Word on the street is, you can earn actual money on Substack, the online writing platform.

I can’t speak for myself. I’m capable of earning money from time to time but money isn’t what it used to be. Money used to be something you could hand to a teller at a bank, as long as you were willing to spend your entire lunch hour to do it. I believe the teller at the bank took it to a big vault in the back and put it in a special box for you and tucked a blanket around it. Before my time, money was a little jangly velvet bag of coins, or a sack of barley, or an ungulate led in on a rope.

These days, I don’t know what money is. It’s ephemeral. If this were ancient Greece, Money would be another of the humors. Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood, and money. It makes things happen but nobody knows quite how.

I have money, somewhere, according to the occasional digital bulletin I get, and there are all sorts of ways of moving it around. I can probe, slide through, or wave at a box with a plastic card. I can flap in the general direction of what I want to buy with my phone. Some day I’ll be able to bank using just my neurons and special glasses. There is a lot of trust being invested in this ethereal system. I guarantee you that if anyone told you you could pay for something with your phone in 1970, I would have assumed it involved sharpening the receiver into a shiv or using the curly cord as a garrote.

All of these thoughts came up recently when I signed onto Substack. If you want, you can put your Content on Substack and charge people for it. Or you can sneak up on them by giving them Content—first one’s free!—and then charging them for more. Or you can give them the basics for free and then let them get extras for more money, like, say, audio of you offering to spank them like the bad boys they are.

I don’t intend to do any of that on Substack. Whatever I put on Substack is free, but there are people out there who decide they want to send me a little something, just because. I myself am sometimes moved by that sort of notion, especially if I am into my second beer.

So—in case America trips over my Content while having a second beer—I can enable payments on the site, it says, by connecting to Stripe. I’d never heard of Stripe, but I know Venmo and Zelle well enough by now to invite them to Thanksgiving, and four months ago they were just shadowy figures behind the dumpster. Next week it will be something else.

Stripe, it says on the Substack site, takes “less than five minutes to set up.”

They’re thinking of pudding. It’s a common mistake. Concrete sets up faster than this does, on a cold day.

I knew I was in for it when the first thing that came up was “Get started fast with a no-code option or explore customizable UIs that integrate with our APIs.” Nothing about this statement said “starting fast” to me.

There was a form to fill out. I started out providing the basics. Name, address. There were bubbles to fill in. This went on for quite a while. What is my business name? I don’t really have one. Maybe they don’t need it. What IS my business?

I don’t know, Stripe, is it any of your business?

Apparently so. There was a drop-down menu. It was long, but not, I thought, comprehensive. I might be in retail sales. I might manufacture clothing. I might be in Hospitality. I might be in IT consulting. Or branding management. “Writing” is not in there, not anywhere. I was perplexed at first, until I realized they are talking about jobs that one might conceivably be remunerated for, and writing is not one of those. I left it blank. But they wouldn’t let me go on. So I typed in “Content provider.” That seemed to settle them down.

Give a two-sentence description of what you do, it says next. “I provide content,” I typed. Again, they wouldn’t let me go on. Evidently they were serious about the two sentences thing.

Well, they swallowed the “content provider” bullshit, so I mined the same vein. “My business likes long walks along the beach. My API would love nothing better than to snuggle with your UI in front of a blazing Central Processing Unit,” I typed. Good enough!

I kept thinking I’d come up with a screen that said I was done and possibly had been done ten minutes ago, but it just kept going. It was this close to asking to see naked pics of my user interface. Finally I just quit. They were okay with me quitting, except there was one bubble I’d left blank that needed something in it. Anything, probably.

LIBRA, I typed. Good enough: Done. I’ve got Stripe.

I can now take your money. Barley is fine.