Buy Low, Sell High

I had this friend who was a money-chasing alpha in the financial sector. He kept a framed crisp dollar bill and a magazine photo of a random hot blonde hung side by side on the wall in his room. If you asked him why, he’d say, pointing to the girl and then the dollar, “She’s there to remind me why I’m working 15 hour days earning THAT.”

He viewed life like it was a giant business transaction, which means he was closer to the truth than all of history’s great philosophers. He’d usually start off making a point by saying:

“I’ve been in the business 5 YEARS and lemme tell you…”

Ocassionally he was in the business 10 years, but when he got on a roll he was too funny to correct.

In his view, love was the same as stocks; you bought low when she was still young and more interested in you than 401Ks, held on while her stock (firm ass) continued to pay good dividends, and sold high when her P/E ratio began to droop and you could afford to diversify in high risk international stocks and start-ups.

“You gotta remember to allocate your resources! Don’t invest everything in one pussy.”

Whenever conversation got around to cars, he would always give us this dire warning: “Don’t buy a new car, it’s a depreciating asset!”

“Depreciating asset!” “Depreciating asset!”

Then his former friend-turned-cutthroat-enemy coworker bought a new BMW and one month later he was pulling out of the dealership in a brand new SUV, telling us he could blow red lights now because he got the optional invisibility package.

His idea of romance was to buy one giant scented candle and put it on a cutting board in the middle of the living room.

“I got some candles for the ladies.”

Money, girls, work, status, beer funnels.

I don’t think I’ve met a happier person than him.

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Hopeless Rebels

Every time I venture to Georgetown (daygame, shopping, peeping in millionaires’ windows) I see these two characters loitering on the corner of M and Wisconsin in front of the Douche Republic selling black T-shirts printed with the words “Stop Bitching. Start a Revolution”.

A few passersby slow down to hear their sales pitch.  Mostly, people ignore them as if they were road pylons to steer around, which isn’t hard to do as they aren’t in-your-face obtrusive with their schtick. I’ve always been curious what revolution they are selling so this time I stop and talk to the blond pony-tailed guy.

Me:  What kind of revolution do you want to start?
Him:  A new way of living… saying no to society’s rat race.  Hey, it’s really busy right now, you want a T-shirt?

A reluctant capitalist.

stop showering seek an institution.

I didn’t tell him that starting a revolution is the biggest bitching a person can do.

When I got home I dogpiled (I despise google’s owners) their T-shirt slogan and found this story.

They call themselves the Zendiks and live in a small group of 30 on a commune in West Virginia, subsistence farming and selling T-shirts, CDs, and bumper stickers in the city.  A woman who escaped from the social experiment is writing a memoir about her imprisonment time there.  She said it had the hallmarks of a cult and was run by authoritarian leaders.

Translation:  A David Koresh-style guy at the top horded all the young pussy for himself while brainwashing the rest into believing they were participating in a beautiful rainbow of non-competitive, non-status seeking cooperation.

Nearly all ostensibly egalitarian cooperative communes eventually fail.  You can only bottle up innate human drives for so long.  A famous example is the Oneida Commune.  Jockeying for status among the top leaders (who were, of course, men) and sexual tensions helped undo the commune’s mission.  What’s hilarious is that the leaders encouraged the young men to refrain from ejaculating during sex because “wasting” semen was bad.  As a result, the women enjoyed many hours of prolonged sex from betas who sacrificed their own pleasure by not cumming, while the alpha males got to impregnate women whenever they wanted.

I have a theory about anti-establishment anti-social dropouts.  It’s not society they hate; it’s themselves.  They hate their own natures.  The world around them is their mirror, reflecting everything that frightens them about their own bestial id essence.  They try to escape their evolutionary heritage by retreating to the woods to resurrect the ghost of Karl Marx.  I suspect most of the members are of Northern European ancestry.

People like this are starting a revolution against human nature.  It is a battle they are doomed to lose.

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