That's me. Ian Lidster, 'thousandaire'

Pity the poor banking weasels who are now going to have to subsist on a mere half a million a year. What must that be like? I suppose if your sense of fiscal responsibility and entitlement is stratospheric, it must be a very bad thing to be forced into such penury.

But, it’s all relative. In the (unlikely) mind of a Paris Hilton, I suppose the thought – she has them, they say, though they often conflict with considerations of appropriate nail polish hue – would be a sympathetic one for those who will now have to struggle so.

I do not live in such exalted realms. I’m also a tight-fisted bastard. So, when I accrue a few dollars, I detest spending them. I like getting bank statements showing four (sometimes even five) figures. I detest debt and attempt to scrupulously avoid it. Right now Visa owes me $11.35. How cool is that?

So, by this stage of my life the only thing I want to spend money on is (aside from the obvious like mortgage, food, cable and transportation) is travel. That is never money badly spent.

So, you can imagine the joy in my acquisitive soul when blogger Leslie offered me a cool five grand. That’s right. In her tagging of me she said $5,000 would be laid on me; my personal bailout, if you will. All I have to do is respond to a simple question: What would you do if given $5,000? A nice little sum that. Not a half million, but tolerable. So, when she tagged me you can imagine how jubilant I was.

All I have to do to get my five grand is suggest a worthy use for it. Excellent.

It was only a while later that I realized that the sum was strictly symbolic and that no filthy lucre would change hands between her and me. I thought we were friends but I guess we just weren’t as close as I’d imagined.

Nevertheless, I want to play. The only criterion in my response is that my answer has to be sensible and worthwhile, not $5,000 worth of M&Ms, which was a concept she toyed with for a while.

So, here are some possibilities I might consider:

I rejected my initial response which was to lay the money on a friend of mine who is in the process of opening what she hopes will be the first legal brothel in Canadian history. No, my friend is not a ‘lady of the evening’ but she is an advocate for them. Well hookers get a lot of bad press, their lives are often wretched, and some of them can be very nice (don’t ask me how I know that), so the idea wasn’t a bad one. But, I pulled back on the idea because I think there remain too many legal hurdles. So, I move on. OK, now these are my serious suggestions:

1. I have a friend who operates a halfway house for recovering alcoholics/addicts. So often people complete a rehab program but end up having to return to some dysfunctional and shitty dive once clean and sober. This puts them in jeopardy. So, I would happily give my friend some of that largesse.

2. Leslie mentioned her husband suggested investing in solar panels. Brilliant. I could see doing that. A number of years ago when we were in the Cook Islands we noticed that many of the dwellings had solar panels. It made so much sense, and I could only think, what the hell is wrong with us that we’re not doing likewise? Those people are supposed to be primitive. We’re just morons burning up hydrocarbons like there is no tomorrow. Guess what? There isn’t.

3. Provide hypodermics for Type I diabetic children of poor families. In this weird society they give out free syringes to junkies. Yes, I know, it is to thwart the unwanted spread of HIV and Hep-C. Fair enough. Yet addicts are there by choice. Diabetics have no choice. And have no freebies.

4.Donate the bucks to the Island Corridor Society. This is the group that operates the little railway on Vancouver Island. They get little help (other than from loyal passengers, and there are many) from officialdom and deal with governments who want to pave the world into freeways and ignore the highly viable option of rail transit. The Asians and Europeans are about 200 years ahead of us in this regard. No wonder much of the rest of the world thinks North American attitudes are pretty pathetic.

5. Send Ian and Wendy back to Kauai (or the South of France, either will do nicely). You know, just to clean out our psyches so we might continue to contribute to society. Just consider it a body and soul investment. Well, it was worth a shot. The first four suggestions, by the way, are absolutely serious.

Who would I like to see do this? Well, absolutely anybody who wants to give it a shot. It truly does make one think. But specifically I will look for comments by:

Thailand Chani
Merely Me
Cs
Heart in San Francisco
D. Sistrunk
Acuity Todos