MONEY CAN BE a real problem if you can't use it to buy things like Venus fly-traps and glow-in-the-dark ties and diamond-studded yo-yos. The question then becomes whether to use the stuff to paper the walls, fertilize the garden or make washers for Bolivian lawnmowers.

Despite what you might think, or wish, money carries with it a threat of impermanence. My Great Grandmother Townsend, for example, was a South Carolina millionaire, except that it was all in Confederate dollars, which instantly lost about 100 percent of their value that day at Appomattox.

I might today have been the John D. Rockefeller of Ninety-Six, SC, if only Ulysses S. Grant had had a couple more belts of Old Gutsnatcher on the eve of Gettysburg, but there you go.

(There actually is a place called Ninety-Six, so named because it is that many miles from Columbia. Folks thereabouts to this day claim that Ninety-Six and not Columbia would be South Carolina's capital had not the town fathers of the time voted against a railroad depot because trains made too much noise.)

But I digress. The subject is money, and it came up recently when I was pondering how to redecorate my small office in the cottage. Suddenly I found my inspirational muse in a trophy cup just loaded with bank notes and coins.

Actually, it is a sort of Igor the Hunchback of the cup set, a rather bent and twisted item that a pal dumped on me when he fled to Moscow. But over the years, it has served as a depository for all sorts of foreign foo-foo money that one accumulates in travels abroad, then finds that one cannot get rid of.

In this big cup are Vietnamese dong and U.S. military script, or MPCs, from my days of wading around in swamps and rice paddies trailing along with the American Marines. And Philippines pesos with pictures of Ferdinand Marcos before he was kicked out and his wife got caught with all those shoes.

There are East German marks - coins made of about the same material as cat food cans. And Indian rupees and Pakistani whatevers and Lebanese pounds and Egyptian flim-flams, all carrying engravings of sundry rascals who have been dethroned, overthrown and/or otherwise dispatched to the hereafter.

I won a ton of rupees one night playing a weird sort of gambling game involving seashells with the king of Nepal's brother-in-law. Then I discovered the stuff was worthless beyond a 200-yard radius of the Soaltee Hotel. The remnants line the bottom of the trophy cup.

In Tahiti, I once exchanged about 50 bucks American for the local foo-foos. The exchange rate must have been something like 6 billion foo-foos to the dollar, because I wound up with rolls of bank notes that filled three pockets. Two drinks relieved me of most of it.

Anyway, some of the Tahitian notes are - were - about the size of a comic book page. I saved a few, and they were my main inspiration for the idea of taking all these bits of folding funny money and turning them into a sort of wallpaper for my office.

My wife Elizabeth's reaction was around the halfway point between appalled and outraged. She saw nothing particularly esthetically appealing about the likes of Indira Gandhi, Emperor Hirohito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran peering down as she pounded away on the PC keyboard.

I attribute this to a singular lack of vision on her part, but Elizabeth does hold a certain amount of sway over the way things are run in the cottage, so all those foo-foos remain tucked into the trophy cup, their future as uncertain as that of the characters they depict.

I'm not the only one, however, faced with the problem of what to do with useless money. The nations of Europe are on the verge of the same sort of conundrum, albeit on a rather vaster scale. They are going for a single unified currency, called the euro, as of the end of this year.

The question is what to do with enough banknotes to equal several billion encyclopedias and 350,000 tons of German deutschemarks and French francs and Spanish pesetas and Italian lire and Dutch guilders and other coins that are headed for a rather steep scrap heap.

The Germans, as efficient as ever, are going to turn paper D-marks into fertilizer. The notes are going to be taken to a special treatment plant where they will be put through a process that breaks down the special dyes and turns them into mulch for farmers.

"At least they will continue to serve the land long after they have gone," says economist Hans-Dieter Eckhardt. Ah, the poetry of the German soul.

Germany has a cunning plan for its deutschemark coins (it has a stack of them that would rise about 18,000 times higher than the Eiffel Tower in Paris if the panzers could blitzkrieg France just one more time). A company called - wait for it - Eurocoin AG has the contract.

What Eurocoin AG is going to do with all those D-marks is to turn them into washers for Bolivian lawnmowers, Chilean car parts and spin driers. So much for the bedrock of the German economic miracle.

But Spain is still scratching its collective head over what to do with all those leftover pesetas, although I understand scrap dealers are lining up all the way down to the Prado gates to offer to take them off the government's hands.

Portugal, Ireland and Finland are likewise in this rather unusual cash quandary. It would seem logical to melt all these coins down and use them to mint the new euro coins. But the European Union seems more concerned over whether to allow the sale of bent bananas, so they do have their hands full.

Meanwhile, there's my own problem with the trophy cup of coins. Wonder if there's enough there to make maybe a toaster and one of those toast holder thingies ...

Thought for the Week: The best place to live is just inside your income.

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