Money is a strange substance. I often think it's more of a wispy cloud of vaporous gas rather than a tangible solid embedded "in the black."
Although it can be a liquid, of course, especially if you happen to be a ravenous, single-minded loan shark patrolling treacherous waters, or an avaricious Narcissus seeking your own reflection in a deep green pool of wealth.
And there is the financial meaning of the word liquid, too, but that is rarely the average person's experience of money.
But for most of us the nature of money is gaseous: billowing on payday only to disperse by the end of the week. We try trapping it in bank accounts but it always seeps out through the cracks in our ledgers. Drifting in front of our faces today, occasionally fogging our brains with pecuniary consequences, before finally wafting away through our fingers tomorrow, leaving naught but the ghost of Mammon and a faint odor of affluence.
Of course, some people manage to inherit or amass huge storage tanks of the stuff; usually a heady mixture of fast-talking helium and maniacal laughter-inducing nitrous oxide. At least that's what I recall inhaling on the few occasions I've met a millionaire.
I keep my money inside a half-inflated balloon attached to my pocket by a short piece of string. Please don't float away balloon, please don't float away. Turn yourself into a balloon animal, an elephant, a whole herd of balloon elephants so I can stampede into solvency.
