The April Fools of the US equity market in the Year of our Lord, 2025

 I don't give investment advice to friends. I don't care about the outcome enough to stay engaged, the personal payoff structure is asymmetrical. Family is different. Them, I try to keep out of the ditch, if they ask. 

The market fell off sharply as our President has become enamored with a tax called a tariff. Markets will tolerate a modest hike in taxes, but not on the scale he is proposing. 

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, badly. Never sell out of US stocks. Never. Never. Never. 

Buy when the market is rising, buy when it is falling, buy when it is flat. Never, never sell. Buy when a President is healthy, buy when one is assassinated. Buy when oil is plentiful, buy when there is a shortage. Buy when there is no cure for a terrible virus. Buy when a vaccine is developed. Buy when you love the President, buy when you don't. Buy when you're sober, buy when you're not. Buy when there is war, when there is rumor of war, when there is peace. Buy when your dog dies, when your cat dies (especially), when your Uncle Wayne dies.

Granted there are times when one should sell everything, go to cash, wait for clarity. Ask CNBC or Fox Business they see it all the time. Having been born in 1956 I have yet to see such a day. 

What so many people fail to realize is our emotions act in an opposite fashion of real things. 

When the market falls we percieve (feel) that risks are going up, we feel this is bad. In reality the risks are going down. The opposite is true when stocks are rising. 

This was true in 1929 and will still be true in 2029. True in 1974, will be true in 2074. 

In case I am all wrong. Keep a few cartons of Marlboros and some bottles of Jack Daniels in your basement. I think I have about four of each. When the social order completely breaks down, when the gas pumps are dry and the shelves are bare at Food Lion, these two things will always have value and can be exchanged for passage across the border into Canada or Mexico. 

My Imaginary Pretty Brain Pictures

 Sometimes the words I read will slap me and yell for my attention. It will get into my head. Some startling thought or image. 

I am reading M Train, a sort of diary by the punk rock singer, Patti Smith.She writes quite well and M Train seems to me a poetic balance between between her days of hope and her days of melancholia. 

She wrote the line below and it is in me. In my imagination it was written three hundred years ago as my ancestors boarded ships and sailed west. 

"I was thinking of French time traveling children with Scottish accents breaking the hearts of the future."

Two days after writing this I dreamed that Patti Smith and I were at a party with people from my past. It was a retirement party of sorts. 

Books read in 2022

The following are the  books I read in 2022. Most of them are quite good. A few were not worth reading, several are worth reading a second time. Although I do not read much science fiction, I got started on the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov and had to read them all. 

A book that took me almost 50 years to read, The Dreaming Earth. I started it in high schook, got bored with it, lost it some time in the 70s. I thought about it last year and decided to find it online. I did, and am glad to have done so. Nice little sci-fi story. The Best Loved Poems of the American People was a book in my parents home as a child. A wonderful collection. 

I hope to someday read again Marina and Lee, and Churchill's six volume account of WWII. 

The worst book of the bunch was "I lived to tell it all" by George Jones. He was a bad man who treated people terribly and squandered his wealth and talent. He wrote this book to brag about the amount of liquor,  drugs, and human souls he consumed. 

Another loser was "Pre-Colonial Black Africa" by Chiop. Basically a rant that everything good in the world came from P-C B A. World religions, economic structure, democracy, music, art, writing, mathematics, astronomy, skittles, tacos, Buddy Holly, pickup trucks, checkers. The writer makes the case that even the pre-colonial slavery of Africans by Africans was a good kind. 

As a Catholic I am supposed to like Flannerty O'Connor and see how her Catholicism is relected in her writing. If I am a proper intellectual Catholic, this will just ooze out of her brain into mine. Didn't happen. I liked one, one, only one short story. A Good Man is Hard to Find. I asked my wife to read it but she did not. 

The books are listed in the order I read them. 

Foundation - Asimov 
Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life - Lacey
The Second World War - Volume 1: The Gathering Storm - Churchill
Marina and Lee - McMillan
Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Revealing the Jewish Roots of Christianity - Bergsma
Prelude to Foundation - Asimov

Beyond the Veil: The Adventures of an American Doctor in Saudi Arabia - Gray
The Dreaming Earth - Brunner
Rural Roots of Bluegrass: Songs, Stories and History - Erbsen
The Second World War - Volume II: Their Finest Hour - Churchill
The Second World War - Volume III: The Grand Alliance - Churchill
The Second World War - Volume IV: The Hinge of Fate - Churchill
The Second World War - Volume V: Closing the Ring - Churchill
The Second World War - Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy - Churchill
The Guardians - Grisham
The President is Missing - Patterson, Clinton
Second Foundation - Asimov
Foundation's Edge - Asimov
The Best Loved Poems of the American People - Felleman
Forward the Foundation - Asimov
Salvation on Sand Mountain - Covington (2nd Reading)
Foundation and Earth - Asimov
The Big Short - Lewis (3rd reading, at least)
The Practice of the Presence of God (3rd reading)- Lawrence
I, Robot - Asimov
The Caves of Steel - Asimov
The Naked Sun - Asimov
Into Your Hands Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us - Stinissen
The Robots of Dawn - Asimov
The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor
Robots and Empire - Asimov
The Stars, LIke Dust - Asimov
The Currents of Space - Asimov
A Pebble in the Sky - Asimov
The Joke - Kundera
The Saint Monica Club (3rd reading) - Green
The Hope of the Gospel - MacDonald
Basic Music Theory for Banjo Players - McKeon
The Diary of an Old Soul - MacDonald
Fantasy Classics Collection - MacDonald
The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism - Bouyer
Unspoken Sermons: Series I,II and III. MacDonald
Four Witnesses - The Early Church in Her Own Words - Bennett
Introduction to Christianity - Ratzinger
Cash - Cash
I Lived to Tell it All - Jones
Precolonial Black Africa - Diop
The Hidden History of East Tennessee - Guy
Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and around the World - Ayittey
Disraeli - Blake
Churchill - Gilbert

Rod McKuen was the narrator of my college era

On August 6, 1976 I bought a paperback book by RodMcKuen. I still have it. It has been in my garage for years, by the trashcan. I have tried to throw it away but always pull it back. I wrote my name and the date on the inside, as if it were important that both be recorded. I was 19, almost 20. I sacked groceries in a small town in southern Missouri and lived in a trailer. It was the summer before my junior year in college.  

I am probably one of the few people on the planet who can lay claim to having lived a life influenced by the poetry of this man. But there was a brief time when I wanted to be a younger version of him. The contemplative loner, hanging out in a cafe in Paris, composing a letter from a LandRover in Bangkok, walking the beach at sunset in Malibu, meeting a friend for tea in St. John's Wood, writing ballads about sunsets and hitchhiking. 

I look at the lines I underlined and realize I plagiarized so many of them in letters to long forgotten girlfriends, perhaps even to my wife of 43 years. If any of you are reading this I must confess that these lines were not originally from me...

 "I've drawn your face on tablecloths across the country"

"I was drifting while waiting for your eyes to find me"

"I have yet to see a sky or world quite good enough for you"

And this is just a sampling. This book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted. I sat on a rock by my driveway and re-read all my favorites. Some seem corny and schmaltzy but others still speak to me as they did 50 years ago. 

There truly was a time when my hair was thick and long and my bellbottoms were size 28 or 30, that this book slipped perfectly into my back pocket. If girls were not impressed with my charm, or my grades, or future prospects, there is always Rod. When doing my lonesome walk to class, or through a park, or being pseudo-contemplative, he was there, narrating the scene. Meanwhile, I loped and moped and hoped she would ask the question... "whatcha readin?". 

I read this today, which once spoke to a life I could but imagine, and now have, in a way. 

Freedom

"Free I am. 

I have no bills to pay. 

My debts are squared,

the edges smoothed out perfectly. 

My ducks are in a row

and I can sail. 

There are borders

in this final life

that were not here at nineteen

or at twenty-three." 

(It deteriorates from there but you get the point)

I bought this book at a time when I was human play-dough, being molded by chance and circumstance and places. I'm sure it made its way to the small chapel on campus, an aging tennis court, that park I fled to so often, the trunk of my 1969 Ford Fairlane. So now, almost fifty years later I am drawn back to this little book, at obscure times. I can go years without thinking one thing about this guy, until a trigger reminds me a of a time when he was a much bigger influence on me than he should have been. He was a man who accoumplished some things but not a good man that other men should want to be like.  

Now the jeans are size 34 or so and the bottoms have no bells. I would be embarrassed to have this book in my back pocket so it rests on a shelf in the garage. But still there are lines that gnaw at me as I thumb through the pages once more. I see that I wrote my name in it twice that August 6 of 1976, on different pages. Something was going on that day and I think I know what it was. 

I'm not the reader I think I am

Just finished browsing the Modern Library's 100 Best books list. It's embarrassing. I've read 3 from the non-fiction list and 4 from the novels list. What's worse, all were read in high school and college. None since then.

Hmmm, perhaps some sort of fodder for a new years resolution, some reading to do by my ample supply of incandescent lights.

"...there has been much throwing about of brains."

In October of 2010 I decided to read the complete works of William Shakespeare. Every play, every sonnet. I have had it on my ipad. Almost all of the reading has been while on the bus, commuting from home to downtown Minneapolis.

For the first year or so I was reading Shakespeare and the KJV of the Bible side by side. When I finished the Bible, I picked up speed with Will. This project required a deeper level of concentration than I am accustomed to.

Today's snowstorm gave me a two hour bus ride. I knocked off the last fifty pages.

I don't feel smarter, just a wee bit more refined.

While most of it was terribly boring, there were a few times when a passage grabbed me with its beauty and compexity. Like this, from The Twelth Night. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have said about you...

His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles,
His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,
His tears pure messengers sent from his heart,
His heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth.

Goodbye Mr. Shakespeare.