted you to the longer range ill accepting the course offered would cause. You escaped a job once because it was just not right to slam everybody in the worlds email boxes twenty times in a day. The escape made you feel better; you have now injured a machine that injured half a billion people a day with annoyances. You are guilty of being moral and ethical to yourself, and if the truth be known, everybody else, but the fiction cannot accept a person like that. Last time it did it put us into two thousand years of additional fallacies and counting.

The question now becomes how long can you hold out against the delusion? You need Greenbacks to survive in this world and you are not willing to go rural. Even then, it would take a stack of Greenbacks to get there before you can go rural and live off the net. To what extent are you willing to accept the stigmata from the culture around you before you throw up your hands and give in to the inevitable? You do not know the answer to that, but you can feel it would take a much strong personality than yours, so you know there will come a time where you will pursue the Greenbacks again.

So, how long do you hold out, allowing the imps of the Greenback hound you? How long will you submit to the daily grind without the creature comforts you are fantasizing about? When will you wake up in the shared delusion that is the world around you and existence for everybody that you know? Is Utopia any where near? Can you last until your point of view is the accepted point of view? And now you know, the answer to all these questions is inadequate to sustain you and you once again give into the delusion. You go and search for the cog that is missing in the delusion and take the place that it serves.

But maybe there is a way of serving the delusion without giving into the whole. You look for something that is “out of the way” or “off the scope”. You look for the stealthy ways of acquiring Greenbacks. You search for easy ways to generate the Greenback income to survive so you may then live the life you want to live without the delusion encompassing your whole twenty-four hour existence.

The realization of what needs to be done hits you and starts a revitalization within you. It is the conundrum of the Greenback, you may hate it, but it feels good to be in pursuit of it. In fact it feels great to be part of the big machine. It feels wonderful knowing you are an eager participant in the race of acquiring more Greenbacks than the Jones’s next door over. And every time you pull out an imp to pay for that new top-of-the-line computer and pair of fashionable shoes you make yourself more and more the Greenbacks slave and give the imps more opportunity in the future to harass you unrelentingly. You are again part of the delusion and you love it. You love it until something breaks in your little system and then you hate the fact that you ever got involved in the Greenback delusion at all.

But you set aside the idea of the delusion and pursue the Greenback again. You immerse in the delusion and chase your vanity filled dreams that the Greenback can fulfill. You are again wallowing in the illusion that everything is alright, and you thank the Greenback for it.

God bless the Greenback Demon, we love you, for now.