How I Learned to Stop Worrying (Mostly)

Tarot's Card of You and I

Those who know me know that I can analyze anything to death. It took me nearly nine months to buy a refrigerator as I had to learn about them, then compare all the models and prices. Then there was the five years that had passed before I finally settled on a way to replace the windows in my house. Again, I was looking at all the best possible ways to get this done.

Where does this caution come from? I suspect part of it is age. The older you get, the more you know that this world is an erratic place and your reactions to it had better be judicious. Also weighing heavily on me was my past. There were times when I jumped without looking and OUCH! I was one of those people who learned from their mistakes a bit too much.

I'm better now, really. I used to be worse!

It was 2003 when I had a lightning bolt of enlightenment about my trying to predict all possible outcomes in order to be “ready” for them. Eight years ago, my brother had ended up in the hospital due to his cystic fibrosis. The disease was progressing rapidly in its terminal phase and home care was not going to cut it. I'm no doctor. My part in his care was coming to an end as I was I was sorely unqualified.

He had complained that morning of not being able to use the right side of his body as it was numb and paralyzed. I had him shipped out of this house that early September morning via 9-1-1 and I hotly followed the ambulance all the way to Rhode Island Hospital. When we got to the hospital, the vitals were read and it was determined he was not at death's door and was admitted for further testing. There was no reason for me to stay and I went home.

The next morning I had gone to visit him and realized then he was in ICU on a respirator. His CO2 saturation was awful, the other data sucked and the doctors could not reliably predict his outcome. Great. Atrocious lab tests and no real prognosis which gave me nothing to go on.

That certainly set off on my ”What will be the outcome routine.” I just had to know.

That weekend in September I tortured myself with various scenarios, tending towards the most catastrophic. “What if he dies? How will I manage the funeral? Dammit! I don't have all his friends numbers to find them to tell them! Christ, where are all his legal documents? If he does die...I'll be the LAST one of this family and how will I manage THAT! What if he doesn't die and ends up in a nursing home? Does he have the insurance to pay? Wait!!! He has some ownership in this house. What if the bills are so large they slap a lien on this property? What if he does come home but is in worse shape and I have to hire someone to watch over him? On and on I went.

For two days I sorted every goddamn possibility of what would happen and formulated a response to each.

The Monday morning after the weekend I visited him.  As I passed the nurse's desk in ICU, an Asian nurse sitting there piped up and said...”Are you the brother of Ken M?” I say “Yes” and he then tells me of the following story.

“Well, we had some problems this morning with your brother.”(Oh.Fuck. I was thinking...things got worse).

“We were sitting here and his screen suddenly showed all zeros, not off, just no data.” (The nursing station has flat screens that update all the vitals, information and whatnot of every patient in ICU)

The nurse goes on.

“I went to go see what happened when I saw your brother walking down the aisle, yanking tubes, sensors and all the other wiring he had on him that was connected to the computers. I asked him...”Where do you think you're going?”

My brother responded in a clear voice, “Home.”

By then the other nurses had showed up and the Asian one tells me they had to manhandle him back into his bed as my brother was adamant he was not staying any longer.

Finally a his doctor showed up to talk to me

He suspected my brother came out of his Ativan haze long enough to extubate (rip out his own intubation tube that was jammed down deep into his trachea) and manage to pull off all the other medical equipment.

“You're brother isn't on the respirator now. We concluded if he could get up and decide to walk home, he could do without it. Also, the tests we did following this incident showed his CO2 levels were near normal and that supports our decision to keep him off of it. If he's not relying on the respirator, his lung strength will improve.”

I stood there listening to this, not surprised by my brother's actions, but at my complete inability to have predicted this.

I was dead wrong on it all.

I can remember walking to my car after visiting him, thinking on all that I had heard. I was then struck by the thought, “All your hyped up concern was for NOTHING.”

A couple of months later, after my brother had come home, I had sent him out again due to low O2 levels. But this time I didn't hop into my car to tailgate the ambulance back to RI hospital. Instead, I flipped on the stereo and made myself breakfast.

I had learned to play it by ear.

I still look before I leap. I still am prudent. But, I did learn that I am not some gypsy with an ability to see into the future and that's a relief.

Semi Lazy Sunday

Well, it would have been a lazy Sunday, but I dragged my ass to the gym and found it mainly deserted. Good. There is less noise and improved pickin's of the equipment.

Once I get past the first twenty minutes of cardio that makes my temples hurt and legs sting, the final fifty minutes sort of breeze by without much discomfort. I can get a small runner's high from it. I'm sure it's nothing compared to the opium-like high some marathoners claim to achieve. The odd thing is, once I get past that initial “Arrrggghhh,” I feel I can go all day sustaining my target heart rate. Albeit I sweat like a pig.

Is it boring? Sure it can be if you let it. But I let my mind wander to this thought or that. To tell the truth, once you get into a stride, thinking about “stuff” comes pretty easily. You can finalize issues you meant to work out before in your mind.

Or I look at the girl in front of me and wonder...”just how single is she?”

This morning's run I came to a few conclusions about my next “job.” There is an old adage, “Work Smarter, Not Harder.” That seems to be the prescription if I can pull that off without life interfering as it so surprisingly does at times. We'll see.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Jack Straw

1976 Grateful Dead loading in at the foot of the Sphynx

Grateful Dead songs are playing in my home this morning. I'm not sure why, but it's what my tastes require in music for the start of the day. By the way, I haven't smoked pot in years and that can be verified by many. So, don't worry!

I've never seen the Dead nor any combination of any surviving members live, though I wish I had. But that's water under the bridge.

My brother, was a huge Dead Head. I, of course, became familiar with the music as it was always playing and my brother was trying to finger the guitar section. What I like about it was it's folk style at times. You don't hear much of that now. Also, the Dead were good at crafting some great music.

The song Jack Straw I have always enjoyed. Years ago, my brother and I were on our way to Scarborough beach and this song was playing on his newly bought Radio Shack 8-Track deck as we we're on Point Judith road in South Kingston. We were flying down the highway and you could start to smell the mixture of cut hay by that horse corral on the right with the salt air. This is a clear memory I have from July 1978. I'm not sure why it stuck. I suppose that it was a fun day with just us two on our way to the beach. I was fourteen and that would've made him nineteen.

At nineteen, he was nearing the height of his life, but he didn't know that would be the highest summit he was going to achieve. He was doing very well at Providence College, had a job, his first real girlfriend and in the “Felbs” band with others from the college playing the new, New Wave music. The real name of the band was taken from the light/sound guy whose name was Felber. Ok, the name of the band was, “The Paul Felber Mutha-Fuck Yo' Ass Brown Bitch Biscuit Blues Band.” It was an inside joke amongst the players, stolen from the National Lampoon magazine article about Billy Carter. Remember, this is 1978...Jimmy Carter ring a bell?

Before you freak on the band's name and it's racial overtones, don't forget political correctness hadn't been invented yet.

So, my brother was having the best time of his life and I got to sponge a bit off of that as well. When I could, I was adopted as roadie to hump that damned heavy equipment into bars and other venues around Rhode Island and Massachusetts. This got my 14 year old self into nightclubs and...beer! Do you know what a sound board weighed back then? It was all large transistors and hundreds of feet of copper wire. That thing was heavy and it wasn't the most cumbersome piece to move either!

One of the best times my brother and I had was when they were playing the then Rathskeller at Rhode Island College. The Rathskeller was a bar/hang-out joint in the bottom floor of the Student Union. In 1978, 18 year olds could legally purchase liquor. This meant I could partake in this as no one was stopping me, the roadie, from lugging equipment into the place and then acting like I was working the sound board. Well, I did operate the monitors as Paul had taught me how.

The Felbs had a bit of luck that early summer. They had written a song “Stop and Go World” that was getting airplay on WBRU for a few weeks and WVBF out of Boston as well. So, the crowd in the Rathskeller was pretty huge and things were looking up. Their set list consisted of any music the band members liked, with a heavy dose of covers from New Wave as well. The whole night ending with their minor local hit of Stop and Go World.

One of the songs my brother had the band learn was Jack Straw.

I can remember it being played that night and enjoyed it as I sat amongst the equipment, drinking cheapo college beer. It was a great time at such a young age. I was illegally drinking in a college, being “part” of a well liked band and seeing REAL shitfaced college girls acting like harlots. These were the few times when being a teen and realizing you're cool as shit matter.

The other memory I have of this song may seem sad, but it wasn't to my brother's friends nor I.

After the church service, the funeral procession ended up at Mt Saint Mary's cemetery that's on the Blackstone river as it widens out dramatically. After the final sayings of the priest, one of us had the sense to bring a Boom Box along and played Jack Straw for one final time beside the just dug grave. It was December and quite breezy that day as the cemetery sits on a plain overlooking the river, with nothing blocking the wind. I can remember standing there with my tie flipping over my shoulder with this great song being played by those who knew, as well as I, that this was Ken's most happiest time. It was one of mine as well.

It was a fitting gesture of recognizing and knowing him well enough that we knew what those few years in his early 20's meant to him.

Jack Straw will not, nor will ever be a sad song to me. It's too damn good with too many great memories.

Girls Start Early...And Never Change

What's fun about the Internet is the dirt or success stories you can dig up on people you know or knew. I'm sure, you like me, have used the RI Defendant Search form at the Superior Court to spy on your neighbors, old classmates and whatnot. What surprised me about doing that was finding out how many wife beaters there were in my neighborhood over the years.

“Really? Wow, I thought he was just a quiet guy who liked to garden a lot.” I caught myself thinking about one man I knew growing up. Guess he wore the face to show the world and a different one inside the house. But we all have that don't we? C'mon...you do it too.

One girl I Googled, who was tormented in our sixth grade class, I found had made it to the top. The last time I saw her was in Miss Mara's class and after that, poof, I never saw her again. I remember her as a good kid and was given to theatrics at times to draw attention to herself.

She, unfortunately was 12 years old then and being a girl, was a time to time target of other 12 year old girl's vile jealousy and tribal behavior.   Matt Groening (the creator of The Simpson's) once had a cartoon that showed grammar school girls at their worst. The title was, The Most Dangerous Thing in the World, A Roving Pack of Eleven Year Old Girls. In the cartoon, a group of girls are encircling another named “Debby.” The taunting girls chant in a sing-song voice, “Cry Debby Cry! Cry Debby Cry! Cry Debby Cry!”

Of course, Debby starts to cry.

Ann, who I'll call this girl I knew in Mara's class, came from a family of some means and could afford to dress their girl in nicer, more fashionable clothing. I remember her wavy Katherine Hepburn hair, her slight buck teeth which she was almost finished growing into, silk scarves and corduroy skirts that were the fashion in 1976. The other girls though, hated her for having any access to such clothing. Lower middle class fashion for those girls consisted of Wrangler jeans, flannel shirts for winter or some pull over top for warmer times. All of which could have been bought at Apex or Ann & Hope in Cumberland. I feel Ann's parents rarely shopped at old mill outlets then.

I can't remember the reason, but as Ms Mara was out of the class (teachers then blew off work and hung out in the coffee room then), the other girls saw their chance to start carping on Ann. Perhaps it was just to start off where they left off. Ann did fight back but it's not easy when seven other girls persecute and verbally abuse your looks, voice, teeth and choice in shoes. Finally, Ann, after giving it back as well as she could, buried her head into her arms on the desk and started bawling.

It was unfair.

This would happen on various occasions throughout the school year. The girls then would find another target they can beat on for a while till they get bored of that and then move on to the next one and back to Ann eventually.

So today, I Googled Ann and I come to find out she was Merrill Lynch's Top Bond Analyst in their headquarters in Manhattan.

Holy Shit girl! Good for you! From JC Potter School all the way to a bond desk in the world's financial capital.

Another chick I Googled from that class (and who enjoyed bashing Ann) has a lengthy record with the Superior Court.

Karma is a bitch!

120 Over 80

I've been waiting for grand changes in my mental state due to my being out of work. Nothing's really changed that drastically to tell the truth. Then again, it's been just barely two weeks, so perhaps I shouldn't expect too much.

Though I've noticed some physical changes. The gym I go to has a lot of cardio equipment designed to monitor your heart rate at various levels of activity. When I was working, my resting heart rate was a bit “up there” but within the range for someone of my age. Now, before I fire up my workout regimen, I test the heart rate and I've been noticing a steady drop in the resting heart rate. I haven't attributed that to any benefit from working out prior to the beginning of May as I wasn't regularly attending the gym.

My rate is down due to very little stress. I bet my blood pressure has followed suit as well.

And that's fine by me.

Now when the surfer dude's hang-loose attitude makes it's appearance in me, remains to be seen. Perhaps some more time will be needed. The last time I had that unconcerned nature for any length of time was back in the early 90's, when I did live at the beaches in Westerly.

I'm still waking up at dawn but that's due to the dog. I have been watching more TV which is weird, because I generally NEVER watch it. To tell the truth, I'm watching retro channels. Would you believe I have finally seen, for the first time, Robert Stack's The Untouchables? Oh, and Hawaii 5-0 sucks. The Wooden Actor prize should've been given to them.

Here's how far out of the loop I am when it comes to television. A friend, Rich, was trying to explain a joke to me via a Dos Equis beer commercial featuring the “Most Interesting Man in the World.” All I could say was, ”Who?” He looked at me in complete surprise. “Don't you know? It's been on for a couple of months!” Nope, never saw it I said.

He rolls his eyes at me and I try to explain. No doing. You can't get out of someone's judgment when it's final. I persisted in telling him that I garner all my information, fun, books, movies, news and whatever via the Internet. I told him I watch some TV channel out of Normandy France through the Internet.

No deal. I was living under a rock according to him still. When it comes to today's TV, I do live under a rock as I find most of today's TV, appalling.

So, what else have I noticed.

I'm finally cooking for myself now. Before, I'd come home and the last thing I wanted to do was create something nice. Ask a mechanic if he likes to work on cars when he comes home, generally they don't. I felt the same. But now, I'm actually eating something other than vats of food designed to last me three days. Now, I've rediscovered my herb garden.

What else, what else...

I have more energy. I'm not dragging like I used to at times. This translates into a neater house and neater yard. I used to come home from work, look at the dog tumbleweeds floating by my feet and say..”Ah...fuck it..I'll vacuum tomorrow.” Now is a different story.

So, well see what the coming weeks will bring.

Double or Nothing: How JP Morgan Killed Itself Friday

(an article I found interesting that explains why things SUCK)

There’s nothing controversial about the claim— reported on by Slate, Bloomberg & Harvard magazine— that in the last 20 years Wall Street has moved away from an investment-led model, to a gambling-led model.

This was exemplified by the failure of LTCM which blew up unsuccessfully making huge interest rate bets for tiny profits, or “picking up nickles in front of a steamroller,” and by Jon Corzine’s MF Global's doing practically the same thing with European debt (while at the same time stealing from clients).

As Nassim Taleb described in The Black Swan these kinds of trades — betting large amounts for small frequent profits — is extremely fragile because eventually (and probably sooner in the real world than in a model) losses will happen (and of course if you are betting big, losses will be big). If you are running your business on the basis of borrowing to bet, this is especially dangerous, because facing a margin call or a downgrade you may be left in a fire sale to raise collateral.

This fragile business model is in fact descended from the Martingale Roulette Betting System. Martingale is the perfect example of the failure of theory, because in theory, Martingale is a system of guaranteed profit, which I think is probably what makes these kinds of practices so attractive to the arbitrageurs of Wall Street (and of course Wall Street often selects for this by recruiting and promoting the most wild-eyed and risk-hungry). Martingale works by betting, and then doubling your bet until you win. This — in theory, and given enough capital — delivers a profit of your initial stake every time. Historically, the problem has been that bettors run out of money eventually, simply because they don’t have an infinite amount (of course, thanks to Ben Bernanke, that is no longer a problem). The key feature of this system— and the attribute which many institutions have copied — is that it delivers frequent small-to-moderate profits, and occasional huge losses (when the bettor runs out of money).

The key difference between modern business models, and the traditional roulette betting system is that today the focus is on betting multiple times on a single outcome. By this method (and given enough capital) it is in theory possible to win whichever way an event goes. If things are going your way, it is possible to insure your position by betting against your initial bet, and so produce a position that profits no matter what the eventual outcome. If things are not going your way, it is possible to throw larger and larger chunks of capital into a position or counter-position again and again and again —mirroring the Martingale strategy — to try to compensate for earlier bets that have gone awry (this, of course, is so often the downfall of rogue traders like Nick Leeson and Kweku Adoboli).

This brings up a key issue: there is a second problem with the Martingale strategy in the real world beyond the obvious problem of running out of capital. You can have all the capital in the world (and thanks to the Fed, the TBTF banks now have a printing-press backstop) but if you do not have a counter-party to take your bets (and as your bets and counter-bets get bigger and bigger it by definition becomes harder and harder to find suitable counter-parties) then you are Corzined, and you will be left sitting on top of a very large load of pain (sound familiar, Bruno Iksil?)

The obvious real world example takes us back to the casino table — if you are trying to execute a Martingale strategy starting at $100, and have lost 10 times in a row, your 11th bet would have to be for $204,800 to win back your initial stake of $100. That might well exceed the casino table limits — in other words you have lost your counter-party, and are left facing a loss far huger than any expected gains.

Similarly (as Jamie Dimon and Bruno Iksil have now learned to their discredit) if you have built up a whale-sized market-dominating gross position of bets and counter-bets on the CDX IG9 index (or any such market) which turns heavily negative, it is exceedingly difficult to find a counter-party to continue increasing your bets against, and your Martingale game will probably be over, and you will be forced to face up to the (now exceedingly huge) loss. And this is what JP Morgan called, “hedging your bets.”

   

The really sickening thing is that I know that these kinds of activities are going on far more than is widely recognized; every time a Wall Street bank announces a perfect trading quarter, it sets off an alarm bell ringing in my head, because it means that the arbitrageurs are chasing losses and picking up nickels in front of steamrollers again, and emboldened by confidence will eventually will get crushed under the wheel, and our hyper-connected, hyper-leveraged system will be thrown into shock once again by downgrades, margin calls and fire sales.

Sleep tight!

That's NOT Funny! How Dare You!

Cloudy Skies, chasing the, sun away

Come and meet, where the poison's sweet

Can you tell me how to get to

How to get to

Suicide Street

Come and play, Everyone's D.O.A.

Deathly Angels there

That's where we meet

Can you tell me how to get to

How to get to

Suicide Street

(sung to the Sesame Street theme opening)

The above “song” was rewritten by my brother years and years ago. If you cannot find it somehow funny, you totally miss the idea of gallows humor.

Gallows humor, black comedy or just plain sick jokes. That is what my brother's idea of a good laugh was. I probably adopted his style just for the simple fact I was with him for so long and actually loved his jokes, drawings and written stories. There was laughter to the point of tears sometimes.

What is black humor? Here's another example from a long, long time ago, taken from a Wikipedia excerpt on gallows humor.

At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?”

I think that's funny. My brother would somehow turn that into a song or story.

My brother and I were aware that some of our jokes would bring condenming stares from the neighbors or friends who would wonder about our supposed mental state. So, we learned to keep the real sick humor between ourselves. In fact, most of the humor we found hilarious could only be understood by we two, and perhaps others who could find the world a bizarre place to live in.

I'll explain...

...to a certain point.

Perhaps as a matter of coping with life's sometimes inane cicumstances, my brother and I managed to find humor in it. Or, we managed to inject humor into grave situations. Instead of feeling miserable at what life can sometimes throw at you, why not laugh at it, even if for a few seconds? It's also why we both found irony so funny. Why not, irony is everywhere, you trip on the world's silliness daily, so make a joke out of it.

Our father had died young, at 47, of the same thing that took Jim Henson out, walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia sounds just like that, you can walk around with it as a minor annoyance. He apparently had been sick for two weeks when on his last day, the pneumonia escalated remarkably quick and choked him in about 12 hours. Also, my Dad being a Depression Era kid, you stayed the hell away from hospitals as that's where you got nonocomial pneumonia. Well, he was right about hospitals, until his last sickness.

So, for a good week, at the wake and funeral, everyone was wailing about how he was taken too soon, being cut down in his prime and this and that. Ok, it's true, he was too young to leave yet. But the display of grief seemed over the top to me.

My brother was starting to agree. The relatives wouldn't give up this near wailing. We're supposed to be Irish, not Italian; and we don't hire professional mourners to stand around the coffin to cry and sniffle. We're supposed to sing, be drunk and not miserable.

So after the graveside service and at the reception afterwards, we watched the adults suck down beer and whiskey (this IS the Irish thing to do...), my brother quietly comments into my ear...

“Can you imagine if the pall bearers dropped the casket?”

To that, I bust out laughing, to the wonder of my uncles and aunts whose heads shot around to hear me laughing. I quickly snuffed it.

Still, something like that was needed when everything around you seems twisted beyond measure.

I'll back up the validity of this humor with American literary icon Mark Twain, who once joked, “I haven't heard anything like that (than funny), since the orphange burned down.”

Also, Walt Disney had a go at dark humor as well...

Daily Stuff I Trip Across...

“Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” -Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday I call up my friend from Plymouth and before I can say “Hi,” he barrels in with:

“36 Hours! That's it! 36 hours and I wanted him OUT!”

He was referring to an old college buddy from Holy Cross who was stopping by while on his way to the Cape to visit family. Apparently they aren't all that buddy/buddy now.

“He's turned into an Old Nelly! After 12 hours I wanted to kill him!” says B again.

B goes on, “Do you know what he did?”

So he tells me. “He put the cover to the toilet down. I got up around three am to take a leak and being half asleep, I was pissing all over the cover, wondering why my socks feel wet and warm! I NEVER put the cover down on the toilet!”

“...and he brought is own FOOD...since when does a guest bring their own FOOD?”

“...and tissues! He uses tissues all the time, I'm still cleaning up bits of that paper everywhere!”

B stops, takes a deep breath and tells me;

“I know...I am a bad man...I know I can't tolerate most people anymore. I am set in my ways and now, no one can live in this house but me. I know I can go off on people for the smallest things.”

“Yeah, you can.” I respond

“What??” he says, a bit surprised that I agreed.

“I said, you can become furious over the smallest things. I wonder why you can invest such emotion and energy into anthills?”

His admission to having a short temper wasn't ready for my confirming it apparently.

There was that telling pause from him on the phone, then answered...”Ok, you know it too. But don't tell me you haven't that mousetrap-spring, freaking temper. You go off like a nuke over stuff that isn't that important!”

So I tell him, “Yeah, I do, but it doesn’t appear every two weeks! My problem is burying the thousand little annoyances till Mt Vesuvius decides to blow.” I know this. I've known myself a long time now.

There was another pause and he finally concluded...”Alright...You suppress and I exaggerate tiny annoyances. It's not like we two will change that much in the future.”

After that, I shifted the conversation to some local gossip.

______________________________________________________________________

I saw this yesterday at the watering hole. Ann lazily walks by me muttering...”Where's my coat? I put my coat here...It's not here...Where is my coat?”

“What kind of coat is it?” I ask, barely glancing at her.

“It's a black leather one...oh wait..here it is!”

I stop her from taking it, as that was Katherine's.

“But where's MY coat?” she goes on.

I then look to see her wearing a black leather coat.

“Ann...what's on your shoulders?” I ask.

“Uh....Ohhhh...( a little drunken laughter) I thought I put it around one of these chairs...(more laughter)

I think, you've got to be well irrigated with booze to forget you're wearing you own coat!

Verbatim

From WikiPedia, Cheech and Chong's Sister Mary Elephant...

Sister Mary Elephant tells the class that they will read their previously assigned essays on "How I Spent My Summer Vacation". She chooses one boy (Chong), who stands up and reads in a monotone voice how on the first day he woke up, went downtown to look for a job, then hung out in front of the drugstore. He repeatedly describes this same daily routine verbatim for each day of his vacation as well.

Here's the difference, so far, of my life compared to Chong's. 

Today, I got up, let the dog out and then went inside to turn the Today Show on. I opened a Coke, sat down and watched it.

Tomorrow's entry?

Today, I got up, let the dog out and then went inside to turn the Today Show on. I opened a Coke, sat down and watched it.

Getting the picture?