People and Money

I will never understand people and money. I probably won't understand either people or money either, but I definitely don't understand them when they are together.
Me? I've never made a lot of money except when I was a chef. Those were the old days and if you were very good it wasn't impossible to get a $1,500 a week cash job running a kitchen in New York. There were only one or two cooking schools of merit and they were turning out very few chefs. Mostly they turned out hotel managers who knew something about the kitchen and costs and such. But the rest of us were self made. You could either do it or not and if you could you could make good money.
But before and after those years, I've always been a guy who makes enough to get by, have a little treat sometimes, and generally been lucky. Not frugal, I've always spent it as I earned it--something I've still got to learn to deal with.
But I've always thought my word was my bond when it came to money and that if you promised to pay someone for something, you did. And if you borrowed money, even if you couldn't pay it back for a long time, when you could, you did.
Right now I owe one pal $1,200, another $800 and one of my sisters about $2,300. That and the mortgage are the entire debt, financially, in my life. (Anyone I've forgotten, let me know.)
Which isn't bad, considering I borrowed about $16,000 to keep this house from begin repossessed the first few years here in Texas before I got the writing gigs I'm so happy to have right now.
So while those debts still linger after 4-5 years, they should be gone this year, finally. With interest.
The point is you eventually pay the damned things.
But on a recent trip to Peru--the one the doctor had me find a replacement for by having me do my surgery almost as soon as he saw me. --the person whose trip it was had the hotels fronted to her. And then she lost a bank card and then came home to find the government had frozen her assets and and says she has no money and now can't pay the remaining $4 grand on the hotels and so my friends Andy and Maria, part of my team in Cuzco, Peru, have been picked up by the police for non-payment of the hotels and are being threatened with having their tourist licenses taken away--a major thing in Peru, believe me. And the person whose trip it was won't even answer her phone.
If that's me, I'm borrowing money to get them paid. I'm selling a car or whatever rather than seeing good people harassed for doing me the favor.
And I've already been stuck telling Andy and Maria that starting in December, when a series of checks becomes due, I will cover the debt monthly till it's paid. I can't do better because these darned stomach operations have eaten all my savings and this last one had me borrowing $3 grand on my only credit card--my limit--as well.
And I'm upset that someone, a wealthy person who is my friend, is letting this happen. She's a great person. What the fuck is she thinking?
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about today.