Good morning. Hello. How are you? #868
Ailments update, fake booze update, a long thing about angel investing, follow-on rounds, moral dilemmas and style points in wealth accumulation.
Good morning! Hello there, friend! Hola. ¿Cómo estás? Muy bien? Man, learning a foreign language in your 50s is hard. But I persevere. Took me ten years of nonstop trying to quit smoking. I’ma just gonna keep learning Spanish for ten years. Septico. Pintar. Mantillo.
My arm is a wreck, my leg is a wreck. There are now four pieces to this tennis elbow contraption: a compression sleeve on my elbow, and a Farmer’s Defense garden sleeve over that, and then the elbow band and then the wrist brace. Garden sleeve cuz the wrist brace was chafing my skin and hurt like an MF. Also I had it on too tightly and so when I took it off last night my entire right forearm had shrunk and it looked like a cartoon and it was very alarming. It is better this morning. Trying to find a balance between stiffness and not shrinking my arm it is creepy.
My leg is still welted up by these bites, I think they must be chiggers, and I just have an insane reaction to chiggers that is the new theory, since I never see anyone ever biting me. Bought a bunch of random SPF-50 blocking outdoor sun clothes — some cheap football pants base layers and a pair of Truewerk summer pants — to see if I can stay fully covered while gardening, since, you know, you should anyway, melonoma and all. The part in that article where it said that even a single case of blistering sunburn radically increases your chances of melonova was very disspiriting. I think I’ve only blistered once, when I was a teenager, I fell asleep from heat exhaustion reading Dante’s Inferno, appropriately, at the lodge at the Grand Canyon because I didn’t really get how suburn worked because I grew up in Alaska. I had blisters for weeks it was horrible. And now it has come back to haunt me.
I really wanna post a photo of these bites but that would just be cruel. Here is a picture of my blueberry bush instead:
Fake booze update: the best Fernetty thing out there, Pathfinder, is now availale for re-order. Stuff seems to sell out in batches, so if you are into trying this weird-ass bitter hemp-and-wormwood-based digestif, now is your chance.
Latest non-alcoholic bender is a phoney negroni consisting of Monday gin, Ish gin, Dr Zero Zero campari, Versin vermouth, Wilfred vermouth, Ginista Wormwood campari, and orange bitters. I find using two of the various ingredients builds a more complex flavor. Gotta drink it fast ish, though, or shaken and strained. Too much water dilutes the gin taste.
And a Bud Zero on the side. Man Bud Zero is a great invention. Can they make a Bud Light Zero just so I can, you know, support trans rights at the same time?
So years ago when I was a hipster angel investor living in Williamsburg and working out of my awesome coworking space, Secret Clubhouse, I invested in the company of one of the tenants. It was sorta the only time that happened, which is funny because when I opened the space I had this vision of often investing in the companies that worked out of the space. But it only happened that one time. This woman Daniela pitched me on this awesome idea about distributed, ad-hoc, long range networks and how great they would be for things like disaster recovery and protests like the then-ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement. Sounded great. Gave her some money.
Fast forward a decade or so and she is no longer with the company and the whole thing has been, not surprisingly, co-opted by the national security apparatus, one of its largest clients is the INS, and they are raising a new round. Details are a bit murky whether they had to do this or not, but supposedly thanks to our crappy fund raising environment, the new round has very onerous terms and is wiping out the entirety of the previous investor base, if you do not choose to participate in this round.
I only ever gave them $10k, so this is mostly an academic moral dilemma. At first — I don’t know why I did this — I said I would participate in the round. Back when they got a lot of very public grief about working with the INS and the po po, I had said semi-publically — I think in one of the very early GMHHAYs actually — that if I ever exited this investment profitably, I would give the entire proceeds to RAICES or something like that (they’ve had their own challenges but we can put that aside for now). I think that decision, in my head, absolved me from the moral dilemma so I just didn’t worry about it anymore, looked at the investment paperwork strictly from a personal financial point of view, figured it was the wise thing to do. The new team was competent, the fundraise was enough money to set them up right. I stupidly did not, like, ensure that I would only invest if the round was complete, but I’m a plebe you don’t usually get that choice anyway you just gotta roll the dice. But really, all in all from a capitalistic pov it looked fine.
Anyway not long after I said yes, the paperwork arrived and suddenly I felt deeply, profoundly uncomfortable with signing it and giving these people any more money. It just made me really sad. Of course I’m sad to lose the $10k, but I would have had to give them another $10k to keep it and that just made me depressed. They were admirably consistent in their reminders of this investment, I got a Docusign reminder every day for like two weeks, and then on the last day (yesterday) that I could sign and pay before the deadline passed, I got emails from the lawyer and the CFO. I did not answer any of them. What was I going to say? I am a sensitive artist, I don’t want this bad mojo in my life. There’s no point explaining it to them, they are probably not bad people they’re just coming at all of this from a completely different viewpoint than I am and we’re all too busy to have some wide-ranging philosophical discussion about humanity and borders and the panopticon and whether we really live in a democracy.
Better to just ghost.
Style points. I have always said accruing wealth is about style points. The only thing that matters in accruing wealth is how you accrued it. Make a fortune in some weird boring neutral thing like ball bearings or container coatings, great. More or less neutral source of a fortune, assuming you weren’t a horrible boss. Make it in hip hop or basketball or acting you get a fair amount of style points. Make it in… Orwellian border control tech… negative style points. Am I living this? Eh, adtech maybe not a bunch of style points but I will argue it’s neutral — at least my little branch of it is. That of course is debatable and maybe I will have that debate in public some day, but lord knows I don’t need the judges deducting like 40 million style points because of this investment. I’m borderline enough as it is.
I wonder what the absolute coolest and most noble accumulation of wealth could be.
I mean, you should give it all away anyway don’t get me wrong. Capitalism blah blah. That’s not the subject here. And I’m not talking billions here. Maybe tens of millions.
Catch and release wealth that’s kinda funny.
Anyway this is all mostly abstract in my life I just… yeah I don’t need that.
Man. It was supposed to be for avalanches. I had pictures of the things strapped to those cute saint bernards with the barrel around their neck.
Enshittification.
Got a little office set up at the new house so I’ll be working over there in the afternoons, doing little chores between work tasks, letting various contractors in. I laid down in the living room the two old brown rugs we had. They’re okay but not perfect. Emma’s right. The rug in the master bedroom belongs in the living room of the new house. What a pain. I am so tired of moving rugs.
Jane’s mind was blown last night by “the man” video by Taylor Swift during Daddy Jane Dance Party. She was impressed enough that she said she would give “Anti-Hero” and “Lavender Haze” another shot, so we watched a lot of Taylor Swift last night. Then we got “Hung Up” again which is just such a fun song to dance to, then Samia, who Jane is very fond of. And luckily she’s not upset that Emma and I are going to see Samia tonight and she is staying at Grammy’s. If I were really into some musician and my parents were going to see them without me, well, I would be very upset.
And then right as the evening ended Contrapoints dropped a new two-hour video about JK Rowling so man I gotta watch that. God knows when I’ll have time. Hopefully I can finish it all this week otherwise I’m gonna have to watch it on the plane and make the person next to me very uncomfortable.
Drone playlist for you today. Gila Band did a KEXP session this week and it sounded awesome I always forget about them. Was a little short so I threw on a Spacemen 3 classic who doesn’t love that song. Man. Really opened my eyes, my ears, when I was 17. Oh shit there are two Yo La Tengo songs on here well it is too late now. Great album.
Have a lovely tuesday. Got seven meetings, myself, today but we will get through it. Samia tonight! So exciting!
i've gotten my share of sunburns, for sure, but only one blistering sone that i can remember: at our BU graduation, on my nose! that *better* not turn into fuckin melanoma, with how vain i am. (since last year, i'm pretty religious about applying sunscreen daily—on my face, anyway.)