They say money makes the world go round.

But does it really? I don’t remember much from my school days, but I do remember an old science teacher of mine, Mr. Owens, saying something about gravity and mass. Then again, Mr. Owens always wore the same tie, smelled like fish, and wept in the boys’ room about his mortgage payments. So maybe all that talk about gravity and mass was just wishful thinking on his part.

I wonder about the time of the dinosaurs, before money was invented. Did the world not go around then? Dinosaurs had their own kind of money, I guess — the money of “You better run or I will eat you.” That kind of money could have made the world spin a hell of a lot quicker than our paper kind — especially if a lot of dinosaurs were running in the same direction.

That leads me to the big question of how money connects itself to the earth, gets the traction to spin it, and then lets go fast enough to not get spun around itself, in a huge cyclone of money. Or am I missing the piece where money gives itself to some secret company with a giant Spinner Machine?

Money does seem to like to hide things. Like itself, from me. Sometimes I think the best way to find out how money makes the world go around would be to just get all the money together and ask it. But whenever I put money in the same place it seems to be replaced, eventually, by empty gin bottles, shot-up drone kits, and ‘cease and desist’ notices from the fine folks at sexygungirls.com.

As a result, science suffers.

Maybe what they mean is that money makes the world go around in a more spiritual sense. You could get that idea from a lot of places, like church. When you go to church, they tell you about God, and then they ask you for money. But why? Does God need money to spin the world around, like a service charge? If I were running things down at the church, I would just say, “Forget it, God, we’ll keep the money for ourselves — let the world stop spinning.” What’s the worst that could happen?

I told my minister that idea, expecting she would be happy about all the money she could save the church. But she just looked at me in that certain way she has that’s so money in itself somehow, and said maybe I should worry less about what makes the world go around and more about what kind of job I’d like to get.

I said her job, and she said I could have it, but it turns out she wasn’t serious about that.

After a while it occurred to me that maybe the answers were on the money itself. The next time I got my hands on a dollar bill, I examined it closely. George Washington had nothing to tell me, though he did look a little smug. On the back were the bald eagle and the pyramid. The eagle held a tree branch in one talon, and that made me think: maybe eagles grab the trees and flap their wings so hard that the world turns? But I haven’t seen that happening much. Anyway the eagle had a bunch of arrows in his other talon, so does he somehow fling those the other way in a wild display of centrifugal force? No, he does not. What do crazy flapping eagles have to do with making the world go round? The eagle is a red herring.

Then there was the pyramid with the eye. It’s very mysterious. But the more I studied it, the more it seemed to be saying, Egyptians knew all about this and you don’t, you stupid idiot. Which is why you only have one dollar.

Finally, I thought maybe I should take the minister’s advice and look to myself. Maybe the world is like me, I thought. What makes me spin around? And that brought me back to my empty gin bottles and my poor shot up drones, and the poor slighted folks at sexygungirls.com who try to give a free public service to every poor American who likes to see babes in their underwear shooting at stuff, and to the poor SGG lawyers who want their clients to be able to put out their wares just so, instead of having secondary angles taken from far above with high-powered lenses that sometimes fall out of the drones — and most of all to the poor startled babes who already have enough trouble in life without telephoto lenses falling on their heads while they’re shooting.

Maybe they’re wrong about money making the world go around. Maybe it’s not money — it’s liquor, bullets, and artistic integrity. I remembered that one time I poured all my gin out in the yard and vowed to change my ways and gave my drones to the neighborhood kids to have some fun with. And I thought, “Well, maybe I’ve done my part.”

In the end, I don’t really know if money makes the world go around.

I do know that I want some more money.