My radio interview with the legendary Daniel Johnston for KBOO in 2009.
Looking back, I am still amazed that I landed this interview. It is simple however, I was the first producer at KBOO to reach out to Daniel Johnston’s manager. That is really how you find opportunities in life: Timing. His manager was his brother, Dick.
Something I don’t mention in the script here, when I got him in the interview chair he had a momentary freak out, running out of the studio. I hope to this day it wasn’t me. Because it was like he felt threatened by me. He was famous for living with schizophrenia.
Imagine my panic standing in Studio 2, all prepared for the interview, and for a moment I thought it was over before it had even started. His brother ran after him, calmed him down, and we got a good fifteen minutes in, including an in-studio performance. Somehow, the guitar came in too quietly on the board and its signal was lost. With tape, you really have to push the gain.
It is silly that I ended up using cassette tape as my medium. Listening to it now, I feel like it wasn’t worth it, but then again, I did something unique with this radio piece and I had the freedom to do it at KBOO. For what I contributed to the station besides 11 minutes and 26 seconds of noisy airtime, listen until the end for the call sign.
Johnston has been recorded plenty of times in super high definition since he was made famous in the 1980’s. To come to him a scrappy young man myself with a cassette system for an interview seems like exactly what I should have done, granted we were in a studio with professional standards.
There is more to the reason I used cassette than that. I believe the session files were intentionally disappeared. All KBOO producers had space on a network drive, and my Adobe Audition files with Daniel Johnston went missing from my folder. I still had the cassette. So I passed it off like it was a creative decision.
My personal legend is that ultimately I had no choice, because the original media was both digital and cassette, but the digital disappeared. A likely story, akin to my dog ate my homework, you might say. Let’s just say it was the ghost in the machine.
If memory serves me right, I was stuck, and I tried to make it work with digital noise filtering and other things, including some reverb. It is sonically one of my worst pieces of radio or any audio that I’ve produced. But you get used to it.
It is a simple piece, I read an intro script to lead in the interview. After the short talk, we go to his concert that night with a field recorder. It was at Berbati’s Pan, I talk to some fans and a musician that I knew and yet whose name I didn’t get down because I was an amateur journalist. I think his name is Ryan. After the concert, the out segment is the performance that I captured in the studio.
Nobody arranged to get a picture with myself and Johnston, in front of the studio, or anything. This is a real oversight by myself and the whole organization. But we got the audio. Here it is, in my archive.
It could have been more awkward. I think I approached him very rationally, but I was thrown by the fact that his mind was elsewhere. He may literally be fighting off the flight response the whole time. There is a sense also that he is still trying to make it. He doesn’t seem self-conscious to the fact that everything wrong about what he did is what made him famous. One can only have compassion for the mindset of a man you cannot understand.
Rest in Peace, Daniel Johnston. You really were a prolific songwriter, and a gift to musicians for generations to come.
Do things happen in life for a reason, or do we apply reason to chaos? If we have the endowment of reason, do we stand alone with this power? If we are not alone, do we stand below a higher power? My consciousness feels timeless although I know my body is aging, what happens to consciousness when my body fails?
Jiddu Krishnamurti is a stand-alone spiritual leader that takes these common questions and reflects them back at the questioner by absolving himself from answering them. His attitude is skeptical of the questioner and puts it on them to get their own answers. He tries to get behind their question to push it back at them. For example, behind the question of death is very likely fear and insecurity about the unknown, all forms of the unknown. Quick answers may sooth that insecurity, but it may not be Truth.
He renounced all forms of organized religion and refused to teach any kind of meditation practice while deconstructing religious practice and meditative behavior, demystifying these things. If this line of thought makes you feel disoriented, that is good. “Truth is a pathless land,” says Krishnamurti.
Despite having no instruction to offer, people flocked and paid to attend his retreats hoping for spiritual advancement through contact, and community. It is fair to say that he was also a pioneer in business. He was in fact a millionaire. His career spanned from the 1920s until he died in Ojai, California, 1986. His business model has been repeated by hundreds of spiritual and self-help figures, from Tony Robbins to Ram Das.
Today, his legacy is recorded in numerous books transcribed from audio recordings, video and film reels, and increasingly these tapes are becoming available online, thanks to the work of Krishnamurti Foundation.
I borrowed his most famous book, Think On These Things, from a neighbor in my apartment building, in Los Angeles when I was 20 years old. Was that book given to me for a reason? The new age school of thought would respond, “Yes, of course, you manifested it.“ But I have found that to be a cultish kind of thinking prevalent on the West Coast.
I lived in the epicenter (LA) of the cult religion (Scientology) that I was raised in but had rejected firmly as an adult person. Today, my parents are out, but they paid a hefty price. And they continue to struggle with the deep conditioning of it. There is a solution from Scientology to every problem in life — not saying correct solutions. But this is how an adult person loses themselves in it, as life is scary and difficult to face. I think most people tend to look for guidance rather than build and refine their instincts.
Today, I self-identify as Buddhist, but I don’t go to a temple. I practice Vipassana meditation, and Zen, and I work to live by the moral code first transmitted by Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha. If you are Buddhist then you may believe that the principle of karma not only delivered me into a human form, but also the opportunity to at once reject religion and embrace Buddhism on the path of liberation. For me, believing in karma isn’t important. It is about finding gratitude for having a fortunate position in life, and using that position to practice the Dharma (moral code).
My first splintering from Scientology began with a short book by Dalai Llama, The Way to Freedom. I was 17. I have written about that process for THRU Media in a story called “Going Clear, For Real”.
Living inside a conspiracy theory like Scientology gave me the opportunity to come out the other side with the power of spiritual skepticism. Scientology is a quasi-political pseudo-religious multi-billion dollar tax shelter that depends on near-slave labor to maintain itself. I didn’t know about any of this until everyone else did, but I knew it was wrong, spiritually, and the intellectual tool of skepticism guided me away from it through adulthood.
The only people who don’t know how corrupt Scientology is are the many thousands of Scientologists that censor their own information. Like my parents. My family wasn’t deep, so I don’t have any trade secrets, but I saw how a community can reinforce itself in delusion. And let’s face it, you may substitute Scientology with “The Republican Party,” or “The Democratic Party,” or “The Catholic Church,” and so on, and this paragraph would still hold up.
That is spiritual skepticism, looking at all institutions and leaders for what they are: inherently corruptible. We know the self by reflecting on our relationship with others, and we know others from reflecting on ourselves.
We look toward figures of greatness for allegorical inspiration. Siddhartha’s legendary story of leaving the walled garden of his kingdom to face the truth of human suffering has inspired billions of people to date, although we cannot accurately place him in history.
Jiddu Krishnamurti has a documented story that carries allegorical power, but it shows the truth of political convenience, individual weakness, and the dark side of spirituality.
Oil on Canvas Portrait of Jiddu Krishnamurti by Jane Adams via janeadamsart.wordpress.com/
Manufacturing The Messiah
He was personally selected by infamous mystic Charles Leadbetter to become the messiah for the Theosophical Society, at their headquarters in India. The boy, fourteen years old, kind of frail and low energy, was lifted from his impoverished Father by some degree of manipulation on the part of Leadbetter.
The Father was devoted to Theosophy and he knew that the opportunity offered wealth and education for his boy. Perhaps the man believed he would benefit too. Their relationship suffered the deep loss of estrangement as the Father was left outside the inner circle.
Leadbetter believed Krishnamurti was already awakened, claiming to see his brilliant aura, while others thought the boy was dull. He was given a rigorous combination of British education with esoteric training into occult practices so that young Jiddu would become The World Teacher. He was not only groomed as their messiah over the next decade, but he eventually served as a salaried editor and columnist for their newsletter, providing a public face for the Theosophical Society.
This is a lot of pressure, and a rebellious young man might exploit some holes to their logic. After those first ten years of rather more blissful times, the delusion of the role they set out for him began to crack under intellectual scrutiny. The first blow to his faith in Theosophy must have been the estrangement of his master.
Leadbetter would be forced out of the Theosophical Society, England and India, where the society was headquartered, for sexual misconduct with countless children under his tutelage. Jiddu himself denied having gone through sexual abuse. Leadbetter found exile in Sydney, Australia, by 1915, just six years after discovering Jiddu. The mystical pedophile would live the rest of his life as a Bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church and as a member of the Co-Masonic Order.
The story of Leadbetter and other figures in his life are a big feature of the posthumous biography A Star In The East. Author Roland Vernon wanted to illustrate clearly why Krishnamurti renounced Theosophy. Prior to this book, very little was understood about his youth.
Annie Besant consolidated much of the power that she shared with Leadbetter as a leader of the Theosophical Society. She helped conceive of the World Teacher Project circa 1900. She provided a critical role in Jiddu’s daily life, serving him as a mother figure, educator, and role model, while at once manipulating him toward her project. He cared for her and she cared for him, but he would be estranged from her eventually, as well. He last visited Besant in 1926, though she did not pass until 1933.
In August of 1929, just a month before the market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, he dissolved The Order of the Star, an organization of 3,000 members devoted to the oncoming messiah that he had strategically positioned himself to lead. By dissolving it, he was just Jiddu Krishnamurti again. I’m not sure how much money or followers we was able to keep with the dissolution, but it was apparently enough to start his own venture with the help of his core posse.
He never spoke of Theosophy, Besant or Leadbetter unless pushed into it. He made a wise political decision in that regard, but also liberated himself from bad vibes and carried on with the new frequency that he had tuned into.
He settled in Ojai, California with his closest friends and long-time lover, working the land, rebuilding his speaking career where he felt there was more open-mindedness than almost any other place in the world. He spoke mostly in India, Europe, and across the United States, publishing dozens of books containing hundreds of transcripts, until his death in the 1980’s.
Finding My Allegorical Inspiration
He was born into a situation much riskier than mine and his payoff was much greater. Like all heroes, we look to them even if our problems are minor by comparison. I found allegorical inspiration at a time in life in which I was voracious for philosophies that could thoroughly discredit Scientology, so that I could move on psychologically.
If you want to critically think through life, skepticism is indispensable. The term “spiritual skepticism” was adopted if not coined on the Tin Foil Hat Podcast. That is where I heard it. I enjoy that show for its humorous presentation of conspiracy theories. A diversity of opinion is good. Even sifting through false information is good, which you have to do with that show, if you want to get some genuine, unreported Truth.
Our sense of discernment is built like a muscle. Nobody will curate a perfect stream of Truth for us and to expect that is like opening your skullcap for easy brainwashing. I like ideas that make me uncomfortable. I like challenging my biases. By doing so, I explore the depth of my psyche.
Krishnamurti says that true listening happens in three areas at once. If someone is speaking, you hear the speaker verbatim, while observing their bias, while observing your reaction. The same can be said of reading a book, a news article, hearing a podcast, or watching documentary.
Listening is meditation. It involves deep concentration. The old joke of people falling asleep at church is taken for granted. If there is a total loss of attention, what is the purpose of going to church? If one goes for the community, I can tell you that Scientology had a lovely community, but it was the blind leading the blind. If you’re asleep during service, are you deaf?
How often have you loudly reiterated a position on a political topic even though it was debunked or misinformed? Nobody has never done this. Do not deny it. Whereas the admission that you don’t know something liberates the mind from delusion and frees up brain power for new possibilities. Intelligence is allowed to operate with a simple “I don’t know.” It is fully shackled when stuck in one position. So it is not about being right all the time, that is too much pressure, it is about knowing when you don’t know.
I don’t know if there is ever a time that you can absolutely know anything. But in the parameters of our observable universe, there is plenty to know and to live by. If we too frequently say we don’t know, I’m afraid we’re making ourselves dull. Keep an open mind, but not so much that your brain spills out. I’m not sure who said that.
Everything in life is in motion. Sometimes you know. Sometimes you don’t know. Truth will continually flow, but your mind is not required to flow with it, it can believe whatever it wants. The brain doesn’t care if an object is real or imagined. The idiomatic expression, “jerking yourself off” uses the allegory of masturbation to refer to a psychological process. Men will lay in bed with dry palms imagining a warm wet pussy and cum into that imaginary woman, that is their bare fist. There is no difference between this and filling your head with beliefs in order to satisfy some absence in your life.
Be willing to disprove your beliefs every day. Abandon them when you reach the shore of Truth. Belief is a raft to carry over the tumultuous river of doubt.
Skepticism gradually purifies all the nonsense that comes from living in our media saturated environment, this age of PR. I have upended my relationships and reset my spiritual, political, and aesthetic preferences a few times now. I have been susceptible to insecurity and I was clinging to my social group out of fear rather than out of love. It led to almost as much delusion as any cult. It led to many people being hurt by me, and many people hurting me. Let’s face it, fear exposes you like nothing else.
We are all hurdling into a brave new world, with all the trappings of social fragmentation that Krishnamurti spent his life warning about. He tracked it from the end of World War One through the height of the Cold War, the hippie movement, the new age, yoga, and meditation crazes. He got notably more cranky over the decades as it seemed his message was going to waste. But he tried on until death.
Maybe he really was the world teacher, because I have yet to see a more concise and apt description of the stresses taking place on the human psyche than the ones he described. He lasted into the computer age — he had begun comparing the brain to the computer. Science has proven him correct. It is that easy to program.
The world we live in desperately needs defragmentation, yet the tactics of ideological warfare only seem to be increasing. If the world psyche is an operating system, it is Windows 95 and it is full of viruses.
Yet for me, my life personally, I have never felt less like I am on a side, part of any groupthink, or even swayed by any close friends and family. It is lonely, but I’m not tormented. I am watching a world fracturing, watching people at the height of fear become highly susceptible to whatever information, whatever community that brings them security. I worry about them, but I am through with trying to control anyone’s perspective. I know that I crave a good cult and belief to live by, but once you’ve discriminated gold from pyrite, you will not trade back.
Auto mechanical talents run through my genetic code almost as consistently as big noses. My father’s side comes from the Oil City area of Pennsylvania, so named for being the epicenter of the oil boom in America. My mother was born in Detroit. We are always one degree of separation to an autoworker.
Shekell Moving Co. First Motor Truck
My great-great grandfather stakes claim to having introduced the first motorized moving truck in Detroit, upgrading from a horse drawn trailer for his Shekell Moving Company. My father’s brother is 75 and winning amateur car races at the Tucson Speedway, with his own machine shop bearing the official sponsorship.
My father can drive a car so that it will run 300,000 miles. Somehow even the interiors remain intact. I think he keeps his vehicles together with psychic will and steady routine. That shows an inherent understanding for the car, but using his hands as a technician, that is quite another thing. Truth is he can barely turn a wrench.
The genetic material could not stop itself in me, although I turned out more like my father, an artist. Like him, I love making music and writing, and yet I find myself rebuilding motors too.
Since high school, I’ve been working on my own cars. Gradually, I have drawn down my reliance on other people to repair them, taking on more complex maintenance over time. There was one project that lifted me to the next level: Rudy the Dasher, a 1977 Volkswagen Dasher 2-door Coupe.
We were fortunate enough to be together, the car, Kate and I, during the full solar eclipse of 2017.
This car was given to me by a good friend, Tony, because it was stuck in his driveway. The classic, but forgotten, VW was his grandfather’s, inherited by his father, then given to him, then given to me. I was honored. Tony just wanted to see the car running again. He tried to maintain it for a while, but it just kept breaking down.
Our mutual friend Doug was our mechanic. He’s also a musician, a multi-instrumentalist in the jazz tradition. I took private piano lessons from him in college. He is a true renaissance man, capable of almost anything. He has always been there to help me on car projects, whether or not I was broke. It was natural to ask him if he would help me with it.
First thing was getting it out of Tony’s driveway. I was living in an apartment downtown, so I asked my new-at-the-time-girlfriend, Kate, if I could tow it to her house and work on it there. She kept the housemates at bay, but I had to work in the street. I found a cheap Craigslist tow driver for 50 bucks and that was that.
Second thing was to clean it out. It was taking on water thanks to dry rotted gaskets around the glass. It was molding all through the interior. Luckily, it was almost completely surface level, and the rust had not yet eaten through anything. Kate helped and we got it clean.
The more I learned about the Dasher, I couldn’t understand how dime-a-dozen VW bugs were so valuable to auto collectors, while this unique, historic car was totally ignored by them. It was the first modern car by VW, introduced in 1974, it is actually the Passat — Dasher is the American model name.
Even in mint condition, this Dasher would not sell for as much as a bus, bug, or Ghia, in poor condition. So it was a labor of love, because I thought this car was too cool to be junked.
After cleaning it out, I had to get it to run. You have air, spark, and fuel. When you are starting from scratch, you have to troubleshoot everything. And it turned out everything was wrong.
Read into the deeper technical stuff on my portfolio page here. See an archive post in which I look to Rudy as a case study in the true environmental impact of cars and the importance of maintaining them. Kate even wrote a poem dedicated to the car, also for THRU.
Kate and myself out on a swimming excursion, with Rudy, July 2015.
We named it Rudy. I gave it a full name: Rudolph Spirit Walton. Let’s break that down. Rudy because it is an underdog, like the football film Rudy. Rudolph honors the reindeer, because VW collectors have been snubbing it from their reindeer games (irony that its factory name is Dasher, I know). Spirit because in Portland, “Spirit of 77” refers to the only year the Portland Trailblazers won the NBA Finals (against Philadelphia). Walton because Bill Walton was MVP that year.
Once it was running, I just kept working on it. For almost three years, this remained my daily driver. When it was tuned up, even with its flaws, it had a glide to it. My favorite was to drive in the farmlands over the Northwest hills of Portland, all connected to Skyline Boulevard.
Skyline is an old residential highway tracking the summit of the mountain dividing Portland from her western suburbs. With rack and pinion steering, you turned the wheel with the road in a way that feels one with its curves, accelerating and coasting in third gear gave just enough range to make most turns without downshifting.
It didn’t have fast acceleration with 84 horsepower, but it had smooth acceleration and would build momentum, getting from zero to 60 faster by the moment. The motor has a Porsche-like growl about it. It was marketed as a luxury car and it felt like one, despite the cracks in the dashboard and flickering lights.
Problems were always popping up. It became a part-time job that wasn’t paying off. Kate was beginning to lose patience with it, and with me, by late 2015. That was a rough year in general, and it cost me so much time, money, and energy, that it seemed foolish to go on with it. I tried to sell it, but its title was stolen out of our storage locker and I couldn’t afford to replace it. Really, that year was traumatic on the whole.
Kate got photos of me doing the brake overhaul. Photo by Kathleen Dolan.
We survived it. Relationships are difficult but we got through, things were looking pretty good, then in 2016, the motor crapped out. It just wouldn’t start. I did a compression test and it failed. Not sure what to do, I found a junky old Ford Ranger for $500 and I grabbed it. Ended up selling it broken down on the side of the road for half that a month later. My name and date was never put on the title, so it was worth it because I needed the truck to take on jobs.
I decided to rebuild the Volkswagen. It had made it down to the hill to the barn before it stopped starting. Better there than the street, but challenging nonetheless. I had to bring the motor to Doug’s warehouse, then commute to his place every day until it was finished. Tony let me borrow his truck to transport the motor back and forth.
While I had the chance back at the barn, I pulled every last part from under the hood, inspected, repaired, or replaced what was needed, and scrubbed it down. By the time we finished the motor and put it back in, it was almost totally mechanically restored.
Using a sleeve, we safely drop pistons into their chambers. Photo by Kathleen Dolan.
As you might expect, it felt better to drive than ever. I got a taste of what it felt like to drive that car new off the lot. And I think it is a swell drive.
I probably enjoyed a few months of trouble free driving before the next wave of mysterious issues would surface, and I would just keep myself busy resolving them.
Some time in early 2017, Kate and I decided to move out of Portland. So it just made sense to sell it and buy a truck, or van. I found a vintage Ford F-150 on Craigslist for just $700. You don’t get one of those for that price without problems. So I started all over again.
Rudy was listed on eBay because I figured there had to be someone in North America looking for a Dasher. Locally, I just got lowballed. I was right. Someone in Idaho bought it, he said he drove a Dasher in college. So I took Tony and his girlfriend together in the backseat on a drive along Skyline Boulevard, at sunset on a summer night, to give him some closure on the project.
Two days later, Rudy was on the freight truck. Meanwhile, I was already working on my new truck, Harriet, to ensure she would make it to Tucson. Little did I know that I was driving a motor that technically should not have been running. I’ll have to save that story for another day.
I cannot stress enough the importance of starting from where you are, and in my previous finance posts, I have approached that idea from the perspective of someone like myself, before I took those first steps. I am not writing a finance series for people that have money and experience already, this is for people like myself: Poor folks. There are lessons in here for anyone that has not invested yet, including people that already make good money.
From Russian-crafts.com.
You can start with five surplus dollars a month, like a kid with a piggy bank. That is step one. Whatever bit of money you can hoard, you have to start with that, then find ways to increase that amount. The piggy bank is okay for the first few hundred bucks, but matryoshka dolls more closely resemble the savings investment scheme that is a grown up strategy.
Living the path from where you began
Life is a game of risk management. Every action is a risk. Going out is a risk. Staying home is a risk. Driving is. Walking is. At any moment, you could be struck by lightning, stray gunfire, be caught in a structural collapse, be stricken with illness — everything can happen. The deal is, the better you manage your risks the more likely you are to avoid disaster. You cannot avoid every expense, you cannot avoid every disaster. Like anyone, I’ve been screwed many times.
If you’re doing well with it, then you will be better prepared for economic downturns and more likely to keep your assets improving over the long run. If you just react to every situation in life without a game plan, you will not manage shit. You will sell all your stocks at a loss exactly when you should be buying stocks. You will buy a new car because you got a dollar raise at work. You will budget for life in a short-sighted kind of way.
My viewpoint, well into my thirties, was that if I paid my rent and bills and I still had $100 and a paycheck coming, then I was solid. I happily spent 60% of my income on a downtown apartment. That apartment was a luxury for me, but it disabled me from saving money. In fact, I had to rent a cheap room to save money to get into that apartment in the first place.
Your circumstances will rule over you forever, until you take ownership of them. Sometimes there are hard decisions to make, like giving up the apartment, leaving spongey people to dry (speaking from experience as a spongey person), leaving jobs that don’t pay you right, between this and that, and the other.
Until you’re beyond wealthy, you will always be sacrificing luxuries and comforts, if you want money later. So long as you’re spending all your money now, or worse, credit cards, then you are assuring yourself that you will not have money later. Credit cards are a strategy to themselves, but I started with no credit card, so I’ll deal with credit and debt in a future piece.
Most folks starting to save money have a short term objective. When you’re inexperienced, you’re saving up for something. If you’re serious, then it will be forever. You should have in mind something like buying a house, starting a business, or funding an investment, while remembering that saving is just going to be a part of your budget, for life.
However much you earn and however much you expend, it is up to you to analyze what you can sacrifice to maximize your surplus income. Leverage your skills so that you can save money at home, earn extra money if necessary, or simply occupy your time so you aren’t just burning cash. Hobbies are proven to maintain health and youth, saving on bills. There are ways to turn hobbies into secondary income, and that is a very efficient strategy to building wealth.
What Am I Saving For?
Stocks and cryptocurrencies are moving fast right now, in these mid-pandemic market conditions. The stock market it behaving with certainty that the economy will reopen, and it hopes that the trifecta of stimulus (cheap oil, loans/grants, and UBI) will have bombastic short term results on quarterly profits, while accelerating innovations that will reduce corporate expenditures.
Most stock picks right now are still undervalued. Hundreds of solid companies are trading at 5-year lows right now, and I am talking about blue chip stocks, brands that will survive this, no problem. There are opportunities, like cannabis, that have actually performed well during the pandemic but were already suffering from a supply glut. Real estate stocks are down, many of them more than 75%, but these companies offer some of the most stable, high-dividend securities available, and are expected to bounce back.
Cryptocurrencies are booming as bitcoin is approaching its halving event, in which the mining reward for BTC is cut by 50%. Trading now around $9,000, as demand is hot and supply is cut, its value should recover 2017 peaks and exceed them. Historically, the value quadruples or better in between halving periods, bubbles and bursts, but continues on a bullish trend after that. This is the built-in supply control limit. It simulates a gold mine with limited supply, the opposite of debt-driven fiat currencies.
Here is an example of risk management. If you just got your stimulus check, and you put all $1,200 into BTC, then you have a fair chance of doubling it within summer, and quadrupling it within a year. In this plan, the first risk is that bitcoin could totally fail, so you lose most of your principle. Risk #2 is a happy one: Do you pull your money when it doubles, or do you keep it in and hope it quadruples? Let’s analyze this.
The odds are that bitcoin will continue on its trajectory of exponential growth for years, maybe decades — as the whole supply takes at least a century to mine. That is the design of the technology. Major flaws expose it to failure: If public sentiment turns or the cryptography is broken, then it plummets to zero.
If you buy about one ounce of gold, currently trading around $1,500, then you might gain a few percentage points on that, year over year, but it will always be valuable, because it is a commodity. If the whole internet shuts down, your BTC is worthless, and the dollar might even fail, so gold will be everything. It is safer to put it in gold, but in the short term, it seems more likely to profit with bitcoin.
So how do you manage this risk? The safe bet is to spread it around. You can buy $600 in bitcoin, and $600 in gold. Even more safe would be to invest it four ways: Open an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), open a stock brokerage account, create a bitcoin wallet, and buy some gold coins. You almost can’t go wrong like this. You have two different, volatile investments to be aggressive with, and two passive investments in which you just wait and add to over the course of your life.
The second risk is how to manage your profits as they come. If you’re trying to maximize your profit, you should wait until bitcoin quadruples before selling any of it. So here is another strategy. Again, it is about doing both. When BTC doubles, you can pull your principle investment of $1,200, put it in your IRA with a CD, let it grow for a lifetime. Keep your profit at play in BTC and it will probably double again. Or you can convert that into different cryptocurrencies, of which there are now hundreds. You have a cash farm going, basically, as you have bought the field at $1,200. All you do now is till it, and replant the seeds of the fruit.
What if Saving Was Also Investing?
When I really truly started saving money in 2017, it just sat in a savings account, earning credit union dividends — like $2 all year. If I had deposited most of it into an IRA then I could have taken a huge tax deduction that year, then rolled that figure back in. This is probably the safest way to save toward a house. The least risky, the most straight forward.
Alternatively, I could have purchased blue chip stocks, like Ford, and taken their dividends. You see, a savings account is a storage of cash, while gold, stocks, and crypto are storages of value. If Ford goes up by 5% and pays dividends, that crushes any savings account by a long shot, but the timing on your sale has to be good. If you’re saving to buy property, timing is everything, and you don’t want to get hung up with market fluctuations.
It is difficult to calculate, because it was growing gradually, then exploded in November and December — who knows when I would have sold it — but if I had stored my savings in Bitcoin, I think I could have tripled my savings. I was not experienced yet, so it’s all about hindsight and learning a lesson from it. Obviously the best performing asset of 2017 (Bitcoin) is where I should have put my money. I had contacts in the ecosystem by 2015 and really should have entered at that time, so I kick myself in the ass a little too much.
Everything I have learned about trading, I have learned by risking small amounts, and running simulations. In fact, my first simulation was high school economics class. It was the “Roaring 90’s” back then, so I am not surprised that my stock picks were successful. Ever since, I had a fascination for economics, but eventually in 2016, I mocked up a portfolio at Google Finance. It is hard to understand why I did not begin trading until 2019.
There are several digital mock portfolio platforms online, or do it like I did in high school: Look up the day ending quotes in the newspaper and produce a paper graph. Or you can make a spreadsheet on your computer, watch quotes on Bloomberg, and pretend to make sale/purchase orders. Produce a balance sheet and see if you are capable of turning a profit. Good news: You don’t have to calculate brokerage fees because they are no longer common for retail investors.
If you have an extra hundred bucks, you can open a stock brokerage account and toss in some extra cash — some of them offer cryptocurrencies plus stocks. Suppose I throw $10 at Bitcoin and make $0.50 back, the steps I take are the same as if I played $10,000, to earn $500 back. By the time you have made a hundred low-risk trades, you’re ready to up your game. And if you don’t enjoy the game, don’t play it. Invest in another way.
The main way to mitigate risk is to leverage expendable money. You pay your bills, you have at least a month’s savings above and beyond your immediate expenses. I recommend three months, but you manage your own plan. After that, you can play that money with no worries. It is not gambling, because you are purchasing shares in companies. Options are like gambling, but I won’t go there yet. Sometimes companies go belly up and your stocks fall to zero, sometimes they skyrocket. The portfolio balance needs to profit overall. But my primary rule is never to sell at a loss.
We have discussed risk management, savings, entering stocks and cryptocurrencies, and some strategies toward that end. My next installment will detail how I work with my portfolio. I’ll discuss digging in, digging out, buying the dip, dividend stacking, fractional shares, day trading, and I’ll compare a few known platforms so that you can think about how and why to use brokerage services.
If you want to start trading and to support me for writing these free blogs, then please join Robinhood with my activation link and we’ll both get a free stock.
Through the summer of 2012, I was living in a tent on a farm. It was great. I had rented a house on that farm years before. But this time, I was trying out tent life. I loved it. I’ll some day devote a full story to it.
The opportunity came to rent a house just in time to avoid October rains. Portland’s climate is kind of abrupt. You can have damn near zero rains between July 1 and September 1, but really, it just begins dumping rain by the end of September and it is relentless. My tent was protected by roped up tarps, which is good for a day or two, but without drainage, the ground eventually turns to mud.
This house (not the tent) was in the same neighborhood that I had been organizing music festivals for years, in St. Johns (near the tent). The landlord needed someone to recover damages from his previous tenants, the neighborhood party animals. He let his house get wrecked for years, without checking on the condition of it. He was chill like that.
Freshly pitched tent with canopy. The kitchen would go to the left.
My situation also demanded that I keep a commercial office for my newly expanded non-profit, InterArts, as we had just taken on the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, successfully completing the 2012 season. A work-live situation would be the most efficient way to keep me on the job for no pay. It would turn out not to be enough.
Anisha Scanlon is the person that brought the opportunity to me. She wanted an office for her own purposes. She had no money, but I was doing okay, at the time. This was a moment of mutual opportunity. She depended on me, I depended on her, so we just went for it. Anisha picked up the lead to get in the property. We all knew the previous tenants, but it was the neighbor that wanted us in there. The property included two homes, so we shared landlords with the neighbor — in fact we shared backyards.
Our mutual friend Todd Guess, at that time unemployed, was hustling his permaculture training and design skills, so he looked at this as an opportunity to consult us through it as part of his portfolio. Other community members joined us in providing materials and labor until we pulled off a minor miracle.
We managed to fully repaint the exterior of the house in October, and finish landscaping within November, as we had an unusually dry season, followed by a soaking wet winter. We shifted to the interior in the knick of time.
This project significantly educated me on home construction and maintenance. This was not quite a remodel, but close to it. We painted everywhere, repaired or replaced kitchen and bath facilities, added new electrical circuits, and more. From the top down, we finished the whole job out with new flooring.
Once everything was done, I got to flesh it out with an art gallery, a complete office and multimedia suite, and workspace for up to six individuals comfortably in the offices.
The grand opening party went off well, I really believed that it was going to continue to go well. One problem began that I didn’t have time to curate the gallery and we did not gain traction to utilizing the house for revenue.
Housewarming Party
Housewarming Party
The fate of my non-profit hinged on a filing error that causes, according to an obscure detail in the Pension Protection Act, automatic revocation of federal 501(c)(3) status. Not an irredeemable mistake, but it was the straw that broke this camel’s back. It would cost us however much time would be involved with filing a new application, plus the $400 fee.
I was tortured with technical non-profit law and all the mumbo jumbo that goes on in the whole non-profit administration field, including professional backstabbing, cut throat competition, popularity contents and all that. I have more memories than I care to recall of supposedly compassionate liberals scrambling all over one another for position at some non-profit corporation. Gross.
That year, I organized for a work travel visa for the Brazilian group Ventura Trio, but the State Department delayed the application until they missed their flight. I worked 16-hour days for the full two weeks leading into and including the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, in 2013, only to have one of my headliners cock blocked by a hegemonic immigration policy. Literally within the same month, the IRS revoked our tax exempt status. I was beyond stressed out. No pay.
The way you get your executive leadership (that’s me) paid is to invite wealthy people to your Board of Directors. I required only a $25 membership fee, very low compared to most organizations. Members could waive that fee with, I think, 12 hours of volunteer time. So I attracted other poor folks to the Board.
InterArts put on No.Fest 2008 through 2011. We split, that is Jeffrey Helwig took over No.Fest in 2012 and I absorbed Cathedral Park Jazz Festival. I ran that for two years. Revenue went year over year roughly like this: $200 (08) $2000 (09) $2500 (10) $4000 (11) $23,000 (12) $32,000 (13). While I gradually increased the office budget, and I slept in my office, I never paid myself a check. I would survive an audit. But it was precarious. Fortunately, I could legally sleep in my office at The Point. It was a huge step up.
There is leadership potential in me, but I write here in this blog openly about my flaws. There is a pathology to it, a history that makes sense of my erratic patterns of mixed success. I have this dual edge, I can only pull off the persona rich people want from me for so long until I crack. I really can’t do it. Most people I meet are fully compartmentalized. I never could do that. So I never got funding to pay any staff beyond event-based contracting. By the way, I earned a RACC grant in 2013 to pay $10,000 to musicians at CPJazz.
That September, I did my annual deep dive into contemporary art and performance via PICA’s T:BA Festival. I had been contributing media since 2008. It was such a nice break from producing events, rather I got to be the commentary, the observer, the journalist. I was feeling a longing to take back my role as a creative person, not an administrator. And I wanted to expand on my long-lived role in media. I found myself emotionally resolved to dissolve InterArts.
Rather than keep the house, or slog through IRS filings to keep my non-profit, I just gave everything up. This sealed my reputation among a certain group that I was prone to overheat and burn out. It was true — but it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy when those same people do nothing to support you if not directly oppose you. I left town for several months, coming back to start a whole new project, turning away from St. Johns, as for me it was scorched earth.
So that is the rise and fall of the The Point. I’ll tell you what, it led to a whole new collection of adventures. After selling all my unneeded stuff, and working out a sudden exit with the landlord, as InterArts had ran its budget and I couldn’t afford the whole house, I embarked on a long form version of my annual holiday season travel through California to Tucson.
It looked like the best planning I had ever given to a trip, but I returned flat broke, without the car I left with, had been investigated by some kind of law enforcement, and a drum set that comedian Andrew Michaan eventually transported to me, for nothing, because I’m a bum. I crashed on the floor of my good friends’ art party house until I found a room for rent.
This next period of my life I regard as the THRU period, where I embarked on the ludicrous project of starting up a media company. Not that the idea was ludicrous, but my capacity to do it was not compatible to the idea. I was ahead of myself. Start from where you are. That is how The Point happened. It was successful. I let it go. Chaos ensued.
I see how this pattern works now. The universe arranges itself toward your intentions, but when you abruptly change those intentions, it pushes back. It has to fully reorient you within its system even though you are a disoriented person feeding it confused intentions. At least that is how I look at it.
