My employees pooled their money to buy me a rowing machine for my 60th birthday. In the gift note someone had written "row away, emperor - we'll swim after you." Over the years, I've pooled my birthday notes from generations of employees and spent them to buy myself a personal present, what I call a "meditation holiday," approximately a three-and-a-half-day binge on beer and antibiotics. It's a regimen I learned during a free-association brainstorming session in Napa with the president of Whole Foods. His economic philosophy is questionable but his intestinal economy is an unprecedented, elegant system of free exchange. He modeled his dietary totalitarianism after a 1960s artist colony in Manitoba. There, each community member received a slip of paper for each bowel movement, which could be exchanged for one day's sack of feed. Through mutual metabolic support, the accumulation of capital was washed from their bodies; esophagi, colons, duodena, contracting and relaxing in a unanimous, elongated sigh of elevated appreciation for Land Art. Ghandi himself was an enthusiastic proponent of the enema, but what he didn't take into account was its capacity for community building, creating vast rubrics of intimacy flushing across the globe.