(WARNING: The following column contains concepts in a language that might upset people who have never spent a night in a truck stop parking lot.)

I’ve mentioned this before, but it was shortly after 9-11 that I decided to spend the rest of my life writing a book about economics. I remembered what James Carville had famously said during Clinton's first Presidential run: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Carville, who was Clinton's campaign manager, was courting the vote of people who wanted more money. But it didn’t take me long to realize that economics is but superficially related to money. Behind the screen is the idea of permission.

Yes, permission. Permission granted by an authority like a sovereign nation-state, or my mother when I needed a permission slip to get back into school after missing a day because I was sick.

It's a hard thing to explain, but I'll try.

The realization came to me during a fleeting moment of curious clarity, in like a flash when everything seen is for the very first time from beginning to end all at once in an instant. Ascetics and monastics have names for the experience. So do poets and psychiatrists. I call them my “Bean Visions.” I couldn’t write without them. They’re the endings I write up to.

I had my Bean Vision about economics in a truck stop parking lot on I-95 in Florida just south of Jacksonville. I was an over-the-road American trucker at the time, living an over-the-road American trucker’s life.

It was a small truck stop. A Citgo with room for maybe a dozen big rigs out back. Unlike the big new Petro’s, TA’s, Pilots and Loves, it wasn’t advertised on billboards along the Interstate. You had to know what you were looking for to find it. I’d been there before. The first time was because I was lost and after that on purpose.

The place was in a small clearing nestled into a coastal Florida jungle/Cypress swamp. Like an organic sponge, the thick and tangled vegetation soaked up the wavelengths of traffic sounds from the nearby Interstate like food for growth. At night the night was filled with jungle sounds. I rolled down the small, screened windows above my bunk in the back of my Kenworth cab. Outside, insects the size of small birds hissed like snakes; colored birds off in the distance chatted poetically; a twig cracks beneath the paws of a hunter. I’m stretched out on my bunk, breathing the pungent air, watching thoughts come and go with my eyes wide open, like the Zen masters say to do.

When all of a sudden there’s a tap, tap, rapping… tapping at my chamber door.

In the big corporate truck stop parking lots, hardly a night would go by without at least one visit from one of the “ladies of the lot,” as I thought of them. Other truckers commonly referred to them as “lot lizards” and had “NO LOT LIZARD” stickers on their doors. I always thought that that was cruel. A “PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB” sticker would do just as well. They might add that they have an 8 a.m. delivery and need the sleep and that their wife back home is pregnant and the rent is due.”

“tap, tap, tap” again…

The jungle sounds vanished. Utter silence.

“tap…” softly feminine, not like a hand holding a gun.

You didn’t normally expect “visits” out back of the small mom-and-pop truck stops.

I pulled a sheet around my shoulders and moved to the driver’s side seat up front and looked down into pleading eyes, their dampness reflecting the neon colors of the overhead Citgo sign.

Maybe she was 16. Maybe not. I scanned around the lot, looking for a pimp’s car. None. Probably just a local girl from the town a quarter mile away back deeper into the jungle.

I rolled down my window.

That’s when a young girl turned my view of economics on its head.

She said: “For five bucks, mister, I’ll let you see my titties.”

This is a true story. I know, I know… I’ve been known to make things up, but this really happened and all of a sudden I was in the midst of a Bean Vision.

I must have had a strange look on my face because the young girl said to me: “Are you all right, mister?”

I could have told her that I was beginning to have a Bean Vision, but that would have meant nothing to her.

I pulled a twenty from my wallet. Holding it six inches in front of my face, I examined it with my eyes wide open. Ink on paper. Then I noticed that there was an image of a face on it. Clearly, at first, I recognized the face of a President, but then the image dissolve into random points floating aimlessly in a defined space.

I blinked.

As if guided by the hand of the force of an idea, the random points began to rearrange themselves like on purpose until I saw the face of my mother, smiling at me as I’m sitting at the breakfast table eating a bowl of Wheaties before heading off to school.

The day before I’d complained of a tummy ache and got to stay home.

Sitting in my truck in a jungle watched by a hungry child, I held the slip of paper I needed to get back into school -- a permission slip signed by an authority greater than a sovereign nation-state, signed by my mother

I handed the permission slip to the young girl. “Go buy a sack of snacks to hand out to your friends at school tomorrow,” I said. “Now scam and do good.”

“Thanks, mister,” she said, “I’ll remember you” and off she went back towards her small home town as if she were on a mission.

I went back to my bunk and made a vow to not forget, either.

Ever since, whenever I’m paying for something with money or researching the economics of money -- from gold to Lincoln's "greenbacks" to Fed policy to floating international exchange rates -- always in the back of my mind lurks the idea of permission, permission slips signed by an authority, like my mother. I remind myself that: “Everything we build, everything we do is an act of permission,” recited almost like a prayer born along the pavement of I-95 in northern Florida years ago.

Going to the moon is an act of permission, like housing and genocide, authorized by an authority with no more authority than my mother.