Two episodes into my livestream series and I’m pleased to be talking with the creator of the Aquarian Anarchy podcast, which I have been tuning into for several months.
I first noticed that Marcus used the heptagram as part of the branding for his podcast. And then I noticed that he sometimes brought up Aleister Crowley on the show. This was a red flag for me, that guy is a troublesome character. I was able to directly ask him about it and challenge the credibility of Crowley without disrespecting my guest.
This launched a discussion that established a spiritual foundation for anarchism and I would say it was never dull. We had a good conversation and in fact it continued off the air.
I appreciate Marcus for joining me and boosting my signal. I don’t believe it will be the last time we talk.
North Philadelphia Avenue is the street leading to and from St. John’s Bridge, a utilitarian Portland, Oregon landmark, of which I had formed an extraordinary bond well over a decade ago.
Landing right into town, you take a right onto Lombard Avenue and there is a corner diner there at the next left. It is an old school sock hop soda fountain style diner. It isn’t retro, it has just been there forever. It is called Pattie’s Home Plate.
Exterior of Pattie’s Home Plate
The landmark restaurant lives there in memory only today. It closed just after I moved to Philadelphia in 2018. According to a friend of mine, the building was nearly sold. Due to structural issues, the deal fell through. Unfortunately, the owner shut down the active restaurant (and two other businesses) in advance of the failed deal, so the building has been vacant ever since.
Anyway.
The “home plate” pun is irresistible. It suggests a starting place and an ending, like rounding the bases you end up where you began. It is a plate of food that you’re seeking, and a refuge like home, but not, because you’re out.
Pattie’s could not really be a true home away from home because it wasn’t open 24/7. Like many restaurants out west, they chose either to be breakfast and lunch, lunch and dinner, or dinner and cocktails. A few modern coffee houses stayed open late, so they fulfilled much of that role.
24/7 restaurants offer a holy atmosphere. Especially in the Northeastern United States, with shining steel surfaces, tiled floors and walls, private booths with vinyl seats, the diner is something between a church and a hospital cafeteria. You go there to be healed — possibly to be saved.
The first 35 years of my life were lived all over the West Coast. There, we do not have the diner tradition like that. In Portland, I can only think of three 24/7 restaurants. There was the Pancake House on Powell, Javier’s (fast Mexican food) on Lombard, and the Roxy on Stark Street. None of these use the term “diner” and they all have some other kind of theme.
Roxy Cafe interior Portland, OR
When I was about 20 years old, living in the valley in Los Angeles, I would jump on the 101 and drive like ten miles to the North Hollywood Diner just to drink coffee and eat toast, to read and write, living out a beatnik fantasy that only a young budding stoner intellectual would go out of their way for.
That NOHO spot is an unusual place for LA, even though the city is full of 24/7 donut shops. Portland is full of coffee shops. Tucson has Waffle House and Denny’s. High school kids with cars that hung out there were “Dennys’ Rats.”
A couple of weeks ago, I drove I-95 to and from Florida, and I found Waffle House to rule that route. It is reliable but I consider it a last resort.
The Northeast is different from the rest of the country in many respects, but focusing on the people’s food, burritos are presented with more exoticism and a higher price point in Philly while hoagies are at every corner. Out west, is basically the opposite.
Philadelphia diners have more Italian history to them — always a selection of pasta. New York tends to lean Greek — always a gyro. Jersey diners define the classic all-American melting pot, offering both gyro and pasta.
Jersey diners more often dress the building with steel siding that apparently armors it against the apocalypse. It suggests that this place is bullet-proof: You can rely on it.
The Midwest is different still. I drove through the town that invented sliced bread in Missouri one time, I could not find a sandwich shop, except for Subway.
In Michigan, at least in the areas surrounding Detroit, you will find Coney Island restaurants everywhere, with a range of hot dogs, the typical burgers and omelets, but then it could have some other twist of their own. Usually gyros and pastas are on the menu.
Wherever you go, there is a regional flavor to it anyway. It’s something I love about this country. We have at least 50 different twists on what it means to be American. You absorb a lot about an area just by sitting inside a local diner.
However the people like to lay it out in their land, there will always be some demand for 24-hour food. For me, I want a place to sit. When I am with someone, a booth is great. Alone, the counter, because I can usually banter with the server and get faster coffee refills.
Today, most of the demand for a commuter breakfast is met by gas stations and fast food. Personally, I go to Wawa and Dunkin quite a lot. They solve the problem. Especially Wawa, that place is the gold standard of gas station stops.
Women at Luncheonette in New York, 1948
I think about automotive culture and how that evolved the diner into its second generation. Early on, fast food was a hole in the wall near a train station where you could sit down to order a pork chop $0.15, one egg $0.10, toast $0.05, and coffee $.10, and be out in ten minutes for less than a buck, after tip. This was pedestrian life, pre-auto culture. These places are properly called Luncheonettes.
Then the roadside diner sprang up along new highways and freeways interconnecting the nation for the first time since the railroad. This and commuters from the suburbs changed the idea from the hole in the wall by the train stop to a large building with a massive parking lot, huge signage, and lots of booths.
Elmer Diner, New Jersey 1950
I remember my first truck stop. I was a young boy, a few years old, riding home to Santa Barbara from Arizona after visiting some relatives. There is this remote Interstate 10 diner that was featured in the film, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. It was still a new movie at that time — a household favorite — so we had to stop there.
This roadside attraction these great dinosaur structures that you could walk into, where, lo and behold, there was a gift shop. It’s primary goal was to attract business to Wheel Inn, and gas station.
Original Postcard
The atmosphere was fun and comfortable, and when the meal came out it was this massive chili burger and fries. I was delighted and exclaimed, “This is why I love truck stops!” And my father shot back, “But you’ve never been to a truck stop.”
He was making fun of me a little. But he wasn’t gaslighting me, it was true. Only I am sure that I knew what I was talking about. It turns out I was right. They are delightful.
I stopped in there in 2018 but the restaurant was already gone and the dinosaurs became the main attraction.
We didn’t have any diners around Santa Barbara, although I’d say humble restaurants with standard fare were far more common than today. Santa Barbara has been a gradual gentrification process, to become an epicenter of chic world-class dining. It is not the same town, but even around 1986, the road to its future was being paved in sun-dried tomatoes and sprouts.
Today, the self-awareness of being a diner is a marketing concept. Before, it was just typical American dining: Always bread on the table, and always soup or salad before the meal. There are a few places that just keep doing what they’ve been doing for decades, and those places feel real. Too many new diners try to reinvent them to satisfy the bourgeoise. It is dumb.
It is always dumb to focus your attention on the people who do not frequent your business.
I made it my business more than three years ago, when I moved here, to visit every diner in the city. Whenever I think I am close to meeting the goal, I see one that I wasn’t aware of.
Honestly, I accelerated my pace on that this year, due to domestic problems. I was three months into an eviction case that was severely protracted, thanks to the CDC eviction moratorium, and subsequent local laws based on that order. The tenant became irate and destructive, so to protect myself, I began to stay with other people. My presence in my own home became covert. I was avoiding the place like hell.
During that desperate period of three months, I ate a lot of meals, and killed a lot of time, in diners. Even without 24/7 service, these places were available all over the place. The pressures of surviving that ordeal were alleviated by women asking me how I like my eggs, pouring refills of coffee. It was my hospital and church, especially in the morning. It was my home plate.
Llanerch Diner, 2012, Photo by Marvin Greenbaum
It was a winning strategy, but arduous. Today, I get to go to the diner not out of desperation but again to enjoy myself, to meet with someone, or simply to get a break from the road.
And I have so much experience with them now, I could write a review for each one. The criteria for what makes a good experience is entirely my own. I would say in general, diner owners should hold back on LED strip lighting and modern tile designs. I don’t want to name names, but some of our best places are remodeled into oblivion.
Return to 24/7 as soon as possible, god willing someone likes working overnight. And keep the menu traditional, just improve the quality of the food, like spending an extra nickel on cage free eggs. If you’re about to spend $50K on bad tile installations, please consider the eggs. That is all. Thank You. I’ll see you soon anyway.
Watch out gang. Here we go. I’m about to get back into the podcasting universe. This is step one, and I asked a new podcaster on the scene and old friend, Dan Leeson from 2 Bulls in a China Shop to join me.
My strategy is to rock some livestreams to gradually get my interview chops back up, to reinforce and rebuild an audience, while gradually working out the technical details involved with producing a professional podcast.
Turning out to be more difficult than I had imagined. Podcasting standards are evolving into the 2.0 realm while webcams have become a standard practice in the space. There is a lot to learn since I had THRUPoint going, a standard audio program.
It was as easy as pie to go live on Google Hangouts and immediately turn around a monetized video on YouTube, back in 2013. I did this once with Douglas Mallette. Since then, the whole process has been divided up and converted to premium features. I am no longer eligible for monetization with my piddly 578,000 total views and 283 subscribers. For most users that is actually a lot.
My plan originally was to use Twitter Live with mutual followers on that platform, because I’ve actually been building a community there. Then I learned if you want to do anything more than a solo rant with your webcam, that feature is exclusive (invite-only). Turns out this is the same across social media sites.
This means you need to have a third-party source to transmit a signal that has already mixed the video between myself and the guest.
The good news is that I built a little legacy on my YouTube account and I might as well tap back into it. It just happens to be the easiest place to host of my Livestreams.
There are a range of options, but the first fork in the road is to either go through a service that simplifies the whole process, or engineer it to the greatest extent possible in a self-hosted studio
I am a trained audio and video technician, but I come from the era of wires and signals. Not that we’re beyond wires, but those signals have consolidated into pure digital encrypted signals, transmitted on wifi and fiberoptic cables, very different from straight radio bandwidths received and captured into copper wires that go from A to B.
Today, the protocol for sending video signal across the internet is NDI. This is a patented protocol and is generally a hidden, or premium feature. Skype is supposed to provide this but it’s not working for me yet.
What I ended up with, after experimenting with Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) and Skype, and researching alternatives, was a browser app called Melon. This very quickly connects to your YouTube and launches a Youtube Live event for you.
I forgot to customize my profile, so on the first stream I ended up with my email address in the top corner! Baby steps.
To get more than one guest, and to send a full HD signal to social media sites at the same time, I will have to pay the premium.
Actually, the company that makes Melon offers a proprietary version of OBS, also simplifying the whole process. I haven’t tried it yet, as I am still trying to use the core OBS.
However I do it, controlling my own broadcast studio is the only way to reach the goal of producing a top-quality podcast. It is necessary to control the means of production, or else you are limited in your presentation. As a technician, I will not accept mediocre media.
The advents coming through Podcasting 2.0 are great. It is an ongoing project to develop a complete standard for the new era of podcasting, incorporating supplemental content like chapters, images, transcripts, and audience-direct financial contributions.
The reality of video is also clear, so when all is said and done it should resolve this gap between traditional audio podcasting and the new era of video, but I am not there yet.
The future of podcasting is bright. But is mine?
Here is the irony of life. When I was cooking with gas, had a following, was on the cutting edge of internet and social media promotion, I had no stability in my life. I moved to Philadelphia and changed my priorities. I bought a house and built a studio space. That involved a lot of sacrifice, and hard work. Now I can balance creativity and media back into it.
It’s rarely what I do that I truly regret. It is what I don’t do. It is when I drop the ball. So on the sports analogy, I refuse to sit on the sidelines when the world is going so bananas.
Self-knowledge is not only the intrinsic value of your existence, the spiritual powers and carnal qualities of your being, nor is it merely the sum of your productivity as a working human, it is also the superficial measurement of your net wealth.
Not to elevate our finances to the highest value, but this analysis is one that can help guide you toward a life plan. To carry out a life plan will elevate your will power and imbue your life with purpose. This will lead to a greater good in your life, if you’re a good person.
My financial writing is not meant for the wealthy. It is for the average person just beginning to get their boat afloat, if you like. I am myself just beginning to sail, and I am not wealthy.
As soon as you embark on the journey of long term investing and retirement planning — no matter how old you are — it is good to have a sense of your net worth.
There are probably lots of people who make more money than me who never bother with this. The structure of their finances are probably very similar to mine, so this spreadsheet would help them too.
I bet there is an alarming number of medical doctors whose overall net worth is in the red.
That prospect is simple. Say you’re a doctor. You’re 30 years old. You have a six-figure income, but you have $100K in medical school debt accruing interest, and you bought your first home adding $300K to your debt, again with massive interest charges. Assuming you lease your car (no debt), you’ll need home equity and investments valued above $400K to hedge against your great saddling debt.
To look at the interest charges you’ll pay over the lifetime of a mortgage or student loan payment is frightening. Best to ignore it for now and focus on the idea of net worth in the event of liquidation.
In terms of ratios, the person with no college, starting out at Walmart, in the short term will surpass the net worth of the doctor. The doctor is highly leveraged and carries liabilities out the gate in life.
The 17-year old cashier could save at least 50% of their income at first and draw it down to 10% as they become independent, relieving the parents from the cost of hosting them. Out the gate, this worker has the opportunity to build their net worth in the green.
If the cashier rises up to General Manager after ten years, they too can earn a six-figure income. If they learn how to invest their portfolio, they could end up living next door to the doctor in a cul-de-sac. Who gets there first is a tortoise versus hair scenario. The doctor will rapidly earn more money once they enter the workforce, but the entry level worker can build their wealth debt free.
This is why everyone should plan their finances, not because it is a race or competition of some sort, just because anybody can elevate their situation with focus and planning. I am speaking from experience. I was raised poor and until age 34, I held myself down in poverty. I’m starting later than the doctor, I am low-income. With planning, I believe I will retire before age 60.
Once every quarter, I go through all of my financial accounts and enter the balances into a spreadsheet. I am including it as a download here. It is a straight forward net worth analysis. Also notice that I have formulas in the cells. These are calculators. I did the work so you wouldn’t have to.
There is a primary goal for this spreadsheet. It is to predict the maximum liquidity of all my assets, literally all of them, imagining a scenario where I want to reduce my debt to zero and unload my possessions down to a backpack full of cash and nothing but a change of clothes. This figure is my true net worth.
When you see these celebrity and CEO net worth articles, most of them are highly overvalued. There is no way Elon Musk can cash out on his shares and retire with $100 billion in a duffle bag. It just is not that simple.
It kind of leads to a gross misunderstanding of the term net worth. I call that gross worth. Net worth to me is simply my liquid assets minus the sum of liabilities. It is easier to figure than Musk’s money.
In the process of building this spreadsheet, I decided to include net credit limit into the gross worth figure. If I started cash advancing my credit cards and pulling my balances as quickly as possible, what would be the maximum cash I could liquidate? For this, the spreadsheet adds up total available credit, cash on hand, investment accounts, inventory, and home equity.
Inventory is important for understanding net worth. Considering the minimal time required to keep an inventory of your possessions, with model and serial numbers, I would say it’s worth it. You can even point that cell on the analysis to your inventory total so that it will update your net worth when you manage your inventory.
By the time you go through your house, add up your car(s), furniture, computers, and devices, depending on how far you want to go with it, your cookware and knick knacks, with modest resale values associated, then you can track an ongoing inventory of your estate.
The minus debt field simply deducts my credit card balances and all other debts from the gross, giving me the post-debt figure, which means I pay debts off but run my credit cards to the max to go off the grid. It’s a weird figure, it’s almost pointless, but I like it.
Liquidity is the final figure for net worth in this spreadsheet. It is also the only realistic number. This time I leave the credit limit alone as if I’m cutting up my credit cards. I total up cash on hand, investments, inventory, home equity, and deduct all debts. This scenario would have the maximum cash I can stuff into a bag after selling all possessions, investments, while paying off all debts.
The truth of your liquidity is still not revealed. There are costs every step of the way. If I sell my house, I’m out thousands in closing costs and fees. Some people still pay brokerage fees to sell their stocks. If you sell your inventory in a hurry, you probably will get a fraction of its top value. I bear all that in mind, but I don’t have a calculator for it.
Finally, there is one more figure that I realized I should know and estimate for the sake of my parents. My parents will depend on me as they grow old, so I want to know how much they could potentially get from my estate if I suddenly passed, God forbid.
I do not presently have kids, so I don’t have a serious life insurance policy. Mine is free through the credit union and it pays one grand, which amounts to a basic cremation process.
The better news about this total, even though I don’t benefit, is that it adjusts for student loan forgiveness. The only person legally responsible for my students loans is myself. This is the case whether I’m single, or married with children. So long as I keep my credit ratio well below cash in the bank, and my other debts below my home equity, then there will be enough of my capital remaining for them to reinvest into their portfolio.
Prepare for the worst, work toward the best.
In addition to this template, I have sheets that reference investment balances to chart growth (or loss). I have a very simple sheet that I will update annually for 20 years to ensure I am meeting or exceeding my goals. If I exceed, then I should at that point own my property and inventory outright and be able to bring my monthly obligations down to negligible figures.
My entire collection of sheets that work into the analysis and projections include a budget. I update this annually to estimate my income and factor in expected costs, everything from taxes to recreational drugs.
The whole jawn is a comprehensive tracking system that no third parties have access to. Don’t leave it up to corporations to provide your financial analysis. They use and sell your data. They might even mislead you. Learning this template will earn you the skill to track it all on paper if you want to.
I have included three versions of the Net Worth Analysis template. It was built in Apple Numbers, exported to PDF and Excel. I replaced my figures with basic numbers and generic labels. You are meant to personalize it and refer to your accounts.
It is simple, just start adding your bank accounts and what not into the fields and watch the numbers update. Many of the cells contain formulas. Drop a comment if you have any questions about it.
Without fanfare, I present to you a collection of songs one decade in the making, featuring just one song produced within the last five years, which I made the title track to: Sonny’s Plan.
Had this music been the exclusive focus of my creative life through these years, then this would deserve tremendous fanfare. Throughout that period however, I ran three more music festivals, played and recorded many hours of improvisational music, got deep into stand-up comedy, launched and disbanded a magazine and podcast, worked madly in a haunted house, while adapting a new life in Philadelphia.
The music that I hear is deeply connected to whatever was happening in my life at that time. Usually it is positive, because I tend to compose music when I have the extra time and space to work. However, there are plenty of sad stories in here.
“On the Rails” for me is pure heartbreak. While there is something triumphant about the peak of the song, it rises out of what sounds to me like the welling of tears in my eyes that I had while producing it.
Only the title track was recorded at my home studio in Philadelphia. This music space is not quite what I’ve always dreamed of, but it is the most professional music space that I have put together for myself yet.
Every one of these tracks were previously posted to a number of music hosting sites including my blog. All of these scattered songs with no context or proper mastering, something had to be done about them. It started with taking all of my old work offline. Now, it is up to me to package my old work in a cohesive way.
It took a little time to select these tracks, lay them in order, remix when possible, and finally remaster the whole lot.
These sessions were all archived in my hard drive, but I don’t have access any longer to the digital audio workstation (DAW) software involved. I was able to resurrect some sessions in a new version of Reason, which I ended up paying for on a monthly basis, to complete the project.
I’ll break it down briefly how I produced each of these.
“On the Rails” was produced inside Propellerhead’s Reason 7. The only analog instrument is the ARP Odyssey. This instrument threads across almost each track. It was summer 2015 and my studio was my living room at Penthouse 3 in the Lafayette Building, Portland.
“Santa Crux” was fully formed in a single day, fall of 2013, in a studio apartment in Santa Cruz using Ableton Lite. I was traveling with a complete mobile production system. My friend had an empty apartment with a range of instruments, giving me the banjo and electric bass tracks herein.
“Sonny’s Plan” is totally within Apple’s Logic X. The drums were recorded in my studio, clipped and looped. It was composed in 2020 but revisited to replace midi guitar sounds with live electric guitar. It is the first time I have owned a guitar in many years. I missed it.
“Long House” was a cornerstone for me in early 2011, produced at the InterArts office/studio. Today, it would be a serious undertaking to remix this track, as it was produced with Logic 9 as the master DAW, rewired with Reason 4 and Ableton Lite, plus MOTU Symphonic Instrument.
“She’s Back But I’m Gone” was produced in my penthouse studio in 2015, entirely in Reason 7.
“Clap Trap” was produced around the same time as Long House in 2011, entirely using Logic 9.
“Simple Structures” helped me snap out of a long music break in the spring of 2014. It reminds me of “Structures from Silence” by Steve Roach but I structured it with a simple house beat. Entirely made in Reason 7, in my Kenton neighborhood bedroom.
“Autonomia” was produced at the same time as the previous track using Reason, but this time I took advantage of the new DAW features in the software. It is the only song on this album that includes live vocals, however, they are disguised under a vocoder.
Naturally, I have had a variety of midi keyboards throughout all of this, however, none of them are noteworthy.
Today, I look forward to what feels like a new life of creative work, and in many respects I put this music behind me. All put together for the first time, it follows a single thread of intention in a chaotic life. Even as so many things change, I can’t help but come back to music, and if it takes another ten years to generate an album of highly produced music, so be it, because I love the process.
