Responses

Well, that last piece on infidelity struck a chord. I usually don't receive responses to that blog but I got a few emails this morn.

The emails were mostly from women and one guy. Most of who I know and a few unknowns who happened across my site and had to respond. I ain't naming names!

Guess what they thought? It had nothing to do with Daphne and my shenanigans. What they did say was that they “understood” Daphne and her feeling trapped in a dull, lifeless marriage. Some of the women, I know are having flings on the side. The others just complained about how they love their husbands, but no longer are “in love” with them. I heard this as it was a common complaint. “He changed over the years...we changed...and I don't know how it happened.”

That's the price of living with the same person for over ten years I suppose.

Well, people easily find a comfortable rut to snooze in. As you get older, it becomes more and more comfortable to stay in your rut. It gets harder to change when you go from 35 to 45. The mental energy isn't what it used to be.

I have no answers for them. I don't think there's much of an answer that can be broadly applied as each marriage has it's own particular, sometimes weird, dynamics.

The guy who wrote me, who I know well, told me he fell in love with the little tart he was seeing. She too was a Daphne who was bored in her marriage and she went shopping. He didn't get caught as the whole affair wasn't exposed but he lamented the fact “she went back to him.” I said to him, “99% of the time they go back to Number One...that's where the financial stability is.” I've known some instances where the woman will put up with their husband's infidelities, just as long as she remains Number One on the checkbook and house deed.

“You didn't fall in love with yours...she was a play thing to you..I fell in love with mine.” he finally wrote.

“Your timing was off, not that it was your fault...she was already married. You get over her yet by now?”

He said he had but it was bit of a haul as he thought, as well as she, that they two fit so well together. But, she couldn't give up the house in Rehoboth, the paychecks her husband was bringing in and the Holy Hell that divorce court can be. That outweighed any feelings she had for him.

Anyways, thought I'd update this. I thought I'd get some responses along the lines of, “You sneaky marriage killing bastard!” I got none of those. What responses I did get was eye opening...in favor of Daphne!  

This Will Be a Good One.

It could've been me, but it was you

who went and bit off a little bit more than you could chew.

You said, “You had it made,” but you been had.

The woman, no good, no how! Thinkin' maybe the blood is bad?

Bad blood!

The woman was born to lie.

Making promises she can't keep with a wink of an eye.

Click the Pic and Hear Her Song, Described Her Perfectly. 

Ok, I feel safe enough to tell this now. It's been over a decade. I nearly destroyed a marriage by screwing around with a married girl. Too confident deceptions and sneakiness eventually go down in flames and this one did. I managed to escape the havoc without penalty though. I skated right past it. She on the other hand bore the brunt of it, initially. 

This all started when I learned about chat rooms and it was my first foray into them. I entered the “Providence, RI” one on AOL and sat and watched. I finally started talking to some others when a private IM shot up on my screen.

We started talking and she had asked me where I was from. I said “Pawtucket” and claimed she was from Cheyenne, Wyoming. She then went on to ask me some pretty detailed questions about Pawtucket only someone from here would even know. I began to think it was one of my guy friends posing as a chick to get me to cyber with him and have a good time. I ain't taken in that easily!

But day after day this “girl” kept im'ing me to talk and finally she said, “Call me.” I got the phone number from “her” and lo and behold, the state code actually was from Wyoming. We talked and I found out she had been born in RI and grew up in Pawtucket. She was about ten years younger than me so our paths probably wouldn't have crossed then. I finally did believe she was originally from here and ended up in Big Sky country following jobs.

As the weeks passed, we talked and I learned she was in a marriage that was dead and should've been buried by now. That seemed to be about half the marrieds I knew who had that affliction. She had become bored by the sameness of it all. Whatever spark she had felt for him was extinguished by monotony. These affairs all start off psychologically, with the wounded party looking for someone to unload on because confessing to people you know carries that risk that it'll be repeated elsewhere. You know, most assuredly it will too.  So I became the “shoulder to complain on” for her. I can do that, listen for a good length of time.  Add to that there was no risk of my telling anyone she knew as I knew none of her friends or family. 

I get an email one day saying she's coming to RI to visit her mom and sister and we MUST meet up. We did at a local place not too far from my house. I was surprised she looked better in person than her picture. That got my interest up as she was very cute. The first “date” was just that, a time to spend talking and learning about one another. She was only in RI for a week so the second date was a day or two later and that involved my picking her up at her mom's house by Slater Park and after getting about 100 feet down Armistice blvd, her head dropped down and she was unzipping my pants.

“Huh...I have no problem with this!” I think.

The rest of the week involved..well, you guess.

As I got to “know” her I find out she was forced out of her parent's home by 16, working at menial jobs, hopping from apartment to apartment living a wild life of a free teenage girl with NO parental oversight whatsoever. This girl was feral as an alley cat at an early age. I enjoyed this because at times, and to this day, I do like rides on roller coasters, be they real roller coasters or other people who live life at 115mph. I'll get on for the ride once in a while but NEVER live that kind of life myself. I dabble in intense excitement at times but it eventually becomes far too destructive and expensive. I'm usually off the ride before we get that far.  

So, she finally goes back to Wyoming and we keep in touch via the computer. There were a couple of other visits to RI by her that involved, “having to check up my Mom” excuse. She was telling me she had him blinded by it all. She said she had the best of both worlds, a "real" life back in Cheyenne and a “fun life” here on the East Coast. She was mighty proud of herself being able to juggle all these balls in the air. “This is the most fun I had in a long, long time...I feel like a female James Bond!” she said. “God this is exciting! David's soo damn boring now.”

This isn't rare. I know. I too and others I knew managed to live two lives and keep them separate from those who would be surprised. It's all about keeping up appearances and I learned that early in my teens. What's great fun though, is when someone blows their cover and the town looks upon them with dull surprise. In my early teens I came off as this grade A student, caring son to a mom and generally a “good kid.” But being a good kid is boring. What was more fun was tearing around this town at 14 years old at 3 in the morning. Those were great summer nights, partying it up and growing up wayyy too fast. The trick? Don't take it too far. Don't be stupid and don't get caught. Emphasis on “don't get caught.” That's crucial. 

Anyways...

Round trip tickets from DEN to PVD get kinda pricey after a while though. She was complaining she wanted to come here but the cost was annoying her husband and he started wondering just how “sick” her mom was. Daphne wasn't worried at all, she said she was totally in control of all of this. I found out what a great professional liar she was from some of the things she told me. You have to listen carefully to people as everyone let's slip tiny details and I was good at picking that up. I began to hear things that didn't jive.  I figured then she lied to everyone. She did mention though that I should come out to Cheyenne the next time just to cool her husband's suspicions about all these plane rides.

I thought of it. I thought it was a good idea. I never saw Wyoming or the Rockies and she said she could get away and come an see me at the hotel downtown. When she couldn't be with me, I'd do some touring. Hell, I might even take her to Red Rocks and see a concert as it's a cool venue.

I was this close to buying the ticket that week when I got a phone call one day.

“Hi, is Ron there?” the caller asked, rather nicely.

“This is Ron, who's this?”

“David.”

Now I didn't clue into this at first. I knew a few Davids in 2002 and my not recognizing the voice didn't matter, just yet. So I kept talking.

“David.....which David?”

“You know, David Vail...David Vail from CHEYENNE!”

WHAM! I slam the phone down in a second. “HOLY FUCKING SHIT” I think.

David must've had the fastest speed dialer I ever encountered because my phone rang about two seconds after I hung it up.

Like a moron I pick it up.

“You know, that wasn't very polite of you, hanging up on people who are trying to call you...by the way...I”m wondering...why are you calling here? You seem to call here a lot...and Daphne seems to call YOU a lot...WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU CALLING HERE FOR?!”

I hang up again. This time my heart is probably doing a 130.

The phone rings again. “Shit...I've go to do something about this now.” I think. I pick it up.

Before he could get a word in, I took charge of the situation and nearly ordered him to put Daphne on the phone. I was completely surprised that he allowed it. I got her and told her, “That's it chickie! It's over! I'm done!” In the background I heard him yelling and almost pleading too. The panic in his voice was rising as the reality of the situation began to sink even deeper into him. Everything he feared was coming true. 

“You were going to have him COME out here! You booked a room at the Hyatt Regency! For HIM!?” Jesus CHRIST!!  “Did you FUCK him?!!”

"You better go calm him down." I say and ended the conversation right there. 

I will tell you this with hand on heart. I was soooo fuckin' glad there were two thousand miles between him and me. Had he been three blocks over, he'd be here in two minutes to gouge my eyeballs out.

I blocked my computer and phone for any calls from there. I then really begin to wonder if anything untoward had happened out there. So I started scanning the KGWN-tv for headlines or at least police blogs that said: “Local Man Chainsaws Wife Into Two.” I found nothing though. I unblocked the computer two days later and immediately I get an IM from Daphne, telling me she was soo sorry for the explosion. I had asked her if she was alright and she had said yes and was staying at a friend's house. But after that phone call when we got busted, she and David got into a scuffle there in the kitchen, with him shaking her like an infant by grabbing her neck and her swinging her fists into his face, busting a tooth.

I then asked how did he find out. She thinks he was suspicious a month earlier and started to investigate himself, phone records and the such. The kicker was when she told me she had the hotel keys, the printout from Denver's airport with flight numbers from PVD and my number that were all discovered by him. He also found lingerie that he thought was odd as she NEVER had worn any for him.

“How did he find those things?” I ask.

“It was on our bed.”

“On her bed” I thought. Jesus.

“You know Daphne...spinning all these webs...it gets very hard to keep the scam up when you get too confident. I knew how proud you were with managing all these secrets. Apparently he wasn't that stupid.”

“I can handle guys...been doing it since I was 16. Hell, I'm handling him now even with all this shit that's happened.” she says.

“Not this time!” I fire back.

I say “Goodbye” and told her it was fun while it lasted.

A month later, I get a call from her again, she wants to come out and promises me there won't be any trouble and how “fuckin' hot” it'll be if we meet up again.

“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?” I nearly yell at her. “You think he's going to be ok with you coming to RI again? That'll he'll believe you even if it was for your Mom's funeral? You want him to shake you to death like a British nanny? Daphne...don't try...if you come out, I won't let you into my house. No joke.”

The vile temptress kept at it. “Your house? Your bed? Remember when when you were slamming my head against the headboard?”

“Forget it Daphne!” I hung up.

I haven't heard a peep from her since then. Out of curiosity the other day, I googled her and find out she's still with David and with two new kids. I wondered about that. I've seen couples who weren't doing too well have kids to bring a focus to their relationship...hoping to save it by devoting their whole being to the children. But considering even after the bust, she was more than willing to spin the roulette wheel and bet it all on Black 13 and come out again to see me.  She knew no remorse for what erupted nor any regard for him at all. I found that a bit surprising in her. I guess to the real extent she was willing to carry it. Well, she showed me she was worse than I thought.  For all I know, I may have been one of many. I have little idea really what their status is now. But I do know this, people's personalities usually don't change, only the volume softens as they age. 

It was fun while it lasted and I do like the excitement of alley cats on roller skates...but shit..can it be dangerous! If I was looking for a little adventure back then, I received it in spades with all the jeopardy that entails. I was god damn lucky to have skipped by it all. 

Did I have any moral battle in my heart over this? No. None at all.  I weighed the actors involved in this whole thing and considered them all marred and guilty. She for being a slut, he for marrying a slut and my for chasing one.  After learning enough about Daphne, her past and family and him, I figured it was all disfigured long before I arrived.  All I was, was a scandalous, short term profit seeking opportunist.  I won't in any way try to polish my actions in this.  

Is this a confession? Not really, I haven't been tormented by any of this over the years. It's been too long now and it fades away and becomes dim like the horizon after sunset.  It's just another story I tell on these pages and a good one too.  

In getting this piece together, I came across a Reddit thread that sounds very much authored by You.Know.Who. 

I Married a Slut

Male Chauvinist Pig

Sigh...My big mouth, blurting out “what everyone else is thinking,” and a personal entertaining itch to mind-fuck with people, came out last night. Pour three beers into me and my desire for a little comedy is more easily unleashed.

On the porch, we were watching two 20 something girls, with their shirts yanked up, compare their abdomens. They were about twenty feet away so we could also hear what was being said. The gist of it sounded like this:

“Oh, I love yours! It's so flaaat. I wish I could get rid of this roll I have here..just above the waistline. God, if only I had a six-pack!”

“Six pack?” I thought. The only six packs on girls I've seen were on women weightlifters or the women you see competing in the Olympics. Real hard core sports enthusiasts. It's those kind of bodies that takes five years of daily training just to inch out the other runner by 0.02 seconds and win the gold.

In truth, neither girl needed any form of liposuction or a membership at the gym. When you're 22, that usually comes naturally for the majority.

Since I had the beer in me and all pretense at Political Correctness was subdued, I semi shouted to her:

“Six pack? You're not supposed to have a six pack.”

“Huh?” Granola girl said. I call her Granola girl because she had that Bohemian/Grateful Dead follower look to her. You've seen them. They have the scent of patchouli about them and/or ditch weed marijuana. Most are pretty diaphanous with the “drifting through life” in them as well. Think of Stevie Nicks w/o the millions of dollars. At the end of the day, most of them are cool and wouldn't harm a fly.

“I said, you not supposed to have a six pack. You're up to your neck in progesterone and estrogen...it takes a heap of testosterone to have muscle mass...you're a girl.

“PROGESTERONE!” she barks back at me.

“Yeah...you're a girl” I repeated.

A few seconds pass and then I'm called worse than Hitler.

“That's misogyny! You're a MISOGYNIST!”

It would've been apt then, if she pointed at me and screamed, “Hate Crime! HATE CRIME! HATE CRIMINAL!”

There are times when you get the right comeback. They appear just at the right time as they flash into your brain. I had one and it's an old insult I remembered from the late 80's.

“Misogynist?....SPELL IT!” I bark back.

“You calling me stupid?” she fires

“Stupid? Nooo...I'm sure you we can talk about Simone de Beuvoir's Marxist answer to the oppression of women...How about something more recent? Camille Paglia...that radical feminist who regularly dumps on feminism's sanctimoniousness in general?”

I love blank stares. They tell me everything. That's all I got from her. Her brain flat-lined.

Her other flat abdomen-ed friend grabbed her sleeve and tugged her back inside. I swear she whispered, “asshole” as she went in the door.

I had a mile wide stupid smile on my face as I watched them go in, I knew I had.

“Christ Ron, those two were hot and you drove them off?” Randy complains to me.

“She called me a misogynist because I said the word progesterone? She has NO idea what misogyny is...and I'll reserve the right to be a male chauvinist pig when I want too.”

“She was still hot.” Randy bemoans.

“Hot on the outside, dull as a brick on the inside....and she has the gall to complain about misogyny as those two were comparing how cute their tummy's were to one another? They need to buff up on their feminism a bit. They are supposed to hate “objectification of their bodies.”

There's hypocrisy and worse than that, thick and dense hypocrisy that's paraded by dimwits.  

And now, to piss them all off!

Exquisite

Today, no heavy thought on Shakesperare. Today it's PORN!

Get It On with a young Elton John. Click to Play!

Well, you're dirty and sweet.

Clad in black,

Don't look back

And I love you!

You're dirty and sweet, oh yea!

Well, you're slim and you're weak.

You got the teeth

Of the Hydra upon you.

You're dirty sweet

And you're my girl!

For me, this is probably one of the most filthiest, sex laden songs written, and not due to the lyrics either. Yeah, I know, there's a ton of rap that bluntly states “Yo, I'm gonna fuck ya mouth silly bitch!” However, there's no tone, no theme, no mood created that'll inspire that hot blooded sexual desire. It's a shovel slammed broadside into your face. There's no subtlety at all. And I won't get into Zappa's songs about golden showers, towers of power and becoming a sexual spastic. He just did that to shock and satire American sexual beliefs. If you want to do a song about sexuality, hint at it, suggest it, flirt it. The “come hither” invitation is far more powerful than some slut giving it up three hours after you met her in the nightclub. Get It On does comes ever so close to the edge of it all without being explicit. Abruptness won't work here and erotic tact actually is more potent.

Get It On suggests, with sopping wet humidity, an attraction to a girl who has “it” and knows what to do with it. I swear it's the bass drive in the song that moves the sexual amperage down the wire. I guess the John Birch Society was right after all, rock and roll and African beats, caused America's youth to rebel, knock America from it's superpower status and spread std's everywhere..and caused us to lose Vietnam! Oh, like that wasn't happening before rock? Don't believe it? Read a few poems by Emily Dickinson (herself The Queen of Wallflowers) that were written a 100 years earlier. She probably soaked herself as she wrote them. Her sly use of flowers, bees and pollen aren't lost on the reader.

I'm sure you've seen girls with a tee shirt that says “Boy Toy.” I'm sure feminists everywhere are wholly insulted by that but I will admit, we guys are lurid pigs who can be turned on by girls who can flirt hard and use their feminine sexual power to drive us nuts. The National Organization of Women ought to tune it back a few notches, fucking is great fun...will you admit it? Stop denying the fact that we're human and girls and boys will play. But I'll stop here before I really piss NOW off.

I'm not sure if Get It On can be classified as bubblegum rock but it does have that taste to it in a way. It's simple and sweet, just like bubbegum is and so can be sex. And why not? The song screams about the guy loving his candy and the girl is tempting the shit out of him with it. Good for her! Drive him nuts! Wave it in front of his face. It's part of the game.

A while back, while a few of us were discussing the difference between girls and boys, I thought that a great experiment would be to switch souls. Girls can be a guys for 24 hours and vice-versa, just to see what it felt like.

“What would you do?” I was asked if I could switch said a Karen Nyone.

I answered: “I'd be on my back the FULL 24 hours!”

“You're kidding!” Karen shot back, half laughing.

“C'mon Karen! If you were a guy for that time, you'd be trying to stick it into anything that you could hold still long enough!”

She paused for a few seconds when I jumped in...

“YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT IT! AREN'T YOU?”

All I got was a smile, but that was confirmation enough.  

How to Write Goodly

After I had stuffed the clothing into the washing machine, I started pawing through some college notebooks of my brother that were lying on a table nearby. They were dated around January 1980 which was his third year at Providence College. That feels about a hundred years ago. It's so long ago that no one remembers when Aquinas Hall burned up killing all those girls there at PC. Even some firemen I know had to be reminded of it.

In the notebook, there were a couple of term papers shoved in. I read one, about 15 pages long which was titled, “The Use of Appearance/Reality in Opehlia's Funeral Rites in Shakespeare's Hamlet.” It sounded like a Ph.D thesis to me. How narrow can you get? Apparently very much so. The actual passages of Ophelia's funeral in Hamlet might be a page at most and here he is building a larger idea from a few scant lines. He completely blew off the speech about Yorick's skull the grave digger managed to fish out of the ground. I found the actual passage his entire paper was based on.

The queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow?

And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken

The corse they follow did with desperate hand

Fordo its own life: 'twas of some estate.

Couch we awhile, and mark.

That's it. And in truth, the entire paper was based on two words really, “maimed rites.”

I guess that's what you do in college course called, “Shakespeare's Tragedies After 1500.”

I read the paper and was shamed by my own atrocious writing. He was always better at it than I and the blog you read here generally is a one and one/half first draft. If I wanted to, I could gussy up the writing a bit but I'm too lazy to do that. He on the other hand would write a first draft that would probably equate to third one of mine.

Ken had a gift and he followed it. Well, to a point. That natural gift I read in the paper was crucified by the Dominican professor who graded it. All along the margins, there was that red ink criticizing either his grammar or the run of his argument. There were suggestions I couldn't understand. Well, I wouldn't. I'm not an English major. Add to that my writing was never polished by cutting criticism either so of course I never learned to write proficiently. But talk about nitpicking. One suggestion/criticism was, “Your use of the comma in this sentence forces the reader to to focus on a distraction rather than your main thrust, which is the travesty of Ophelia's funeral. ”

A god damn comma.

Still, I was pretty impressed at how my brother, at a kid's age of 21, could write so well and on something so damned narrow.

**

I had one of my papers called out by a Rhode Island College art professor once and for good reason. I was drunk when I wrote it.

RIC back then forced you to take a “365 course” which was not in your major. It was required to help “round out” your liberal arts degree. So I took this idiot course in Art, a sort of introduction to American Contemporary Art. The stuff like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and the such. It was a silly easy course which guaranteed me an A. I could breeze through it while I spent the majority of my time on the real degree I was after. Why waste time otherwise?

I blew the paper off to the last minute. The day before it was due, this guy MK and I had purchased a couple of six packs and sat outside the Student Union while some band was playing. It was a late spring day and it was made for putting a buzz on and leer at the girls that came by. I put on my springtime buzz and then M and I separated to get on with our day. I was responsible. I went to write that paper at Adams's Library computer terminals, smelling of beer.

I whacked it out. I was just a review of Vincent van Gogh life and my reaction to his artwork. I handed it in on time.

A week later I get a letter asking me to see this art professor. I almost didn't care as this course I treated with all the respect you'd treat “Introduction to Finger Painting.” But he wanted to talk to me about something.

The professor tells me his thoughts when I met up with him.

“I called you in about your paper. I had to fail it as it was atrocious. But I wondered...I knew you were a fourth year psych major and you had to have written many other papers and succeeded to make it to your final year, why this trash?”

“Take this line, 'van Gogh wore very, very baggy and poofy pants that made his neighbors point at him'”

“Or this one, 'van Gogh liked the color blue and he smeared it everywhere on the canvas and it dripped off.”

He asks why I did such a lousy job. I didn't say, “Well Mr. Professor, I whacked it out less than 20 hours ago while I was gooned on beer.” I probably made up some excuse that seemed to give me an excuse why I did such a shitty job. Work, school, work...god knows what I said.

The professor then tells me he knows I can write a better paper and allows me to do a re-write. I thank him and on the way to my car I can't help but think, “Shit, I have to do actual work for this class? I have to put in something of an effort to write this? I don't give a shit about contemporary art! Ah...damn these 365 courses...”

Had I been in PC's Shakespeare class (which is a lark because no way in hell would I have the prerequisites) but just say I was...my papers would piss off the professor so much that he'd grade it with a machete. He'd probably grade this blog with a machete too.  

$50 on "EZ Lay" in the Fourth

"Rule No.1 is never lose money. Rule No.2 is never forget rule number one."

--Warren Buffet


I've never been to Foxwoods or Mohegan because I have almost zero interest in gambling. I have played the dogs at the track in Lincoln when I was 18. I bet two races and lost both. I found myself thinking, “Where's the fun in that?” Not only that, but the place was filthy and filled with short Colombians who acted like they were betting their kid's college educations when in fact it might have been $5 a shot. The way they cheered or bemoaned various dogs with all their hearts was something to see. If you ever wanted to feel your skin creep, that was a great place to have it occur.

But...put me in front of a stock screen and I'm warming up the dice in my palm. When I couldn't understand the odds posted for a dog race, I can sit here and watch Amgen's bid/ask spread tell me much. Ask me about Catfish Hunter's stats for “hits allowed” for the season of 1976 and I'll blankly stare at you. Show me a MACD of Amgen...and I'll tell you whether I'd buy it or not. But that's after consulting S&P's score and Amgen's stats.

I haven't played Wall St's ponies in a long while. That crash in late 2008 was enough to make anyone puke. A major reduction of up to 50% in all stocks, which meant that if you did nothing, your investment was halved, would make anyone shy away. It did me. But the market has since “recovered” then with the Feds jumping in with programs such as ZIRP, QE 1, 2 & 3. The jist? Your kid's and grandkid's futures, in the form of them paying for it by their taxes, propped up today's market. “Borrowing from the Future” I think it's called.

Even as the market was going up, basically guaranteed by the US Gov't itself, the distaste I felt due to that last crash kept me away. Wall St is an expensive casino, there are no quarter slot machines, no $1 tables. Wall St's cheapest table is $2,000 and it goes up to infinity from there. If you can't plunk down two grand on a bet, you can only watch. You want to bet $2,000 after knowing how the markets can act? Losing $5 bucks to a slot machine is a very minor annoyance. Try losing two grand and see how you feel. And to make appreciable money, that you can feel, you need to bet ten times that or more. A one percent move on $5,000 is a lousy $50. It's almost pointless, considering the commission you're charged to place the trade. The same percent on $50,000 is $500. The larger the bet, the more the commission seems to fade. Get the picture?

But I'll tell you, there's nothing more satisfying than making money by clicking a mouse. It's money you never worked for too. It seems almost magical the way it works. But don't get too starry eyed over the whole thing, as it's all done with the seriousness of cancer. Also, you're playing against some pretty savvy people and/or computers programmed to outthink you. You have to keep your shit wired tight at all times if you play this particular game.

So today I fired up my old stock trading platform just to watch. I saw the day traders, betting the usual 100 share lots at a time. If they're successful, they'll make some small cash on each trade, but end up paying through the nose on commissions. Occasionally I'd see someone toss down a bid for 5,000 shares. “That guy has some balls...or pools of cash” I'd think. The platform I have can allow you to use it with “play money.” It's just a simulator that uses the same market data. I played with it using limit orders and was surprised to see my buy order filled just as the pressure of my finger was coming off the mouse button. “Shit! That took less than a second!” It seems things have been improved since I played the ponies in 2008.

Will I play it with real money?

The problem today is that the entire market is two standard deviations over it's mean which means: “Too fuckin' expensive!” This is a time to sell, not buy. By all rights, this market is due to scale down some. But the answer to which no one can predict is: When? When is always the question and no one has ever nailed it.

The next sounds awful but there's a reason behind it. I want the market to throw up. I want it to slip in the bathtub and bust it's head. I want to see it dive like a brick. Why? Because you buy stocks LOW so they can go up later on. It's all cyclical. So here I am, praying earnestly to God for a crash.

I've never shorted a stock, which is when you literally borrow it from someone on contract, sell it immediately, keep the cash on the sidelines and BEG for the market to die. When it does, you buy the stock back and hand the shares back to their proper owner, with you keeping the difference in $.

You profit from the market's death, doom, misery and destruction. No joke, it's legal.

The problem is that there's no limit on how much you can lose. If the stock you shorted happens to keep going up, for the length of the contract you ordered it, you OWE the rightful owner the current price of those shares, which can be far higher than what you contracted them for.

I'm always a “long” stock owner. You can only lose what you originally put up. But even so, the market is far too high now and I want it to catch double pneumonia, for a while at least...enough to put it in the hospital and on a respirator...for a bit at least...please?

God..this is such a mercenary environment, ain't it? Welcome to America!

A snapshot of Amgen today...a fantasy baseball league if you will...

Real Freedoms

Three years ago this week, I was laid off from a job that I had worked for about fourteen years. The company up and quit due to some ugly news stories stemming from BAD nursing. When Jim Taricanni points his camera at you, you hire lawyers to run defense so management runs out the back door pointing fingers at everyone else but themselves. I think the lawyers were the only ones to make out like bandits from all of that.

A part of me was upset by it. I was losing a weekly check, health care and the such. Plus so many of us had been there so long that a family grew from it. I'd miss that and the social outlet that provided. But that's America when it comes to economics. It's like a bus station with employees, companies and CEO's coming and going.

When I heard the news, another part of me said: “FUCK YEAH!!” A few minutes later, I might have fist pumped the air in the back room where no one was looking.

That last time I had an entire summer off was eighteen years prior. Prior to that, it had been another five years earlier when I was in college. With the piles of vacation, sicktime, severance and unemployment bucks about to follow, I calculated that I could skate easily for about seven to eight months provided I didn't step on any financial landmines. Luckily, I never did. This money would purchase me time, which is what I prefer to buy instead of things.

It took about two months to decompress from work and the shitstorm it had become. I know this because people around me started to remark on how relaxed, open and breezy I had become. Sure, when you don't have anywhere to be, no deadlines to face and no responsibility...and the bills will be paid, you revert to your childhood “summer vacation” mode. I knew when I was completely “there” when I realized that there times when I wasn't sure if it were a Wednesday or a Thursday. I didn't really need to know really. That's how free I became. I did what I wanted to, when I wanted to and wherever I wanted to do it.

Prior to being laid off, I knew I had to remain active in some sort of way. Lazing on the couch eating Doritos ain't the way to do it. So I bought a mountain bike and started on a health kick that in the end, burned off 30 lbs. I also regularly attended a gym if it rained and did those exercises and learned all the guys who “Pick Things Up and Put Them Down.”

Twenty miles a day I biked religiously. It took me a while to get to that mark but once I reached it, I stayed with it. I wore out the tires on that bike eventually. I became somewhat tan, lost the weight and my hair style was windblown-unkempt. I sped through the nicer neighborhoods of northern Seekonk, past defunct factories in Pawtucket and up and down dirt paths by a river that runs by near here. I learned that loose lycra was a great thing to wear as it weighs nothing and looked sporty, along with my knock off Raybans.

I may have looked a bit like those retirees you see dressed in sports gear everyday, in some retirement community in Florida. Hell, I felt like I was retired.

**

“You're turning into a hippy.” a girl I knew once remarked.

“What? You see me flashing peace signs and hating on Nixon?”

“Nooo...not that....it's like you...I can't put my finger on it...You...”

“...don't care?” I filled in.

“Yes!” she says. “You just do what you want without much regard to what anyone thinks now.”

“It's the only way to be!”

I could've quoted her Marlon Brando's speech on freedom and judgment from Apocalypse Now but it would either be received as too damn weird or she'd never get it at all.

Kurtz: “Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?”

Nah...it would've been lost on her. But in a sense, she was right. I was free to meander and I drifted to my default state, which was doing whatever interested me at the moment without any constraints or caring about the views of other people. I was happily unproductive and had heaved the Protestant Work Ethic into the garbage. I had done the work ethic for over two decades and found it over-rated. Those who would scorn this attitude, I've noticed would plan and talk of weekends and vacations as their only goal.

If you had been thinking that it's easy to roam and range in life if you have the money, you're right. I was doing exactly that and I had the means, for a while.

I wasn't looking like a hippy, but had the attitude of one. “Tune In, Turn On and Drop Out.” I never took up a nasty LSD habit but the “Drop Out” part I embraced fully. My days were easy going. My true relaxed personality came to the forefront when that toxic crap from the old job, when it became a hellhole, dissipated.

It was a remarkable time that was well spent. I miss it. I kinda know how I'm going to be if I ever hit MegaBucks.

Unfortunately, I got a call out of the blue one day to return to work and be responsible. I took the job. No more biking, no more breezing. The weight came back and winter was setting in. Adult life had returned which required me to be exact, stable and reliable. My Endless Summer ended. I thought it would keep going in some ways. 

I realize now that my mistake was like what everyone else does. You think once a change or effort is put into something, it stays put. No it doesn't! Life is always jostling things loose or outright changing them completely. Though, to borrow an abused phrase, I lived in those moments fully without wasting worry on the future. God, it was great while it lasted. 

I still think of that time and the positives that just flowed from that summer off. Today, I was thinking how could I recapture some of that?   One would be to just plain avoid fighting for hills that aren't worth it.  That's a given though. As I get older, I have less appetite for battles that only produce crumbs. Those who gloat over such wins, can have their crumbs.