Everything Under the Sun

February  | Early Years |   Week 8 | 2/26/2023 Talk about your high school years  In retirement investing philosophy, the most propagated formula is the one with the lowest P Value for future success. Sure there are get-rich-quick schemes, inheritance maneuvers, entrepreneurial delusions of grandeur, and a dozen ways to serendipitously wind up at the end with a pile of cash. However, for the laymen, the guy who gets a job, has a family, and wants to retire at 65, there's a strategy which works. In this philosophy there's commonly three stages identified throughout a lifetime, the Accumulation stage, the Preparation stage, and the Retirement stage. The accumulation stage is important due to the time value of money. The preparation stage is important due to the exponential growth in deposit size. And the retirement stage is important due to the withdrawal timetable. For those individuals who wanted to succeed along the normative trajectory, high school was an analogous micr...

What is it about her that makes me want to stay? Is it the way she speaks or the way she sways? Is it the way she occupies a timeless space? Is it the motion of her hands as she waves and says, "Goodbye my love see you at the end of the day?" Despite the strangers in my bed I'm unsatisfied to no end. I search for meaning in these little moments that I spend, With each new woman, I seek the potential to transcend,  The sanctity of love I once had the honor to defend. Perhaps this with which I contend is the most vital to comprehend. In the quiet hours of the evening, as the sun sets to the west, I find my equilibrium slips into a state of unrest. I wonder when I'll cease this never ending quest to find "the best". When will I look down at a face, lying peacefully on my chest,  And think, wow, I am blessed, it's time for me to rest. 

February  | Early Years |   Week 7 | 2/19/2023 Talk about your teenage years - middle school The dissolution of naivety directly parallels the onset of hormonal metamorphosis. This occurs chronologically perpendicular to the exodus of elementary school. Youth fades, and the world before us undergoes a transmutation at the levels of perception, comprehension, and conceptualization. The vocabulary with which to articulate that new world is developed. And growth is in abundance, both proverbially and literally.   I believe the full obtainment of consciousness is stepwise. With enough introspection, we can pinpoint phasic and tonic locales along the path. For me, and for many others, one obvious leap in consciousness occurred during middle school. Thinking back to that time, it's as if parts of my consciousness became accessible to me rather suddenly. It's as if color was promptly injected into a black and white reality. A simple interaction between myself and another ma...

February  | Early Years |   Week 6 | 2/12/2023 Talk about your adolescence - elementary school In the last few years there's been a really interesting resurgence of paraphernalia, jargon, and popular-culture-allusion to the decade or two that I grew up in. Naturally, as my generation ascends to managerial positions in media companies, product manufactures and marketing departments, the nostalgia of our adolescence will be more present and critical to the economic success of our endeavors. As Don Draper put it, "Nostalgia - it's delicate but potent." Hard as it is for me to divorce the subjectivity with which I view that era, I can say that objectively, it was a great time to be alive and a great time to grow up. The colloquial 90's kid - that was me. The late 90's and early 2000's were a time before social media, before widespread political divisiveness, in a twilight zone of positive race relations and national patriotism. We had Heelys and Janson backpa...

The sun peaks through my window and bliss strikes again. To my surprise, I find another day with no problem. Gratitude pours over my soul like a baptism, and I say Amen. But at the same time, "how could it be possible", I ask with intent?  To be sustaining the perfection of this present moment. It's as if my grip cannot slip, and my hands are made of cement. For the first time in many years I have nothing to lament.  Despite that fact that she's gone and it's vacant on her side of the bed, I seek warmth from time to time, when a guest lies there instead.  Despite troubles up ahead, I'm intoxicated by the solace in my head, Finding prophylactic relief from the dead-weight that I've shed. And to make myself clear, all the words left unsaid, the texts left unread, Could not convince me to go back to that existential dread, That would hit me instantly, simply from opening my eyes back then.  We pray for love and companionship and a life-long friend, And what w...

February | Early Years |   Week 5 | 2/5/2023 Talk about your childhood - earliest memories  "What is your first memory?", an interesting question, prompted to me from time to time by the occasional deep thinker. The first memory I have is walking along the pool deck at our house in Coral Springs, Florida. My brother and his friends were swimming. It's not at all surprising to me that my first memory is of the pool, considering I later became a year-round swimmer, lifeguard, and swim coach to kids at The University of Florida (a job that I still consider to be my favorite job of all time). I can remember the palm trees in the backyard and the thick humid air of south Florida. I couldn't tell you what the inside of the house even looked like, but I have a core memory, wrapped up in the 5 senses, of that pool. Funny how the brain retains some things and not others. Life was good then, when a hurricane would come through, the streets in the neighborhood would flood and a...