Essential Rhythms: Dancing with the Stars

  the great big old clock o' the universe with jazz hands

There is a rhythm to the affairs of the universe. It has a beat. You can't really dance to it because it is very, very slow. One beat takes two lifetimes. This is why the closest anyone has gotten to the sound of the universe is 'om.' They could only register one lifetime's worth before they shuffled off this mortal coil, and one lifetime's worth is only half a beat. The sound of one complete beat, which takes two lifetimes, sounds more like 'boom'. Imagine!

All the other rhythms—the ones you can dance to—syncopate to this fundamental rhythm in wondrous, poetic ways. If you get out of step with these non-essential rhythms, you can assume that you are also out of step with the universe. It's important to hear the beats all around you, and dance to the ones that have meaning in your life.

There is a rhythm to writing. I'm feeling it right now. You should feel the same beat when you read what I have written. It is the rhythm that connects us—your senses, your heart, to mine. The better I am at keeping the narrative beat with my choice and arrangement of words, the more compelling what I say becomes for you as you read. This connection, this dance, is lifeblood pumping in time with the universe.

There is a rhythm to cooking as well. The cook who knows how to dance in the kitchen orchestrates all the various dishes of a meal to come together at the same time—each at the peak of its flavor, its warmth, its nose, and its visual appeal. This is the time to sit down and eat because this is the time when everything the cook has striven for is perfect. Anyone who is not ready to sit down when dinner is ready does not understand cooking, is not in tune with the universe, and doesn't deserve to get any supper.

No one in my family is ever ready to eat when dinner is ready to be eaten. I know this because I do most of the cooking. Even if they were all ready a few short moments before, by the time I lay the food out and announce dinner they will have found a million other, more pressing, things to do. There are sudden text messages that need to be sent off into the ether, e-mails that need to be answered, TV schedules that need to be checked, sunsets that need to be admired, and dogs that need to be walked. More frequently than you would guess, one of the things requiring attention is taking pictures of the food I have made—evidence at least that I have got the visual appeal part of the rhythm of cooking down.

There is a proper rhythm to TV and the movies as well. A 30 minute TV sitcom runs about 22 minutes of show time, and is punctuated by commercial messages. The writers know this when they script the show. The director paces the narrative accordingly. Strange as it may seem, without the commercials some of the intended rhythm is out of kilter.

My wife hates commercials. She records everything we watch so we can watch it later and speed through the commercials. When I watch the ad images speeding by in kinetic disarray, and images of Victoria's Secret lingerie models shoot past my consciousness like so many meteorites in flaming free-fall, I know we have upset the balance of nature. The collaborative art that is television suffers for the misstep.

When we have arrived at the climax of an on-demand movie, the instant when multiple plot threads are about to resolve themselves, my wife will suddenly pause the show to look up the complete filmography of one of the actors because we have an iPad now so we no longer have to wonder about such things. The cantilevered give and take of the dance with the stars that is a movie is undone. The quickstep of heart and mind comes crashing to the floor in a kaleidescope of limbs, sequins, and taffeta. Please pack up your pumps and go. You've been eliminated.

Bean works on his timing.

Animals have to step to the rhythm too. Fish have the tides. Wolves have the moon. Problems crop up though when the seasons of the beasts collide with the seasons of their masters.

Our dogs, for example, are finely attuned to the rhythms of our lives. The effect is the same as though they were not. They have aligned their downbeats to coincide with ours, but the lyrics don't match up, and harmony is largely absent. So, when we sit down to dinner, the dogs need to go out. The timing is bang on, but the requirements are completely different.

When I've got a burst of creative juice at the computer and words are flowing, Bean will think it's an excellent time to play catch. He will convey this happy thought to me by poking my elbow with his cold, wet nose, and barking. My flow is stopped dead in its tracks to accommodate his. Our rhythms are in sync, but I'm doing a box step and Bean's doing the tango. Somebody's going to trip. I'll bet it's me.

All these are just minor catches in the give and take of timing. We all experience them. The trick is not to let them throw you completely off the beat.

It's the larger currents of our affairs that are more problematic and, should one lose the beat, harder to recover. For instance I tend to buy stocks at their historical highs and give up on them just before they finally bottom out. I lost my job the week before Lehman Brothers hit the fan, confirming what all the major players already knew, and sending the economy into a tailspin from which it is still trying to recover. I decided to become a writer just at the moment when the Internet removed all barriers to entry into that noble fraternity, including it seems, any requirement to understand spelling, punctuation, grammar or even the subject about which one decides to write.

All these things have had a disastrous impact on life as I used to know it, but I am far from being the most ridiculously out-of-step wonk on the planet. I use to think that distinction belonged to Friedrich Riesfeldt of Paderborn, Germany, the zookeeper who gave an elephant an olive oil enema and was subsequently suffocated beneath several hundred pounds of its poop. Riesfeldt's story is wildly entertaining and clearly illustrates the most dire consequences possible for ill-timed choices, but it turns out to also be a fabrication. (You can read the complete original account as well as the facts that prove it to be false at Snopes.)

With Riesfeldt off the table, I'm left with several replacement candidates (pun fully intended):

• Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, in a nationally televised debate, decides to list the federal agencies that he would eliminate if elected. He can't remember them.
• Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, decides to suspend his campaign, all the while maintaining that he had not had any inappropriate sexual liaisons, when the number of women coming forward to dispute this claim looked as if it were going to surpass Tiger Wood's record.
• Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, blasts Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for corruption and says any politician who deals with them should go to jail...just as it comes out that Fannie/Freddie paid him $1.6 million for providing them consulting services as a 'historian'.
• Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, claims America's new focus on income inequality is all about 'envy', interrupts his Florida Primary victory celebration to tell CNN's Soledad O'Brien that he's 'not concerned with the very poor [because] we have a safety net there', then releases his last two years tax returns showing $45 million in income and an effective tax rate of just 13.9%. Turns out he's got significant assets tucked in Swiss and Cayman Island accounts where, presumably, all us envious haters won't be able to see it. And the very poor? He probably thinks they can use their safety net to buy themselves a couple of Cadillacs to drive around like his wife.

By now you've probably noticed a recurring theme in my list of candidates for poster boy of failed timing. That's right—they're all middle aged men whose neckties have cut off circulation to their brains. It's fitting that the Republican mascot is an elephant because never has any one group of like-minded yahoos been so out of step with reality, nor so deserved to be buried under a steaming pile of pachyderm dung.

Dissecting the 'We Are Wall Street' Letter: the most fun you can have in reading glasses

New York Stock Exchange - iconic Wall Street ready to fight back.

 Some of you will have seen this letter. It's been circulating around Facebook for a few days now, proudly touted by those who still buy into the whacky premise of supply side economics as a beautiful rejoinder to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Let's analyze it piece by piece, and see just how beautiful it is. (Original text in blue. My comments in black.)

• We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. This much at least is not problematic. Given the timbre of the rest of the letter, the writer is certainly arrogant enough to represent the excesses of Wall Street that we've all grown to despise.
• I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its [sic] not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas. Also quite true. No one complains when they are winning. The problem here is, of course, that it was just like gambling, except it wasn't supposed to be. No one in their right mind takes their pension fund to Las Vegas. They put it in nice safe diversified mutual funds and money market funds. All the unmitigated risk came from Wall Street. Wall Street took our money to Las Vegas and lost it. Not their money, our money. We didn't give them permission to do it. They didn't ask. But even though they lost our money, they still expected to get their commissions and their fat bonuses. And it gets worse because they didn't just lose our money, they set us up to lose our money and then bet against us. They sold securitized mortgage paper that they knew was crap to our pension funds, lied about how crappy it was, and then invested themselves in short positions on the same crap so that the more money we lost, the more money they made. The biggest and most respected Wall Street firms were found guilty of this kind of fraud. They paid substantial fines and penalties for it—not so substantial that it has slowed them down any, but hundreds of millions of dollars. No one went to jail though. A lot of us Joe Mainstreets think someone should have gone to jail. God knows we would have had we sunk to this level of criminality.
• Well now the market crapped out, and even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are. Scapegoat, my ass. If the shoe fits, bud.
• Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. Most of us in the 99% work long hours too—at least those of us who still have jobs. Good luck taking jobs away from the 14 million of us who don't have one to take, or the 11 million additional displaced workers who have been forced into early retirement, have fallen off the unemployment rolls, or are underemployed. We don't retire at 50 with a pension either. In fact many of us will be lucky to be able to retire at all after what you bozos have done to our savings. You don't eat what you kill. You kill for sport. You work until 10 at night because your whole life is about racking up points. You don't have friends except at work. Your family plays second fiddle to your job. You come after my plate and you're not going to find the filet steaks and coquilles St. Jacques that you are used to. You are going to find rice and beans. If you try to take it away from me, you are going to end up eating broth and jello at the hospital.
• For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and doing landscaping? Well, yes I do think you are incapable of teaching 3^rd graders and landscaping. I've done both and I've also been a CPA and worked as an accounting executive. I'd rather do accounting. It's easier. It's not as easy as trading hypothetical pieces of fake paper, but it's not nearly so hard as managing a classroom full of eight-year-olds or trying to get rid of a spider mite infestation on a variegated dracaena marginata without killing the plant...or yourself.
  
  

  

  Trading floor of the NYSE where Wall Street is busy saving America from its elementary school teachers.

  
  
• We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much. Wait...what? Cushy? 4 months off? Double time and a half? $5,000 for running a baseball practice? What planet do you live on?
• So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours. Wait...what...again? $85k? Same question with respect to your planet of residence. I drive a 2003 PT Cruiser, which I wash in the driveway with a garden hose. I tip 20-25% when I eat out because that's as much as I can afford. I didn't stop tipping or cut my tipping down when I lost my job because, unlike you, I am not a prick. And here's another thing. Since you make your money off of mine, when my money dries up, so does yours. It doesn't actually work the other way, much as you might wish us to believe that it does.
• The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom. We lived off the money we worked for. You rejoiced in the money you scammed us out of. What's more the Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee are not going to knock you off the top of the pyramid. You guys paid to put them in office. They are probably going to leave things as they are unless the Occupy Wall Street movement gains so much momentum that they have to sit up and take notice. Where do you think the $2 trillion in bailout and economic stimulus money went? It went to Wall Street. It paid your fat bonus. Conservative pundits are clamoring about Obama's spending spree, but most of the money went right to the top of the pyramid where it stayed. It didn't go to hiring teachers back or putting America back to work. It went into the coffers of asshats and pirates who used some of it to lobby against financial reform and the kind of common sense regulations that would prevent another bubble, bust, and bailout cycle. Obama is your friend. He may not be as good a friend as, say, Rick Perry, but he's done everything you required to maintain the status quo.
• We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? And will they? Honestly, I don't even know what this means. I think possibly your last hit of cocaine kicked in somewhere in the middle of the paragraph above this one. In fact this whole missive is so disjointed and misinformed that I have decided, arrogant or not, you are not Wall Street at all. You don't know enough about how finance and economics actually work to have ever done time selling securities, vetting market analysis, or timing trends. You are an ignoramus, and you are not taking anything away from me. Besides, someone way smarter than you has already got most of it. 

Flatline the Flat Tax

Rick Perry is coming to town with a tired old idea - the flat tax - only it's voluntary. That's right, in an effort to simplify 3 million lines of tax code, Perry has proposed adding another layer of tax rate that you can elect to pay if your taxes computed under the old system add up to more than 20%. How is this simplification? This is an unvarnished tax reduction for the highest bracket taxpayers. 


It's just another way to lessen taxes for those who can most afford to pay, and stick it, yet again, to the middle class.


Just say 'no' to more of the same old trickle down doodoo with a bumper sticker from Aimless Arts.

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