Like pretty much every other quote I put on here, it's a paraphrase. Lloyd Banks--



--said it:

"But as long as i'm here i'm gon' grab checks
And make my cash stretch longer than giraffe necks"

Now, as I went searching for that quote, I found that you get something interesting when you Google Lloyd Banks:



No image? That's what me and my friends call "holding down spots." And if you don't know what that means, don't worry--I tried to find it on Urban Dictionary and it seems like, once AGAIN, I've been using a slang term that no one else in the world knows.

This has been a problem for me in my books. My slang is pretty insular--to understand it, you need to be a New York-raised hipster who used to know a pot dealer named DS.

DS was an American original. He was from Hawaii or Fiji or something; his parents had this loft in Tribeca that was full of masks and canoes. He lived in the basement. It's a cliche, most recently promulgated by Freakonomics, that drug dealers live in their parents' basements, but DS lived in the basement; I think his mom left his food by the door.

He woke up at 5pm. His naturally Polynesian skin fought in vain against the effects of 24/7 fluorescent lighting. And he spent most of his time inventing phrases. My favorite was what he said when he wanted to shut someone up, which I used in It's Kind of a Funny Story:

Yo,
yo,
yo,
yo,
yo,
yo,



FUCK you

He had better delivery than Mitch Hedberg, this guy. But increasingly he's responsible for me saying stuff that no one gets:

• hold spots down
  
  "keep a low profile"



• forces conspire
  
  "it's not my fault" (usually used to explain why you're late)



• pause
  
  "you're gay"

This has influenced my decision to, whenever possible, keep contemporary slang out of my books. Besides confusing readers, it's hell on the translators--back in 2002 the German translator of Be More Chill sent me a desperate message to find defitions for, among other things:

• "phillies"


• "pimpin’"


• "hairy necessaries"


• "palsy-ish"


• "poonanti"

We got her straightened out, though, and I got my foreign rights check, just like Lloyd. But today, some giraffe necks got cut off like in an evolution experiment:

the Chinese stock market dropped 9%

the Dow dropped 416 points

a stock I own received a warning from the EPA about its mercury emissions

Why do I even own a stock that has mercury missions?

Well, it's because I'm not good with money. I'm not not good in the normal way; I'm not good in a very special way where I manage to be cheap and to overspend at the same time. I look at my bank statements and there are nights where I take out $200 from an ATM at 8:00 and $100 at 8:08. Then there are nights like last night where I drink seltzer all night and curse myself for tipping the perplexed waitress $2 instead of $1.

Then again, I am on Lamictal.

So what's the upshot here?

1. I'm less ill than Lloyd Banks.


2. Greenspan says it's recession time again.


3. For once, it makes sense that I keep such a ridiculous amount of money in checking:
   
   
   
   

It's not me, folks. It's from Prank Palace.