Question 9 – How much is too much?

I feel like at some point I saw a trailer for a movie where a drug kingpin said “Too much is never enough.”  Or maybe it was just a black dude and I’m a huge racist.  According to the internet “Too much is never enough” is a song by Florence and the Machine written for Final Fantasy 7.  Mae West is quoted as saying “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”.  Arianna Huffington said “having too much is never enough.”  There’s a book written by the president’s niece called “Too Much and Never Enough”.  In this book the claim is made that if Donald Trump is re-elected the country is over.  That seems a bit extreme.  After all he’s not even the worse president we’ve had yet. 

So it definitely seems like there is no such thing as too much.  Or at least that’s the popular opinion.  I have a friend (really I do!) let’s call him Snicklefritz.  Back in the old days when people did things after the D&D was over we’d often sit and discuss the weighty issues of the day.  He’s very concerned about the human race and the planet and things like that.  I don’t really get it but you know, to each their own.  He often talks about how the only way to make things better is to cap how much money someone can have.  He feels that as long as people are allowed acquire and acquire and acquire things with no limit society is going to keep getting worse and worse.  I don’t know if that’s the only way, but it would certainly help.  It’s basically impossible, like many good ideas. 

I guess first you’d have to create one world government (which already exists of course, wake up sheeple!) And then that government would need to exert a really high level of control over people.  And people don’t like that so a lot of effort would have to go into repressing them.  But then you could control how much money people could have.  I’m sure though that some kind of moneyless shadow economy would spring up though and still there would be “rich” people and “poor” people somehow.  Winning isn’t as important as someone else losing.  Makes us feel better.

One time there was a movie called Justin Timberlake Does Time Stuff (I believe).  It wasn’t very good but it was a neat idea, that being that time literally was money – you got paid in time and poor people were always on the verge of dying because they had very little time.  Rich people on the other hand could live for hundreds of years.  I don’t remember how it ended but I do remember everyone thinking that JT was going to bang his movie-mom because in this world as long as you had enough time you didn’t age so they looked like they were contemporaries.   He was pretty good in that movie Alpha Dog though.

I’m not sure why Snicklefritz or anyone ever talks to me about anything important because really all I ever say is “Well what can you do?” and then I try to turn the conversation to Alien Covenant which is the best movie ever made.  I’m kind of childish that way.  I prefer to play games and think about new superheroes rather than try to help anything or anyone.  Also it kind of scares me when my friends talk politics (or whatever) because I’m worried it’s going to get ugly.  I have a very low tolerance for people getting pissed at each other.  A few years ago I never would have thought that, but now things seem different.  I often wonder if that’s because things really are different or if I never really knew what was going on.  I’m pretty clueless most of the time when it comes to people. 

Maybe there should be a revision to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that includes how much you need at each level.  The problem being of course that different people have different needs.  Some people need a lot of stuff to be happy.  And most people want it even if they don’t need it.  I have plenty of stuff, too much probably, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting more.  Is that natural or a result of the culture?  I was a pretty greedy kid.  I think I’m a lot better now but I still want lots of stuff.  Can I blame society for that?  Maybe. 

I’ve had limited in-depth interaction with people from other countries but they do seem to be different in my small amount of experience.  The two times I’ve talked significantly with someone brand new to the country they were aghast at the pure amount of stuff in America.  They couldn’t believe it.  They couldn’t even understand how people could consume all this stuff.  Their minds were blown.  So probably it’s a cultural thing but on the other hand the cultural had to come from somewhere right?  Some natural instinct to get a lot of stuff must have sparked it all right?

I’ve ranted on other blogs and in other formats about capitalism so I won’t go into that again here.  But you have to wonder, as Sniklefritz does, at a certain point what are you even doing?  Once you have so much money it means nothing to you why do you keep trying to get it?  I gave up on Lewis Black because his shtick got annoying but back before YELLING was his only move he had a pretty good bit about how rich people are wasting money on things like gold toilets.  No one wants a gold toilet, but once you have billions of dollars what else are you going to do? 

I’d want to start a wrestling company, but I know it wouldn’t work out.  If you’re not in the biz the wrestlers won’t respect you to be the man making matches and I wouldn’t want to just be the money man.  What’s the fun in that?  I think what I’d do is start a fake wrestling company, by which I mean a TV show that’s wrestling but it’s all pretaped and done safely like a normal TV show with lots of fighting and action.  I get why live wrestling still involves people bashing their heads in but it seems like we should be well past the point where the wrestling on TV is all super fake.  A CGI piledriver can’t hurt anyone. 

What was I talking about?  The Funk family contribution to wrestling?  No, how much is too much?  That’s what I was talking about. 

Final answer – inconclusive. 

Addendum – A commercial on the TV told me that if you have no place to sit on your couch you have too many pillows.  Another commercial told me that if you have bloating, swelling and tenderness in your breasts you have too much estrogen.  William Shatner told me that if you have sudden or partial hearing loss or tinnitus you may have too much ear wax.  Katie Couric told me that too much sugar causes premature aging.  Too much vitamin C (the vitamin not the singer) causes stomach cramps. 

I bought a Vitamin C CD when I was in college.  I’m only mildly ashamed of that.  She was in the movie Dracula 2000 which wasn’t terrible.  It was no Alien Covenant but it was okay.  She played Lucy.  The rapist from That 70s Show is in that movie though so, you know. 

How much Dresden Files is too much?  I read the first book in the series a while ago and I didn’t love it but it interested me enough to keep going.  I read the second book and am now reading the third.  I want it to be good but I don’t really like it.  The premise is great for someone like me – a wizard PI in modern times?  Awesome!  And the stories are interesting.  The problem is I dislike the character of Harry Dresden.  He’s a moron and I hate him.  I want him to die and some better person to take over these cases. 

I hate to criticize writing because, what have I ever written, but everything seems very clumsily executed.  It doesn’t help that, so far anyway, Harry is the only dude and all the female characters are terrible.  Harry’s interactions with women are so ham-fisted and awkward that I mentioned to Mi Corazon the other day that I thought the author had never talked to a woman in real life.  Which is mean, but seemed possible at the time because he has long hair and is way into karate and Renaissance Fairs.   But I found out that he has a wife so probably they’ve talked at some point. 

At the end of his books he has a blurb where he talks about how much he loves Lord of the Rings and how what he wants to do is write fantasy novels but no one will publish those.  That makes a lot of sense.  The relationships are all treated with the maturity you’d expect from a sword and sorcery epic (IE very little).  I find this attack very unseemly because going after the book is one thing, but I’m attacking the author.  But hey, it’s not like he’s going to read this right?  RIGHT?!

Two other times recently I’ve accidentally read a book that was part of a series.  I didn’t like them but I still kind of want to read the series because I want to know the full story. 

Conclusion – If I finish this book and I still don’t really like it any more Desden books is probably too many.