Genghis Khan and the Story of the First Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is here and it's time to get stuffed and wander the earth like a craven horde, looting and rioting until the very fabric of civilization winces from the strain. Many think this ritual dates back to when the Pilgrims stormed a beach on Cape Cod in search of curry and other spices, and were served a feast by a gathering of local rubes. The theory is that this, followed by centuries of looting and pillaging, sets the stage for the modern Thanksgiving. Lies! In order to observe The Truth, let us recast our gaze from the 1600's back to 1200 or so, AD. Now open your mind the true first Thanksgiving.

While Genghis Khan's Mongolian horde was trouncing Asia, they naturally reached the Pacific ocean, and immediately took to the sea on outriggers in search of the New World. They sought trade routes, spices, and most importantly, weak cultures to subjugate. The horde made for novice sea-farers, but they were enthusiastic, and sometimes that's enough. They soon found their horses to be ill-equipped for ocean travel—but what they lacked in aquatic prowess, they made up for in flavor, and their skulls made excellent hats.

The ocean is a cruel mistress, and enormous. As the horde traveled and fished, they became weary and despondent. The lack of adversaries made them lonely, and the lack of dry land and potable water took its psychological toll as well. But in time, fortune smiled upon those hapless Mongols. They eventually found dry land in the shape of Hawaii, and to their pleasant surprise, it was inhabited - but not by Hawaiians, as one would expect. No, they came upon the original Polynesian settlers, and those fuckers were hearty.

As the two forces sized each other up it became clear that any conflict would amount to the wholesale eradication of everyone, so a weary truce was established. They all rejoiced. They broke bread. Whole herds of swine were roasted on spits. Many Mai Tai's, Pina Colada's, and, of course, Blue Hawaiian's, were served. It was a great celebration. In the early morning fog of the next day, the Mongolian horde packed up their ships and headed out, waving to their new friends as they drifted off toward Easter Island, where they subsequently landed and pillaged before heading back home to Asia.

And that's the story of the real first Thanksgiving. The end.

Throat Slitting Time - Winning Black Friday

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. 

- Napoleon Bonaparte

Grit your teeth. Hard. Now punch yourself square in the nuts. Okay, off to a good start. Now, the question: Did a prize come out? Some twinkling gizmo of questionable quality? An ill-fitting sweater? An unrefrigerated cheese? If you answered no, then you're probably doing it wrong. I suggest you repeat this several times daily if you want to have any hope of succeeding at Black Friday.

In caveman times, men were simpler. Their appetite for plastic nonsense was low, their craving for branded apparel was near non-existent. They didn't need to fill the caverns of their homes, of their souls, with stuff. In those simpler times, the Black Friday sale merely served as a means to bring harmony to the profit and loss columns of their crudely cut stone tablet balance sheets. And they never had to go to war over it.

Today, though, the siren's song beckons you. An orgy of savings awaits! One must gird himself with a prophylactic ethos in order to see this thing through rightly. It may seem counterintuitive, but I suggest taking a page out of the caveman book and bringing along a heavy wooden club, for it is our ability to use tools which sets us apart from the animals—and if you intend to go foraging for bargains during the holiest of retail communions, you will surely come face to face with some of the gamiest and mange-ridden creatures that god ever turned his back on. And they will thirst for your blood.

No good Black Friday run-up is complete without a zealous overindulging in zombie-themed movies and television. This can really put you in a wonderful headspace for the upcoming melee, remove all fear of death, and desensitize you to violence in such a way that strips all humanity from your future victims. You'll know you're ready when you can truly enjoy turkey and cranberry sauce while watching a YouTube medley of The Top Ten Goriest Zombie Attacks.

Lastly, it's important to go into the fray with a healthy sense of American entitlement. Remember: those limited-supply bargains that you wish to purchase belong to you already. Anyone who would prevent you from retrieving your rightfully-owned property is stealing, and therefore must be punished to within an inch of their life. Happy shopping!

Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Used Bitcoin?

Look, there’s no easy way to say this: you missed the boat. And now you wait on the bread lines like all the other saps who didn’t have the good sense to get in while it was hot. Those were heady times, a few months ago. Why, the Bitcoins cost mere pennies, and don’t get me started on the Ethereums… they fell to earth like feathers from an angel’s wings. But you missed big. There, I said it; we can move past that now.

I know what you’re thinking - you’re the only chump who didn’t bet the farm and win it all, and you’re probably right. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late - far from it! The finance gurus will try to tell you that it was all a crazy dream; “Tulips!” they’ll shout, their faces turning purple, eyes bulging, veins protruding, the very seams of their skin threatening to burst with rage. It’s impressive, it’s convincing, but it’s not warning enough for the savvy investor.

Heavies like Buffet know better than placing their name too strongly in the for or against column, because it's just too early to tell; and nobody wants to sound like that idiot Jamie Dimon, who openly told investors that he’d rather throw is money right in the toilet - or worse, give it to the needy - than to bet a bill on these ponies. He backpedaled, of course, much to his very public shame.

But the financial elite have a different code, a different set of rules by which they operate. In that structure there’s no room for anyone to thrash about in wild speculation, except the hedge fund managers whose ancient rituals cause them to twitch about in a way that somehow resembles the wild gyrations of a peacock in heat, just to make it rain cash. No, making vast fortunes from instruments and futures as meaningless as the used betting slips that litter the grounds outside of a Hoboken dog track is their turf, and any rival gang that tries to peddle the same gag gets dealt with, West Side Story style.

The point is, that little man in your tummy who’s telling you to heed their warnings, to take it easy, to play it safe - you tell that bozo to pound sand. That’s no way to live anyway. Once you shake off that feeling, you can do anything. So, first-things-first, let’s talk assets.

Savings is a good place to start. This has traditionally been a place where money goes to die. With current interest rates doing such a poor job keeping up with inflation, it’s a grossly negligent investor who keeps money stored this way. Let’s fix that straight away. Once you’ve flushed every cent out of your savings, I recommend putting it right into Monero - it’s the one that criminals use, so it must be good.

Many investors first get their feet wet choosing from a smattering of funds offered by their company’s 401K retirement benefit program. This is a great store of wealth that, like savings, mostly just sits there, despondent like Sylvia Plath, waiting for retirement and the sweet respite of death. Time to let those bucks boogie! For a mere 10% penalty (and applicable taxes), you can siphon the juices off of your future for the wealth today! In the spirit of the balance and variety that a properly administered 401K program offers, I recommend putting these funds into a mix of 50% vanilla cryptos (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, etc.), and the other 50% in fun outliers like Verge, Siacoin, NEM, Funfair, Bitbean, etc. - maybe even some PowerLedger if you’re a bro. Taking this approach is a healthy way to honor the spirit of what was once a lavish and nourishing retirement program.

I will admit, there’s a lot of bad advice out there when it comes to getting really deep into the cryptos. A lot of the real serious geeks may even propose that you follow a similar plan to that outlined above - and why not, it worked for them. They showed up early, ponied up at the nickel slots, and now they have their yachts. But those on the outside looking to get into it late in the game are faced with an uphill battle. And when the whole table bets on red, you better be the one who bets on black or else what’s the point? Now it’s time to pull out the big guns. There’s a line in the sand. Wheat, chaff. Men. Boys.

The American Dream often revolves around the notion of a family, a car, any number of large-format meats sweating out the antibiotics under the unforgiving kilojoules of your oven in the kitchen of your very own home, which you are somewhere in the midst of your prescribed 30 years of indentured servitude struggling to pay off. Yes, the home - that last bastion of value in the modern citizen’s net worth. Banks will fork over the big bucks for almost any reason at all if you’re willing to put your house in hock to get your filthy mitts on it. Any reason except the willfully irresponsible endeavor of getting big into the cryptos. A bank manager once told me in the confines of a dirty roadhouse with no washroom on the outskirts of Lawrence, KS that he’d sooner sign off on a loan for a significant amount of fentanyl-laced heroin than Bitcoin, no matter the collateral. “Once they get into that stuff,” he said, sweating like a man who had battled these demons himself, “they lose all sensation in their fingers and constantly check values against the major exchanges. It’s a sickness.” So remodeling - tell the bank it’s for remodeling, they’d never turn down a well-adjusted individual such as yourself who simply wants to improve the value of their primary investment.

Because the risks involved with taking money against your home are so significant, you can only truly honor and respect that risk by going balls deep on some seriously questionable and risky cryptos. For this purpose, I like Dogecoin. It was created as a joke, which by definition makes it a double-negative, a fake-fake currency. Therefore, as a value-positive asset, it theoretically holds more real value than any other crypto. I once saw a t-shirt with the caption “GO BIG OR GO HOME”. While I hated it at the time, and the guy who wore its mullet and his general demeanor and lack of sleeves, and his girlfriend’s matching mullet and lack of sleeves, I must admit - the logic stands to reason. And now is the time. Why toil? The worst that could happen is you lose it all - but even in the event of a catastrophic loss you will in fact gain, in short order, the sagest investment wisdom of all. But who am I kidding, with this fool-proof plan, there is no losing, only winning. Audentes Fortuna iuvat.

Zero-Sum Life

It's a Zero-Sum Life, there's no two ways about it, Bub. You come in with nothing and you leave with nothing. And that's fine. Every minute is zero sum - it's here, it's gone. We sell our time, most of it, anyway. We work for someone else (whether you're punching a clock or running your own business, you're working in service of someone else), we absorb content that's riddle with advertising messages (selling our eyeballs to marketers, who are selling their time to sell our time to others who are selling their time to make something to sell to us for the money we made selling our time to someone else), and of course we sell our time to our kids, our friends, our family, our community, etc...

Sure, there's learning, selling our time essentially back to ourselves to become better and more effective at selling pieces of our lives to others. We learn about the wonderful discoveries of others who were learning things in their great endeavor of selling themselves to others, and we become more productive salesmen of our own time. And we think there may be a few of the super-wealthy who can opt out, but are they not constantly selling their time to promote benefits of their gilded-cage lifestyle? Hell, right now I'm selling my time to you - the time it takes to write this, I sell that to you - you might enjoy how great a writer I am or endure how terrible, I'm selling you this content in exchange for your attention and the time it takes you to read it, or maybe you give up and just stop here -

"Ok, so if it's all zero-sum," you ask, "what's the point." Excellent question. Is ours the task of furthering the Human Endeavor? Maybe. Sounds nice, has an egalitarian optimism to it. But what's that for? The end game is, it seems, that we as humans reach that pivotal point of Utopia. That moment where humanity is free from the chains of fate, chance, the gruel of life, pain, suffering... the stuff of being human. In such a world, the underpinnings of what we all live by just fall away - capitalism and wealth, time, health, politics and class, lifestyle, and conflict all become obsolete. Happiness becomes the final capital.

The Year of the Ostrich

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." 

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The acrid tinfoil taste in our mouths from these ugly times, I imagine, is the same taste that inspired legions of young folks and open minds to take to the road in the late 60's to experience what Kerouac and Ginsberg and Cassady were on about - the hallmark of the culture that bore the hippies and All of That. And rightly so, we are in an Era of Change. These are tipsy times, and it stands to reason that no teetotaller should remain standing. One cannot see with one's eyes closed... I'm looking at you, ostrich.

So the mighty ostrich is our current culture's spirit animal. A beast, a fowl, pretending to be a bush with it's head in the ground. I beam with pride. In the same way that in the 60's, The Man was so dismissive of the beats and that entire un-understandable youth culture, now we see the same dismissive attitude toward Millennials. Their ways confuse us, their motives are subversive, their insatiable appetite for sriracha & avocado flavored Tide Pods is alarming. They stand to destroy everything we stand for, after we finally destroyed everything the previous generation stood for. We can't catch a goddamn break.

Maybe they're onto something. Maybe Facebook should just be a scrapbook between consenting adults, maybe Tide Pods are delicious. They might rise to the occasion, and I hope they do. Because if not, I'm going to wake up one day in something resembling a cold war era Soviet nursing home for criminals and ex-pats eating table-cheese and longing for the days when I could casually unplug my inter-cranial datajack and enjoy the solitude of a quiet, warm, sunlit deck on June morning, without having to report back to our cybernetic AI overlords.

Mouthwork

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."

- Ernest Hemingway

It takes a special type of person to go into the Mouth Business. Mouth is not for the faint of heart - most of the horrible things we do daily involve the mouth: eating yogurt, eating liverwurst, swears, lies, politics, spitting, smoking, chewing tobacco, oral, rimming, all the liguses, flossing, singing Journey, opinions, etc., the list goes on. So to get into the filthy business of other peoples dirty, spaghetti crusted cakeholes takes certain qualities: grit certainly, morbid curiosity and a sturdy gag reflex. I'm not sure the desire to help people weighs in there, though I'm sure they'll tell you that.

I've seen the gamut of Mouth People. As such, some were more sympathetic than others. As a youngster I had my teeth filed by a sadistic orthodontist who I must have offended in some way, so much so that he needed to grind my glorious fangs down to negligible stumps. And I'll never forgive that son of a bitch. I once had a cleaning in a questionable back-alley dental dungeon. The tile floor was grimy and cracked, the receptionist was also the hygienist, which is fine, the dentist resembled Newman from Seinfeld, but somehow I knew in my heart that he was a dirty old man who was heavily into upskirt photography.

But some how, I still have all my teeth, and these fuckers are shiny! Sure, I chipped a tooth in a fight back in high school (against a guy whose real name was actually Rocky, which, in retrospect, could have been a red flag), and chipped another ungracefully dismounting a stage at a gig somewhere in the armpit of Massachusetts, but they're at least 98% accounted for. After all my trials and tribulations I finally landed a reasonable professional to do my Mouthwork. No wrenching, no torque, no anestheticly enabled shenanigans. I travel for good Mouthwork. After all, the mouth is the window to the soul.

Crypto Thousandaire

"They were drunk on youth, fueled by greed, and higher than kites."

- Jordon Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street

My curiosity in cryptocurrency started back in 2014, I think, when I had heard, for some time, whispers in the darker corners of the internet starting to bubble up about a rarefied fake money called The Bitcoin was starting to make waves and people were starting to make money from it. After a bit of research I learned that it was something you could apply the right kind of technology to and pull this fake money right out of thin air. I was intrigued. As a youngish dad of twins I had been on the prowl for some easy money and this seemed like just the scam.

After further reading, I accepted that I was already too late - oh, what a fool I was. An article at the time wove the tale of an Australian Bitcoin miner who was facing the ever increasing challenge - the most basic tenet of Bitcoin - it gets harder to mine as time goes on by requiring more juice, better computers to do the work and get paid. Here, the work is verifying transactions, which of course is now relegated to finest back-alley server farms in China, all crunching away to dig up digital pirate treasure.

In a lot of ways I was right to give up, assuming that I was too late to the game and not able to mine this fake money out of the ether. Now just few years later, I see my error. I've never milked my own cows, so why would I think I needed to milk the damn internet? There's the rub - I slept on it, perchance. The opportunity, it seems, would have been to sink the cash I thought I'd sink into a mining rig right into the few cryptos that existed at the time. Hindsight is a bitch.

At the time, a single Bitcoin went from hundreds, to about a thousand dollars, then back down to hundreds. If I had the wherewithal to figure out how to buy it at the time, and was somehow able to hang onto it, I would've done ok. And yet, here I am - a Crypto Thousandaire, in spite of myself. I bought my first ticket to the rollercoaster last spring, added a little cash through the summer and into the fall, cashed out enough Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum to cover my initial investment, and reinvested much of the rest into a handful of other coins of varying returns.

Having hedged my original investment, now I'm just playing with house money and waiting for the whole damn thing to crash to burn. But until then, it's all Champale wishes and Cavalier dreams.