$2.25 spinach knish from old world eastern European bakery that manages to survive on 9th street. (I think it’s actually called 9th Street Bakery) It was not good. But the Fifth Element was inexplicably playing on an equally inexplicably large flat screen over the display case. So I ate half the knish sadly off a Styrofoam white plate while watching the movie then threw it away and left as an old man came in to buy a loaf of rye bread, sliced.
$25.70 for laundry. Two bags. Damn.
$54.50 Cab to JFK from the East Village.
Edit: $23.20 Dexter Season 1
$6.06 for Dentyne Ice, Poland Springs and Mello Yello (holy shit!). Or…Gum, Water, Soda – fucking marketers.
$43.00 cab ride from an Ethiopian driver from Seattle Tacoma hospital to downtown Seattle
Today is an experiment.
I’m trying something different today. Rather than the usual entertainment fest I throw for flights -- serial movie marathons, podcast oversaturation, music plus reading, reading the New Yorker or a novel beyond all patience or watching an entire season of television shows in a single sitting, I have decided to see if I can just sit here with a blank page and write. I actually downloaded the entire first season of Dexter (ah shit, I better add that to my expenditures) for this flight, but I’m just gonna let it sit there for as long as I can.
JFK to Seattle/Tacoma. JetBlue. 6 hours. Personal TV is turned off. Sammi Sweetheart was next to me in the security line.
Why? I was talking to B during another drinkfest and I reiterated that I spend no time in reflection. B recently attained his Holiest Grail – an iPhone on Verizon the day it came out. During every break in our conversation (including pauses within and between sentences), he would pick up his phone, type in his 6 digit work-mandated password, and start dicking around on his phone, face blank and bathed in blue light. It could not have been pressing, though I can’t say for sure what he was doing. Maybe he was checking his email, maybe he was sending text messages, maybe he was playing Angry Birds, at one point he definitely started downloading NPR apps after a voiceover mentioned said apps during a broadcast of a live Explosions in the Sky concert on All Songs Considered. To be fair, I myself was in my computer nook intermittently Gchatting with K and shuffling through my iTunes playlist (shuffle is embarassingly bad at reading my mind), at times clicking mindlessly on bookmarked news sites and scanning the headlines for catastrophe, having just turned off the WTFpodcast I was listening to when B arrived all while sipping wine and ostensibly socializing with B. This was essentially what happened for 3 hours. So, without much of a sense of revelation or epiphany, the familiar thought crept into my mind again: I don’t think about things anymore. I don’t reflect. In fact, I actively avoid reflection. In the moments where reflection is common – in the shower, in bed, while cleaning, making breakfast, getting dressed, brushing teeth, while walking (!) – I have actively erected (hehe) measures to allow someone else’s thoughts to replace my own. These days it’s Marc Maron (WTFpodcast), Ira Glass (This American Life), Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (Radiolab – and curses for them not hiring me), Bill Simmons (BS Report), Ross Tucker/Matt Williamson (Football Today Podcast), the Slate Gabfest teams and all of the writers of the New Yorker or whatever book I am reading in bed or on the john. I let people decide the path of my consciousness at all times, leaving me with little or nothing to say. I have become a vessel for receiving ideas, which is not a substitute for creating or providing ideas. So, long story short, I decided to take a strange baby step in the direction of re-setting, especially on vacation. I first considered going full David Putty and simply sitting on the airplane, staring at the seat in front of me, and riding out the airplane ride with nothing but my thoughts. But Jesus fucking Christ, that sounds miserable. So I decided to write for 6 hours. Let whatever entertained me come from within me (edit at the 4 hour and 20 minute mark: the things that come from within me are remarkably boring) while providing some sort of activity. Did that seem too long and detailed for a brief introduction to this post? Sure. But I’m only 15 minutes closer to Seattle.
I am the blood fluke feasting in the tick feeding on humanity.
I have checked out on the idea of being an attorney, which, despite all of my constant bitching over the past 5 years (sigh), is not as much the sweet release of freedom as I had expected. It’s a little scary, actually. Once you have established a baseline of income and a standard of living, you have developed behaviors and a groove you settle into for how you spend and what you can do. (Yes, this is a little relevant to my diary of daily expenditures, though now it just seems interesting to me. I have never examined my consumption patterns before.) When I really want a new song on iTunes, I can buy it. When my bicycle gets messed up and I have to take it in for repairs, I can opt for the better Sturmey Archer wheel rather than the used POS, while also replacing the serviceable but damaged bottom bracket, just because I should. I can go out for drinks and be generous and buy the round, even though it’s likely I will not get a round in return. I can split the bill in a restaurant, even though I ate less, and not have to behave like a dick. That being said, the deeper concern isn’t really money. The fear is turning my back on an entire path of possibilities that would virtually guarantee that I live comfortably and with security for the rest of my life and that could still conceivably lead to success and good things. I am essentially throwing my very hard-earned law degree and honors away. Lawyers, being what they are, and the legal profession, being as hierarchical, prestige-oriented and lame as it is, may never really let me back in if I realize I’ve made a mistake. Is this me being ungrateful for my opportunities? Am I just another whiney rich asshole with problems everyone would love to have?
But the bottom line is that I have already wasted five years of my life, and I fully believe that “wasted” is the right word choice. I did not want a law degree, yet now I spend my life in a job I hate, serving the bad guys who often serve bad guys, doing things I am simply not good at (read: legal practice) in order to pay off debt for a degree that feels like it is only going to get me work that I never wanted in the first place. I could be a legal aid lawyer or a human rights lawyer, maybe, but those fields feel remarkably hard to get into and simply don’t appeal to me because I would still have to do this thing called “law” surrounded by these people called “lawyers” and still have to introduce myself to people as “a lawyer”. All of which, to my mind, hurts. Maybe my mind is wrong, but it does. When people ask me what I do, I don’t know how to say “Corporate Lawyer”: without feeling ashamed of myself.
More specifically, the financial services industry is a fucking parasite on our society. Yes, blah blah blah, we need some sort of financial system, I’m not a moron, but what exists is not it. The golden age of financial innovation from 2000 to 2008? Here’s a graph.
Zero growth in investment. Nada. Bullshit. Wait, no, that’s not correct. Income inequality has continued to grow at a rapid clip. 
Beyond being fee-sucking middlemen taking a bite out of our asses and the asses of those companies and people that **make** things, they rob us of our talent by generating vast amounts of wealth doing nothing. (well, I guess gambling with other people’s money counts for something). So many of the best and the brightest have now been lured to Wall Street to design brilliant methods of generating fees and creating financial arrangements that do nothing except transfer and rearrange piles of money and value (with fees) while rendering the true risks opaque to everyone, including themselves. Or make enormous bets that pay off for the financiers if they win them and lose the money of their investors (and taxpayers) if they lose them. I will, for the sake of fairness, leave out the culpability of individuals working financial services, not only because I work in financial services, but also because people need to work, need to have dreams and shouldn’t be held to such standards for working to live. But as an institution, as an industry? They are fucking parasites. They are leeches. When industrialists create a better air conditioner, a better car, a better headache pill or a better software for organizing information,e we are better for it. When an investment bank creates an equity-linked note offering bets on how Chinese currency appreciates against the dollar, allowing limited upside gain based on a complex formula but unlimited downside, we are fucked It’s all bullshit. We do not need this financial system for growth or innovation. Whatever, I will try to articulate this better later, this was a mess. An angry mess that is easier to say in conversation than to write down.
Why was I bank ranting again? Oh right, being a corporate lawyer.
It’s unavoidable that I confront my current career path: I serve the bankers who serve the companies. A parasite within another parasite. Taking a step back from that, you will notice that the money I earn from this is funneled directly back to the banks who provided my student loans, who have very profitable interest rates on my loans, ranging from 5% to 7.9% (while getting interest free loans from the Fed after they blew everything up), who in turn have managed to get the government to guarantee my student loans AND prevent my ability to discharge these loans in bankruptcy. What a bunch of dicks. (Luckily, I can still go to the bank, borrow as much money as I can, blow it on a week of hookers, blow and gambling in Vegas and discharge that. Nah, there’s no lobbyists influencing policy.)
The actual point of all of this, however, is to explore the question of whether this sense of malaise and discontentment and sheer disappointment with my (…oh look, I got a Mr. and Mrs. T’s bloody mary mix instead of V8 from the flight attendant…a very small can though – lame) life decisions is a product of going to law school and becoming a lawyer, or just the universally felt pangs of growing up I don’t think it’s actually easy to tell because it does seem like most people I know (oh wow, this is delicious bloody mary mix, I am going to ask for another one later) who are lawyers are very unhappy with their jobs – at least the ones who practice in New York, where I want to live. But then again, most people are disappointed with their lives in some meaningful way. I think this becomes more acute as you get older, though I imagine it begins to dull as well. I just feel like I’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long and need to change course before it’s too late. You aren’t entitled to second chances and you certainly can’t expect a third.
I think it’s time to find a new topic. I spend way too much of my life thinking about this. 1 hour down. Wow.
Aside: JetBlue
So JetBlue is actually not too shabby. There is definitely more legroom which is a giant plus for someone of my size, although the seats and the plane are definitely older models refurbished into re-use (I always get a little nervous when I fly in India and notice that the armrests have ashtrays). The snack basket is definitely a winner though, I just housed a bag of Terra Sweet Potato Sea Salt Chips (with a dubious “full serving of vegetables in every ounce”), a bag of butter crunch cookies (what the hell is butter crunch?) and Bloody Mary mix “perfected with Sea Salt”, which is apparently the newest bullshit subtlety used to make garbage food seem less unnatural. (mmhmm, not “more natural”, but “less unnatural.”)
The Great Outdoors (and somehow this ends up with a section on smoking)
Yes, I would like to eat the Old 96er and even the last little piece of gristle on this vacation.
I’m on vacation now. The last vacation I took was in July 2010 (Wwoofing in Quebec followed by a marvelous/disastrous high school reunion trip home.) That feels like a long fucking time ago.
Since I haven’t had much to do at work in the past week and K has been working hard in Seattle, I had the time and internet resources to come up with a fairly comprehensive vacation plan, which has sadly become slightly rigorous in the ground covered and amount of places visited.
Starting today, we stay in Seattle and do Seattley things for two days. From what I understand, this means getting wet in the rain, buying raincoats and umbrella shopping. K is already in town because she was a business trip for Amazon and she knows the place well, so I am leaving this leg of the trip entirely up to her. My only real entry while planning this trip was eating a Salumi sandwich. (I also demanded that it be waiting for me. When I arrive.) Otherwise, Olympic Park and the rainforest (Pacific Northwest Rainforest?) was super highly recommended by S.O., who I generally trust for all things outdoors and such.
Then we essentially road trip for 6 hours each day to each successive destination. After my phone interview takes place on Monday morning (ahh!!!), we will drive somewhere in Oregon. Yep. That’s the plan. Somewhere in Oregon. Folks have suggested Portland, but if our plan is to drive the Pacific Coast Highway, then that’s two hours out of our way, adding 4 hours to the drive. I will Meh that, but we shall see.
Then, off to Redwood National Forest, which is probably the highlight of the trip for me, since it is on my bucket list and because I have a distinct feeling that I will like tall-ass trees (not to be confused with my disdain for tall ass-trees). (Incidentally, I actually did write down a short bucket list with embarrassing little entries such as “see whale”, “see redwood forests” and other lame little 5-year old desires, but I lost it. Actually, I didn’t lose it. When I moved offices last summer, I took the thumbtack out of it and it promptly fell behind my 700 pound desk at work and was trapped behind the desk, which was, of course moveable. It wouldn’t be embarrassing except that I wrote it on firm stationary which, of course, has my name on it. Someday it will be found when the office is rearranged.) The plan is to camp in Redwood (actually Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park since the national parks don’t have campgrounds), cook over a fire, wake up miserably cold in a sleeping bag, not bathe, avoid banana slugs (these are yellow and over a foot long, which I have actually googled several times in the past just to marvel at the fear that overtakes me at the sight of them…more proof that god is not nice), and look at very large trees. And not die by bear. I would really like to avoid that.
From Redwood, we continue to follow the Pacific Coast Highway 6 hours south to Napa/Sonoma/Yountville, where we will stay at Bordeaux House Bed & Breakfast on the same block as the French Laundry and only 1 block from Bouchon Bakery, where we will have pastries for breakfast. The French Laundry seemed like it was worth splurging for, but that is 540 dollars worth of fucking splurging even without wine. And I’d have to wear a fucking suit. No, Thomas Keller. But I will eat your pastries for breakfast. And maybe load up on extras for the road trip. Somehow, in a plan TBD, we will wine taste. Either shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a driver to take us around to the various wineries where we will get blotto and have a wonderfully intoxicated time (followed by a long drive...) (…) (…) or I will chaffeur the various tastings myself and just try to keep my appetites under control, as I will need to drive from winery to winery as well as the long drive afterwards… (…) (…)
(For some reason, the default channel on JetBlue plays 1) many music videos with two or three James Blunt videos constantly in the rotation within the hour, or 2) is playing only James Blunt videos on repeat. I will report back. Oh look, he just jumped off a white plastic cliff.)
The original plan after Redwood was Yosemite, which really and legitimately excited me. The imposing grey cliffs and domes, Yosemite falls, the gorgeous plains, mountains and forests. For some reason, not even known to me, Yosemite has always had this unnatural allure that I have no basis for. (Yosemite Sam?) I have always just assumed and believed it would be beautiful and refreshing and rehabilitating. I have been to San Francisco 3 times and not once have I been able to make the trip out to Yosemite. This is the only place we budgeted two days in for camping, hiking and general exploration.
But, we’re not going.
I was informed by S.O. and various websites that Yosemite is basically in full-on wintery blizzard mode right now. The weather is in the single digits or lower in the nights, snow falls and accumulates, untouched by anyone, snow shoeing and cross country skiing is the preferred mode of transportation, the roads are not plowed, cars can’t get to the main sights and we aren’t even allowed into the park unless we actually show our snow chains to the park ranger. So, we would have to buy snow chains for the little compact car we are renting, violate rental agency policies by installing snow chains (and risk the damage and pay for any damage), and then see if we can survive in arctic conditions in a 3 season tent (guess which season is the fourth). So we’re going to Monterrey and Big Sur instead, where we will try to camp and hike in what I already know is one of the most gorgeous places I’ve seen.
Thinking about driving down Route 1 towards Big Sur makes me want to put the windows down, the music on and drive, cigarette dangling out the driver side window. Here a cigarette is a very specific joy, but a very real one as well. I just have this strangely pavlovian response to put cigarettes into that scenic drive. I think this is the true difficulty of quitting smoking. Sure, it is addictive and the nicotine certainly has a role, but I haven’t smoked in two months so the nicotine is no longer a factor. Instead, it seems to be the strange completion and satisfaction that smoking lends to certain experiences. Road trips make me want to smoke. Being in another country * really * makes me want to smoke (I can’t even imagine returning to India without buying a pack of 70 rupee Wills Menthol Lights). Strangely, but happily, my old triggers of smoking after a meal or smoking with or after coffee have completely subsided. I also don’t have any particular urge to smoke when I drink (which I think is a stupid classification because the dirty secret of adulthood, at least in New York, is that you are likely to be drinking more nights than not, if only in moderation, so basically you are a smoker and you should shut up). Rental cars definitely trigger the urge to smoke, as does camping. And fishing, big time.
Now that I am thinking about it, most of these activities are passive and reflective activities. Maybe what it provides is an additional pleasant stimuli for a potentially boring moment, even better, a stimuli that can be added to any activity other than eating. Sure, driving can be boring, so you add music to make it more stimulating. Add a cigarette and it’s that much better. Previously, I also felt like smoking provided me with a break. Not just stepping outside from any given situation for 5 minutes, but something more fundamental. Smoking a cigarette provided me with a break from life, and importantly, the relentless part of life. Not necessarily difficulty or stress or events that were hard to escape, but just the low-level hum of existing that can never be turned off – the weariness. Not sleepiness or exhaustion or being spent, but just the friction your soul is constantly buzzing against – smoking gives that part of you a break. And I guess adding that break, that part of the day or hour you can look forward to, into more and more activities makes life a little easier. And you get to structure these breaks into your life and you come to rely on them.
Except, apparently, they are bad for you. And when you start to smoke a lot, you also start to realize you don’t always want the next cigarette but you have to smoke it anyway. The clearest example of this for me is the long road trip. On the drive from home to college (or vice versa), which was 3.5 hours or so, I had to pace my smoking. As soon as I hit the road, the music came on, the window came down and my cigarette was lit and in hand the moment I pulled onto the freeway. And after flicking the spent cigarette into pursuing traffic, the counting started. After you finish that first cigarette, always glorious, the next cigarette is clearly going to rock. But you have to pace yourself, so you find a system. For me, it was counting the mileage. I was permitted to have a cigarette every 30 miles. And so I would watch the mileage, which moved interminably. Until ding! 30! Smoke. And 60! Smoke. And 90! You get the picture. But smoking every 30 minutes or so is a little bit accelerated. The joy decreases markedly. And by the time you smoke 5 cigarettes in 2.5 hours, it starts to hurt a little bit. The first drag is okay, the second drag hurts a little, the third drag is just work. But I would want that damned cigarette every 30 minutes. I would still watch the mileage and I will still even get excited for it, forgetting that it actually hurt at that point. I couldn’t not smoke it. (You can imagine the shit show when we took a spring break trip from North Carolina all the way down to the Everglades then back up to New Orleans and back.) But once you know when you are used to smoking, you just smoke through the pain – which upon reflection might be one of the stupidest things I can imagine.
I need to get addicted to exercise or something. 2 hours down.
(cue the crying baby…)
I hope that when people refer to my having bought the farm, they clarify.
Buying a large plot of land and starting a farm seems like it would be amazing. I think about this all the time. Of course it is easy to idealize a pastoral existence when you’ve only lived on 3 farms for precisely 4 weeks in two foreign countries in the most idyllic of circumstances and run by other people, but I can’t really shake it. Owning 50 acres of land would just be so amazing on a mountain side or in rolling forested hills (which have been the case for all three farms). On your **own** property you would have creeks and ponds and forests, and spaces you’ve never seen before and may never see. Untamed wilderness that belongs to you. A blank canvas of sorts. On a given day you could decide to just grab your rod and go fishing on your own property with a cooler of beer and fresh grown tomato sandwiches. You would have animals and ecosystems surrounding you. You could down trees and build large bonfires in open fields. You would grow and raise your own food. Cultivating even half an acre would provide more vegetables than you could possibly eat in a year. The shocking amount of produced by a single acre of vegetables in Quebec was astounding. Your food scraps would go into compost or into the chicken coop or into the pig slop. Your overage of vegetables could go to the animals as well, producing clean healthy fats and meat. Eggs from the chickens, milk from the cows. You would be able to be outside.
The downsides are social and financial, clearly. So in a perfect world, you would almost need three or more families or friends to join on the farm. The labor load lessens, the social isolation disappears, the ability to diversify and produce a broader and more complex range of food increases (cheeses, yogurts, cured meats, pickling, canning). (plus, of course, a bonfire requires more people). Convincing anyone I know to join such a scheme is basically nil, so I would have to recruit people who will most likely end up being young, middle class raised idealistic dumpster divers with extreme ideologies of some sort or another, who pretty much take the fun out of anything, if not everything. So there goes that. Maybe the secret is to have a farm that is nearby a city where you live full time and use the farm seasonally.
On the financial side, there’s just no way to do this without a massive accumulation of wealth or someone working a full time job, since actually making money to live off the form seems unlikely and unreliable. Sure, food costs should drop substantially, but the cost of electricity, water, beer, healthcare, repairs, equipment, beer, grain-based foods, internet, gas…I will just stop here and say “costs of living) have to be covered somehow, not to mention the cost of raising any children. So you would have go into this with a war chest of money that can be spent down over the years and still have enough for retirement. So basically, that means you need to have such a large pot of money that you are essentially living off of the interest from the money until you retire, after which you can start spending down the principal. Assuming you need $50,000 a year and an interest rate of, say 5% which seems quite generous, then you would need 1 million dollars saved. (Actually, that’s not that bad…though, maybe it’s super bad because I only have $6,000 in savings after two years of high income) So maybe, just to be realistic and safe and factor in the costs of actually getting a farm and making it liveable, you would just need to have savings of $2 million dollars. Hm, maybe I should scrap this development and public health dream I’ve been harboring for 6 years and just join a fucking bank and get this money and go buy a farm in West Virginia.
Alright alright, Apollo. OKCupid?
Online dating is a fascinating thing. Just to set the table, I have never online dated in my entire life but I absolutely don’t think there’s any stigma in it, so I’m really just commenting on my first experience with an online dating website ever. My friend B is currently in the online dating market, so he is constantly talking about the girls he goes on dates with, which has to be like 15 by now. The process is scroll through a series of profiles, gauge how much you would like to sleep with them, then look at their profiles to see if anything disqualifies them. I imagine there’s really no other vetting process. B was over a couple of days ago and he wanted to ask for my opinion on a certain girl, but all he had was his iPhone (sigh). Instead of signing on as him on my computer (because apparently people can tell when you click on their profile and I also did not want to put him through the embarrassment of letting me see his profile), he told me that it would only take 10 seconds to create an OKCupid account, which I did in shockingly record time (as TaiwaneseDude, since my first 6 attempts to choose funny names were already taken and of course, TaiwaneseDude was not taken because, honestly, that is not going to get you a date), and was soon behind the secret but super flimsy city wall.
I had zero information in my profile, so I don’t think any algorithms were going to produce any results for me, so I just hit whatever button it is that effectively works like chatroulette and began the process of skipping blithely through hundreds of profiles in the span of 10 minutes, offering colorful and (most likely) appalling commentary on every profile that came up.
Like I said, that shit is fascinating. You rarely get to see how people peacock, how they present themselves, how they perceive themselves as potential mates and the characteristics they project to the world. In real life there’s a constant negotiation of moments. You have to read their faces, their hands, their posture, the management of timing and beats between communications and gauge your own interest and the chemistry and then try to wade your way through the minefield of involuntary ticks, awkward expressions and insecurities. Sure, you have to deal with these things eventually when you meet online, but everything is so stripped away in an online profile. There are maybe 5 pictures, which have been carefully chosen. The first picture is clearly their favorite picture of themselves and is as good as it’s going to get – “this is why I’m hot.” Then there are a series of other pictures, which are there to alleviate suspicious about the profile picture – provide context and evidence that the main picture is credible. Sometimes you notice that all of the pictures are meant to capture the person’s “good side”, since they all focus on the same cheek. Sometimes some flaw or another is hidden in 4 out of 5 pictures, and it just slips out on the 5th (B and I audibly gasped/groaned on several occasions when an incongruity suddenly made an appearance). But every one of those pictures was chosen carefully with the opposite sex in mind, which simultaneously reflects what they think other people find attractive and what they feel represents themselves in the best light possible. Oddly, even though I saw dozens if not hundreds during my flip through each felt strangely vulnerable – an admission that each person wanted someone, which in all of its voluminous archives means that even when we are alone and admit we are alone, we are not.
And then we get to the blurbs which present answers to a series of questions that I assume you choose out of some drop down menu when you fill out a profile, like what is important to you, six things you can’t live without (a shocking number of people wasted two of the six with “Food” and “Water”, which although correct, reveals an idiocy that is an immediate DQ), who should write to you, and other various generic questions. These things must be brutal to write. You also get to see what personality people think that other people want. Everyone seems to be…a lover of laughter, a bit of a bad-ass, sassy and independent, feisty and sensitive, driven, sarcastic and just a little bit prickly and above posting on an online dating site. But almost everyone is self-aware and tries to affect a sense of irony because earnestness would only enhance the vulnerability. This makes total sense, of course, but it is no less illuminating or surprising to witness each person’s way of dealing with it.
And of course, I found a co-worker on there, who is M’s officemate. (The James Blunt on a beach video is on again. I assume You’re Beautiful will follow shortly thereafter). I told B to message her. That wouldn’t be awkward.
Fuck, stream of consciousness writing is tiring man. And although not boring to do, I’m sure that I will never read (James Blunt – You’re Beautiful just came on) my way through this again...it’s just not that interesting.
Local Finance
Maybe I will try this now when I am trapped on a plane. This is a topic I have been putting off for quite a long time, in part because it is an extremely difficult topic for me to write eloquently about, but equally because I feel like it could be critical to my life to be able to understand, develop and communicate this idea. (That baby is fucking crying again.) This is my first and only true idea for a business or for a major idea with legitimate impact and possible success.
(I know there are at least two people other than K who have somehow become aware that I have re-started “writing” here, neither of which I believe will appropriate any ideas I have, but if there is a third or a fourth, I would ask that if anything I say here sounds appealing, please don’t steal it or tell anyone, just talk to me. It’s extremely unlikely that any of you would actually still be here, or have an interest in stealing or telling other people about thts idea, but I just wanted to say it.)
Setting the Table
As I’ve expressed above and a thousand times before, I believe that the existing financial system is parasitic and broken. It relies on creating complexities beyond the understanding of normal people, so that the public is bewildered by investment choices and has no option but to entrust their money to the very people that rigged the system in the first place. Out of this fear and confusion, money from all across the country flows towards our financial centers, where a handful of very large institutions staffed by intelligent twenty-somethings decide where that money goes and purely on the basis of returns. So that’s the first piece, our financial system is, for the most part, highly concentrated and centralized in Wall Street’s hands.
Putting aside for the moment, the financial cataclysm and economic crisis aside (which is quite a favorable starting point), the returns on investment from financial professionals really isn’t that good (unless you are super wealthy and able to invest in hedge funds or privately negotiated deals where you get sweetheart inside deals or become the client of the bank trading on the other side of normal investors – guess who gets fucked). We believe that they know what they are doing, monitor the total returns on all of our investments without investigating the underlying strategies and comparisons and just assume that the fees they are charging are worth the growth they are getting us. In actuality, they are often being beaten by the indexes and still taking a fee. That’s the second piece, they actually aren’t very fucking good at what they do. In fact, going back to the first sentence of this paragraph, they blew up their own fucking system and had to be rescued.
So all of the money goes there and they suck at getting money back to you. But what are they doing with the money? They seek out the bottom line. This is not their money. This is not their morality. This is their job. Their job is to maximize returns, consequences be damned. So they funnel money to whatever companies produce the best returns. Some of these companies are Halliburtons and others are Blackwaters and others are the Altrias (Phillip Morris changed their name to make it sound more anodyne and unrecognizable.) Other companies are not so inherently insidious, but surely include Blue Chips like McDonald’s, Pepsico, Walmart, Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, TimeWarner, BestBuy, Citigroup, Bed Bath and Beyond, BP, Barnes and Noble and other pervasive, large companies with expanding presence. Some of these companies are better than others, but I believe many people don’t want them to wipe out their local bookstores, restaurants, music stores or hardware stores, while others don’t want them engaging in ultra deepwater offshore drilling or monopolizing cable and media networks, or creating unsustainable financial derivatives that required taxpayer bailouts resulting in continuing excessive compensation practices. Okay, this is becoming a rant. Back to the point.
In short, all of our money into the hands of a small concentrated group of intermediaries who take a fee and then turn around and make decisions with our money for companies who could be all the way across the world or for companies that we would never choose to invest in ourselves and still don’t even do good by us. This can’t be the only option for our money.
The Alternative
I would like to build a system of local finance. Allow people to invest where they live, in the businesses they frequent, in their own communities with their own decisions. Let them decide whether a company is credible, not a 26 year old running spreadsheets with complex models they do not understand.
Neighborhood businesses are a beautiful and vanishing institution, in many ways the last remnants of a community rather than an atomized collection of people. The East Village, where I live, can be a brutal place to small businesses. Businesses rise and fall constantly, which is a good thing as the good ones are spectacular and the lame simply flame out. (I will not miss you, Cookout Grill). I am not against creative destruction of small business. Recently, though I have noticed that many failed storefronts are increasingly being filled by large corporate chains. A small Cuban sandwich place has been replaced by a Papa Johns just across the street from two pizza joints. A Papa Fucking Johns. In New York. There is a Subway next to that, right near the Dunkin Donuts. And these chain stores tend not to close. And the character of the neighborhood begins to change so that it begins to look a little bit like everywhere else. And I do not believe this is dictated by consumers choosing these brands and supporting these businesses because they like them. I believe these chains have lower start-up costs, less supply volatility, less marketing costs and financial support from the mothership allowing them to borrow at better rates.
Local finance would allow communities to support these companies when the traditional avenues of finance may not be available. Investors would be investing in their own neighborhoods, building an economic stake in their community. Obviously, the rate of return might not be as high as an investment in a mutual fund or in stock investment, but I believe that by specifically targeting disposable income (i.e., more speculative money) and aggregating small loans of as low as $10 dollars, people would be more than willing to eat a little bit of additional risk or a lower rate of return to participate in this investment.
The model is relatively simple. You log onto the website, choose your neighborhood (I would like to pilot this in the East Village between Avenue D and Broadway between Houston and 14th Street), and you would have the option of choosing to loan into a “neighborhood fund” which would aggregate loans to a pool of borrowers, or you could loan directly to a single enterprise. The website would continue to aggregate small donations, probably between $10-200 dollars (to prevent large loans and thus a need for self-enforcement), and then when the total amount has been reached, the loan would be released. Ideally, the loan structure would behave like equity, so that investors can reap a higher upside if the business becomes more profitable in a given time period, but this is certainly far more complicated and a future idea.
The businesses receiving the loans may simply need to make payroll or need capital to make an investment in a new pizza oven or kick-start an advertising campaign, or it may just be for a start-up -- a chef wants the start-up capital to open a new restaurant in an abandoned storefront and cannot get the moneybags to give him a shot. (This is a critical issue that I need to research further – that is, discuss with local business owners and entrepreneurs what exactly their capital needs are.)
There are, of course, many kinks that need to be worked out. Such a business model is generally limited to places like New York, San Francisco and other large cities that haven’t been entirely invaded by chains, but it also might be quite successful in college towns. What happens in the event of a default. Who actually has the lending relationship with the business. Collection and payment arrangements. How to avoid securities and regulatory issues. How to avoid self-enforcement or intimidation, if necessary. How to vet businesses and their creditworthiness. How much disclosure to require from each business. Recourse debt v. non-recourse debt v. secured debt v. securing the debt with account receivables. There are technical minefields all over the place, but I believe the idea itself is elegant, simple and appealing and technology and social mores are now in place for such an idea to come into being.
An obvious objection is that peer to peer lending already exists and that it is slow to start and hasn’t really taken off. I think “Lending Club” and “”Prosper” are the two biggest examples, both of which were just covered in the NYTimes. I actually view this as an advantage because it means that the lending model and securities issues are already established. But I also think they are missing the heart and soul of a successful business, which I believe can be provided by the local aspect, the community aspect, the sense of true investment. Prosper and Lending Club are also struggling with creditworthiness issues for their borrowers, which is vitiated for local finance because people can get a better sense by visiting the store and getting a sense for how it’s run. Sure, it’s not the same as having a financial professional (vom) review the balance sheet and cash flows, but for such small investment, people may go for it.
There are also many competing models in this family of social enterprises. Kiva provides microloans to small business owners in the developing world. Vittana does the same except it provides student loans to people in South America. RootCapital focuses their financial efforts on the “Missing middle”, which is middle sized enterprises that aren’t big enough for commercial loan arrangements, but are too big for micro loans. RootCapital actually does large scale offerings to raise capital and then disburses that money itself to businesses of its choice, much like a mutual fund. Prosper and Lending Club run peer-to-peer lending programs. Kickstarter just aggregates donations for artistic endeavors and disburses money when a goal is reached. All of the plumbing exists and is fully operational and there is much to learn from.
I really do think this could work, but it is going to take a lot of work and an ability to find the right people to work through the financial and accounting issues.
So here is the official unveiling of my idea and brand!
Villager: Invest where you liveä
Tada! This will hopefully not be the last time I discuss this topic.
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(Four Hours Down - I have begun to go back to the top and revise.) (James Blunt is on again.)
(Five and a Half Hours down – back hurts, neck hurts, eyes slightly strained, and the Mac Battery has a miraculous 40% left. Wow! Still have not read anything, listened to any music or watched a single program. This might be a record.)
Six hours down. I made it. And now I have to shut down my computer. I’m a little amazed frankly.
(James Blunt)
