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.