The Bottom of the Barrel

As most of you know, I’ve been sending three jokes a day to a friend of mine with cancer for the past seventeen months. She has completed the course of treatment which included much chemo, several surgeries and a host of other side effects. She is cancer free and getting stronger by the day, but it has been a brutal slog. Still, I send her jokes, not every day anymore, but I still send her jokes. Once you start doing something, it becomes a habit, I suppose. At some point, I expect she will turn on me and say something like, “No really Doug...you can stop anytime!!” This morning would have been a golden opportunity for her to put a stop to the harassment...

Just blew the sugar off my doughnut.

....dieting is so hard.

My ex-wife still misses me.

But, her aim is starting to improve.

How do pigeons elect their leaders?

They don’t. Pigeons can only gain power through a cooo d’etat.

I believe it fair to say that the bottom of the barrel has finally been reached.

Motivation Matters

My eyes popped open in the still, pitch black bedroom. I squinted across at the digital clock on the television. 4:43 am. The first thing I thought was, wonder if it snowed? The second thing I thought about was soldiers and mercenaries. It had been the last thing I remember thinking before I had drifted off to sleep seven hours earlier. And now the thought was still with me, soldiers and mercenaries, and the difference between the two.

Almost everyone has respect for soldiers. With the notable exception of Vietnam, soldiers have always been welcomed home with the warm thanks of their grateful countrymen. Even when we disagree about the wars they are asked to fight, we generally honor the men and women who do the fighting. We admire their training, tenacity and bravery, and especially their devotion to duty and each other. We build statues and memorials to them. We know that they put themselves in harms way, for little pay, so the rest of us don’t have to. We marvel at their acts of heroism. We stand in awe of those few who intentionally give up their own lives to save the lives of the men in their unit. The selfless sacrifice stirs us. It causes thousands of us to walk up to complete strangers in uniform who we see at the airport to thank them for their service. They hold a special place in our affections.

But, consider the mercenary. They are also well trained, tenacious and brave. They also willingly place themselves in harms way so the rest of us don’t have to. But no one writes songs about their heroism. There isn’t a single statue in a single town in America that honors them. Nobody would buy a book entitled, A Mercenary’s Diary. The very idea of someone who is willing to sell his killing skills to the highest bidder sickens us. We turn away from such people. We don’t see them as selfless and honorable. And yet, they perform the same function as a front line soldier when the bullets start flying. Why don’t we honor the mercenary? Because of one thing...motivation. The thought that someone would be eager to fight if the price was right, for whichever side wants him the most,  reduces the job of soldiering to a mere financial transaction. Fighting, even fighting our enemies, when stripped of devotion and love of country becomes the blackest of arts. The triumph of money over principle changes everything.

This thought has dominated my waking hours for the past few days. Why do we work? What motivates us to strive and struggle for money? Many noble things, no doubt. We want to provide for those we love. We want to have a nice home, a nice car, educate our children, go on nice vacations. All of these things require money. The motivation to provide these things is what drives us out of bed every morning. We know that we can’t just sit around expecting someone else to give us anything. This is right and proper. But is the pursuit of money all that matters. Does it matter how we earn our money? For this discussion, I am not referring to what is legal and what is not. I think we would all agree that selling drugs to middle school kids is an evil enterprise, no matter how profitable it might be. But, not everything that’s legal is noble. Not every profitable transaction is honorable. Each of us are asked to make moral distinctions on practically a daily basis. I am sick. I need a vaccine. To obtain that vaccine is it morally justifiable to skip the line, throw some money around to bypass those unable to do so? It is the same with how we earn money. Everyone must ask themselves, Although what I’m doing is perfectly legal, is it just? Is there such a thing as too much money, an amount that would change who you are were you to become in possession of it? From my perspective after 62 years, I believe that making money off the misery of others, capitalizing on the failure of others for profit feels like darkness to me. Ambulance chasing lawyers come to mind. Payday lenders. Loan sharks. Price gougers. Short sellers...

Motivation matters...and these days, motivation is everything.

My Take on Gamestop

WARNING: What follows does NOT constitute investment advice, but rather represents the random, scattered opinions of one guy who invests money for a living.

The GameStop Saga has dominated the financial news of late and for good reason...it has been insane. I will attempt a thumbnail sketch with as little jargon as possible to summarize the madness:

GameStop, a retail seller of video games and a business that is much the same as Blockbuster Video was just before it went belly up, has been a favorite short sell target of hedge fund guys on Wall Street. A short sale is when you’re betting that a stock is going to DROP in value. Anyway, a large group of retail day trader types at a Reddit site figured out a way to hype the stock among its 2 million or so subscribers over a period of months with the strategy of bidding UP the price of the stock. The purpose of this strategy was two fold, as best I can figure. First, if the price shot up as they hoped it would A. Make them a fortune in a very short period of time and B. Force the hedge fund guys to buy more shares of GameStop to cover their mounting losses, thus driving the price up even more...rinse and repeat...in so doing cause the hedge fund hot shots to lose a boatload of money. Call it a victory of the little guy over the Wall Street fat cats.

Ok, although I totally understand and appreciate the value in a healthy market of the short sale, at least in theory, I generally detest short sellers. They are the guys who I consider vultures, dudes who only profit when something is dying. So the fact that these renegade day traders have brought many of them low gives me vicarious pleasure that I’m not exactly proud of! If you hear suggestions that these day trading millennials are some sort of brand new and unique threat to the stock market, fear not. There is nothing at all unique about this except for the fact that now a bunch of nobody’s have figured out how to do what hedge fund managers have been doing for decades...front running a bunch of worthless stocks and then profiting through put options.

But here’s my problem with all of this. It’s not investing. It’s stock manipulation and trading. Nobody is buying anything, nobody is making investment decisions because of the products or services of the underlying companies. Nothing at all is being produced except ginormous profits and staggering losses. It’s the exact same thing that happens every weekend in Las Vegas. 

I own a reasonably diverse portfolio of stocks and mutual funds that have been put together with an eye towards, yes...profit, but also sustainable growth. Every stock I own was invested in because I believed in the product or service they brought to the market. Further, I thought that they were well run, and in a position to be profitable many years into the future. By taking partial ownership of those companies I was rewarding them for their well made product or service, and helping them remain so. Now, I’m not a freak when it comes to this socially responsible investing thing. My portfolio is not a philanthropic enterprise. A company that makes the most socially responsible product in the world still has to be well run and profitable or I’m not interested. However, there are many companies that are both of those things that I would never invest in because I object to the product or service on moral grounds. That’s my right as an investor. What I will never do as an investor is seek to profit on the collapse of a business, in others words, I morally object to the implications of short selling anything. It’s just not in my DNA.

Does that make me a sucker at times? No doubt. But as far as I can tell, it hasn’t hurt my results long term. What this GameStop episode is doing is undermining the confidence that many ordinary retail investors have in the fairness and transparency of equity markets. How can a rag tag collection of dudes on the internet drive up the value of a company with very little prospects by 400% in just a few days? It seems shady and dangerous. And if two months from now billions of dollars have been gained and lost and GameStop stock is back to what it was before all of this started the question will be...What was the point? If it feels like manipulation, smells like manipulation, and looks like manipulation, its probably manipulation.

What it’s not is....new. 

Here’s an idea. Only buy things you can believe in. Only buy things that you can explain in less than two minutes to the kid down the street. 

Sophie’s Choice

For most of my life I’ve done a reasonably decent job of taking life one day at a time. Of course no one is perfect in this regard. All of us have been guilty of occasionally wishing the week away when there’s something big happening on the weekend. Who of us hasn’t secretly wanted the child to be done with the toddler stage already, only to take it all back the day they get their driver’s license? But since the arrival of COVID, my ability to stay in the moment has slowly deteriorated to the point now where I am constantly longing for...the future.

I know this is no way to live. John Lennon’s words are still true, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” And yet, restricted life in the Age of Pandemics feels something like the terrible twos to me, something to be endured until better days arrive. But with each passing day, now approaching the one year anniversary of COVID, comes the feeling that it may never truly be “over”, some limits may linger for years. Whenever I read the words variant strains they sound crushing to me. As a consequence for about six months now I have found myself sleepwalking through the present, dreaming of the future. In particular, I have become obsessed with my 66th birthday, the date I set for myself some years ago as the demarcation day of retirement, or some form thereof. It’s all I’ve been thinking about.

Now, President Biden is placing travel restrictions on incoming flights. Other countries are banning travel of any kind. I see the death toll numbers, I read the stories of new South African, Brazilian and British strains, so I understand the necessity of these measures. It’s not even like I had plans to travel, its just another shrinking of my options which feels diminishing. Freedom of movement has always been like oxygen to me, something I never ever think about. It just is. Not so much anymore.

I am certainly not alone in feeling the isolation that comes with COVID. All of us do in one way or another. My thinking and understanding of COVID has gone through many stages over the past eleven months, from skepticism to bewilderment to acceptance of the reality. But merely acknowledging something isn’t enough unless it changes your behavior, and my behavior has changed over these months. There are the ubiquitous masks, the incessant hand washing, that chill that spreads over your hands like fog shrouding a mountain when you squirt that hand sanitizer. At work there are virtual appointments, which feature me smiling awkwardly at a computer screen while I try to navigate the two second time delay.

Then there is the matter of our friends and neighbors who have come down with this dreadful virus, and the feeling of helplessness that overwhelms. When our next door neighbor got it, at least we could check up with her from across the way to see if there was anything she needed. When dear friends of ours in our  church small group came down with it we were limited to delivering a meal for them on their porch, when what we really wanted to do was march inside and clean their house, run errands and hug them close. Speaking of that group, our last face to face meeting was almost three months ago and that was a rarity in and of itself. Church? It has morphed into just another screen experience. We briefly started meeting together in reduced, socially distanced numbers, but then there was a COVID visitation among several volunteers so that’s on hold now.

Which brings me back to living in the moment. One reason I’ve become so bad at it is the fact that I truly hate this moment. So my mind constantly drifts to 2024 and what needs to happen between now and then, some things which are in my power to control but many other things where I am at the mercies of fate and chance. My choices seem to have been reduced to feeling annoyed and adrift by the here and now or nervous and anxious about the future, a Sophie’s choice for the ages.

Losing My Man Card

Ok, I think all of this social isolation is finally getting to me. Last night I made a charcuterie board. I choose not to offer photographic proof of this fact to preserve what is left of my dignity, but I did prepare my first ever charcuterie board and thought it was worth mentioning, especially considering the fact that up until a year or so ago I had no idea what a charcuterie board was, let alone how to make one. Sure, I knew that anyone could throw a bunch of cheese and sausages on a platter and serve them, I just didn’t know it had such a fancy name...charcuterie board...sounds like a board game for old ladies.

Anyway, a couple summers ago in Maine, we started having charcuterie boards every afternoon on the dock down by the lake along with Maine-themed cocktails. Whenever my daughter-in-law Sarah was in charge, these things were like works of art. She would slice up three or four types of meat, Italian sausage, pepperoni, prosciutto, summer sausage. Then she would slice up all manner of delectable cheeses and fan them out like decorations on the tray. There would be Gouda, Brie, sharp cheddar, Gruyere, etc. I learned that the cheese was key to the whole enterprise. Cheese pairings, they all called. Then there are the crackers. We can’t forget the crackers. There are thin round water crackers, rectangular focaccia crackers and the more pedestrian wheat thins. Then, to make the feast look healthier, there were grapes and sliced apples sprinkled here and there. Off to the far corner of the board there would be a small bowl full of a positively dreadful jellied concoction, the best I could tell it was some sort of soft cheese wrapped in a weird jelly/nut glaze. No thanks! On the opposite end of the board there was another small bowl of humus into which one could dip a small selection of sliced raw vegetables. 

This treat was not meant to be an actual meal, rather an afternoon snack to tide us over until dinner. But when its just the two of us here on a Sunday night with football on the television, it will do quite nicely as a meal. So there I was last night fanning the cheese around in a circle surrounding the two types of meat piled in the center of the board. I put the gross jelly thing in a side dish in the corner just like Sarah does. I even placed a couple bunches of grapes atop the pile for appearances. The board I used was a gift given to us by my nephew for Christmas—word having gotten around that the Dunnevant clan is now thoroughly addicted to this sort of thing.

And yes, it is monogrammed. 

Now that I have shared this confession It occurs to me that I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. What is more manly than chunks of meat and cheese that you are encouraged to eat with your fingers? Sure, the way Pam and Sarah put these things together makes them look like oil paintings, still life’s that you’re afraid to touch. But at the end of the day, its just sausage and cheese, the two finest taste combinations in all of Christendom. We just need to come up with a better name than charcuterie board.

The Death of a Hero

I opened my laptop at 6 in the morning while rubbing the sleep from my eyes and saw the headline, Hank Aaron had passed. For reasons I cannot explain, I felt my throat constrict and tears forming in the corners of my eyes. As I have gotten older this sort of thing happens more frequently than I would like to admit. My childhood heroes, like me, are getting older, and yet when one of them dies it always comes as a shock to the system. Now Hammerin’ Hank is gone.

When I was 8 years old I began a life long love affair with baseball, largely due to my older brother’s devotion to the game. His favorite players became my favorite players. For me it was always Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. In that order. I was a Mickey guy, mostly because Donnie was a Mickey guy. I remember checking a book out of the Claiborne Elementary School library in New Orleans, Louisiana that told the story of Mickey Mantle. It was entitled, The Commerce Comet, and I was in the 3rd grade. It was the first book I had ever checked out from a library. I read it in one day. There was much to like about The Mick. He was movie star handsome, could run like the wind and hit a baseball to the moon. But I also loved Willie Mays. He did everything with style and flash, the best center fielder in the game. Then there was Hank Aaron who did nothing with style and flash. He wasn’t particularly handsome, hardly ever had anything to say. While Mickey’s smile beamed out from the cover of magazines and Willie was in every highlight reel, Hank just plugged along. The PR people with the Braves tried to juice him up with the national sports media who were Mantle v Mays obsessed by giving him the nickname Hammerin’ Hank. But it never really worked. He was just a ball player more comfortable with his real name...Henry Aaron. He lacked both the charm and charisma of Willie and Mickey, but never the talent. The press was in love with the charmers who’s rivalry started in New York City. The Yankees and The Giants, the two glamour teams. Nobody cared about the small market Braves no matter where they played...Milwaukee or Atlanta. But Hank kept showing up for work every day, playing the game brilliantly. Then one day it occurred to the baseball writers that he had an excellent chance to make a run at the most hallowed record in a sport full of hallowed records...Babe Ruth’s home run title. Finally, after a spectacular career of excellence, he would be plunged into the white hot glare of national scrutiny in the summer of 1973 and the spring of 1974 as he chased down the Babe. Suddenly after each game a throng of reporters were at his locker sticking microphones in his face. He answered their stupid repetitive questions with short, boring answers.

During this pressure packed pursuit of an icon’s record, Hank Aaron received hate mail. Tens of thousands of letters of vicious, racist hate mail. Death threats poured in among them. Yet Henry Aaron kept hitting and kept up his largely silent quest. When he finally launched a pitch by the Dodger’s Al Downing over the left field wall into the waiting glove of reliever Tom House, it was finally over. At home plate he was mobbed by his teammates, but that didn’t stop a strong, long suffering and worried to death woman from plowing through the crowd to reach her son...

And now this strong, proud and unassuming man is gone.

Willie Mays was asked once about Hank Aaron. His words seem appropriate as an ending for this tribute:

“ Hank Aaron was the best person I ever met.”

Hope Springs Eternal

Wednesday 20, 2021. Our system of government, beaten and battered though it may be, has worked. The candidate with not only the most Electoral votes, but also the most vote votes has won. The candidate who lost is leaving Washington, albeit in a childish snit. The winning candidate, who has never left Washington for over half a century, will become President today in a diminished ceremony. I will tune in for the speech. I always do. However I can’t promise I’ll stick around for the entire thing. I seldom do. One thing I will notice will be the politicians sitting behind the President, and how very old they all are. The president himself, ancient and frail, Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer, old and sagging under the weight of all that backstabbing, guile fairly dripping off them like beads of sweat.Why are politicians so old? Where are the forty-somethings, men and women with energy and new ideas? In other lines of work, thats where. And who could blame them?

What I will not watch is the insufferable virtual parade/entertainment that the triumphant Democrats will foist on us for the rest of the day. There will be all of the beautiful Hollywood types cooing about this and that along with a procession of pop stars. You have to hand it to the Democrats though, they always have all the big stars at these types of events. Whenever Republican’s are in charge, they serve up something like Scott Baio or Tom Selleck while the music is always a couple of Country singers. Its like whoever they send up there, my first thought is always, “Wait...that guy is still alive?” But, there’s nothing to be done about it. The cool kids have always been leftists.

The best part about today—if we make it through without incident—is that it will hopefully begin a new era where politics will become boring again. Sure, for awhile Biden will be news because he’s a new President. But eventually, after his first 100 days, that tiresome legacy of FDR that forces every new administration to act like the world is on fire and they must put it out with rapid fire initiatives, things will calm down. Suddenly we will wake up and realize that every headline on the news is not about Washington infighting. It will dawn on us that politics and politicians have stopped being entertainment and gone back to being necessary but dependable annoyances.

Hope springs eternal.