Need an extra buck? Turn to your imagination

Thursday I wrote a check to pay off my credit card balance. It wasn't a lot of money as the crow borrows but it was enough to cause my eyebrows to go up the way your eyebrows go up when you climb into those fat jeans and they cut off the circulation to your head.

Where did the money go? It was there last week. This week it has vanished, like South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. I doubt it'll return with a mistress and a litany of apologies.

Clearly I need to scale back my quality of life, which is ridiculous because I've cut so much from my quality of life. I was living better as a teenager who mowed yards for $5.

The alternative is to increase my income and that's something I've been giving a lot of thought to as I run up the credit card at going-out-of-business movie rental stores.

I thought, for instance, I could make extra money by offering myself as a live crash test dummy for the Insurance Institute of America. I'd only do it for certain vehicles like a Hummer or an Abrams tank. My fear is they'd put me in a Smart and remove the airbags. Those insurance companies -- you know how fond they are of blood.

I also considered a part-time job in the Jaycees haunted house. Since everybody thinks I'm a flaming liberal I could go as an Ozombie, but instead of moaning "brains" I could wail "taxes." That would scare the dickens out of practically everybody who leaves comments on my column.

What about being a tester for new pharmaceuticals? Sounds lucrative. The only thing that scares me are the warnings. You've seen those TV commercials: "Do not take Zymblastia if you have high blood pressure, glaucoma, three heads, a really good lawyer, a strong will to live, connections to the Mafia, or a large cache of surplus National Guard weaponry."

I've always had a fascination with working at a grocery store. My fear is I'd devour the inventory. Only the onions and liver would be safe. I'm also worried somebody would bring a produce item to the cash register and I couldn't identify it. "Is that a pear?" I'd ask. "No, dummy, that's a rutabaga," they'd answer. Who knew?

Maybe I could make extra money as a movie reviewer. Problem is movie reviews come in two flavors: lowbrow (This movie stinks) and highbrow (This film taps the existential zeitgeist of unfulfilled determinism thereby reducing its couture to a tawdry statement of frustrated savoir faire). Who the heck would pay for that?

A taste tester at a brewery? Now that is a job I could sink my gut into. Imagine a day of staggering around the brewery tapping into the ale vat, sampling the stout, licking the lager spout, hopping up and down in the hops bin ... a plate of nachos and a widescreen TV forever tuned to the NFL channel and I will have died and gone to heaven.

Or I could simplify the process and demand that people send me money. I would start with my friends: "$50 and you'll never hear from Del again." Coworkers would get the "$100 and Del won't monopolize the coffee maker" package. Family members: "Want to disown Del? Fork over $250." Republicans would get: "Del leaves Bush alone and turns on Obama for $250" deal.

I guess there's always the option of being reasonable with my money but where's the fun in that, especially when so many unreasonable and hilarious alternatives are at hand?