I couldn't do it

Reading Cheerful Money*, about the death of the WASP, although, strictly speaking, I'm trash, barely a generation from real-live prostitutes, etc. It's pretty good, witty and the like. It's sort of annoying that Tad Friend, the author, doesn't see that it's hard to feel sympathy for a family that is rent asunder by whether they should sell their summer house for 31.5M bucks...or that his contention that mental illness may somehow be more rampant amongst the Rich than among the gritters down the street from you with the faded POWER OF PRIDE sticker on their panel van is perhaps faulty.

He does tell a winning anecdote of his grandfather (I think - it's sort of difficult to keep everyone straight, with all the nicknames and generations and fairly constant reminders that one generation is the same as the next - timeless!) and his Skull Bones'n'Harmony cohorts breaking into a science lab where a frozen mastodon straight off the tundra is being thawed - and cutting themselves steaks from same and cooking and eating them!

See, I could not eat a steak from some 1,000,000 old (or however long ago mastodons were around - too lazy to look up/curse my public school "education") beast. This is, I guess, what separates me from the Truly Rich.

* also reading Success by Martin Amis, All the Sad Young Literary Men [not awful!] by Keith Gessen, Please Kill Me and a J Diddy compendium!