weekend notes

Hope all goes well…  “Asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge,” wrote the Fed on Friday, already orienting its efforts on fighting the last battle. Which is not to say these risks have passed. They haven’t. But with 80k Americans dead, when nearly

AI’ve always turned up the volume when writing, never listening to anything new. Fresh lyrics are distracting. But after the hundredth time, a song’s words disappear and all that remains is mood. Immersion. From that place things open, creep out, connect. And truth be told, the most fun part of writing is never quite knowing where it will lead. Stephen King writes to music, in a trance. Metallica

Hope all goes well… “First off Olivia, I’m proud of you for passing the exam,” I said. She smiled. “Now let me say that to become the person you want to be, you can’t handle yourself like that again.” She apologized, having spent the previous day locked in her room, crying, indulging in drama, worried she’d failed. “No need to say you’re sorry, it’s not about me. It’s about you, what you want to a

:“One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic,” said Bill Gates. “My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus. The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. W

Hope all goes well… “I just can’t stop crying,” said Mara, apologizing, taking a seat on the couch as I closed my laptop. “Olivia and I went to her best friend’s house for a birthday drive by and were first in a long line of cars. We were blasting ‘Today is Your Birthday,’ rolling slowly. When her friend heard us, she sprinted into the front yard, screaming with joy, we all started crying, now I c

ASpring is here. Tulips are rising. They do so every year of course. A miraculous reminder of the ebb and flow that surrounds us. That includes us. That is us. And for some, rising tulips return us to stories of Holland’s mass hysteria. It left them in 1637 for no apparent reason. A single bulb that traded one day for 10x a skilled craftsman’s annual earnings was virtually worthless the next. Natu

Hope all goes well… “101 degrees!” screamed Mara, taking her own temperature with a dodgy infrared thermometer from some Chinese Magic 8-Ball factory, each reading random. Charlie raced across the kitchen like a cheetah. Silent. Sliding in socks. We stared in wonder. He grabbed his mother’s face with both hands, looked into her startled antelope eyes, and planted a juicy kiss on the lips. “There,

A“Want a scary story?” I asked some nerds. They nodded, firing up Excel in eager anticipation. “Once upon a time, America’s vast state pension system was insolvent. But everyone pretended otherwise.” One little nerd interrupted the Zoom session, and asked me why? “Because no one admits they’re broke. Anyhow, pension boards required perpetual +7.5% returns, and tasked their CIOs with the search for

Hope all goes well… “You know the best part about giving Charlie a mohawk?” asked Jackson dealing at the kitchen table. “What’s that?” asked Charlie, counting his chip stack, all of us on edge. “It’ll be watching him explain to his 5th grade teacher on Zoom that he got his head shaved because he lost a game of poker with his dad,” said Jackson, trash talking. I kept quiet, sipping Tequila because,