Departure & Blowup

From the Black Swan by Taleb





I gave my client notice today. My outside departure date is October 17th.

To leave this place
To which I should never have come
A cloud of paper
A morass of process
I put it all down
And leave it to them
Those who stay to be buried under the weight of it
I was never any good at it anyway
It will be a relief for them and me
But mostly for me.


On another topic: This whole fiscal disaster is a black swan event.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory


Nobody really predicted it. Not the way it came down. It was considered highly improbable and even though a few seers foresaw a possible fall from grace, the reality is that had we seen it coming we would all have moved to safer ground. Especially those deeply invested in the market. Now it has come but not gone. Panic has set in. The herd is running towards the cliff. Any one of us could stand our ground and face this off but once allow ourselves to get caught in the flow, we're dead men. Hurtling out into space, our final moment of cognizance focused on the long fall to earth.

The fault is that our lives are based on money and the greed for things and more things rather than life itself. It controls us rather than we controlling it. So we are open to attack. We are exposed horribly. Panic is insatiable. It creeps up your spine to your throat and chokes you.

We are all Chicken Little and the big blue sky is falling (even if it is not).

I called my broker the other evening just to wish him well after what I knew had been another tough day. He was wound so tight I wasn't really sure he was human anymore.

I can't talk now.

What!

What!

I can't hear you!

I can't talk now.

Maybe I got the wrong number. It must have been another person's broker.

It made me laugh. I have been there. I know what it is like. How silly we sound. We shriek rather than talk. We devolve backward to apes again. Sitting in the trees overlooking the great rift valley, 3 million years ago, shrieking when a beast of prey comes close.

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I ran a 29 minute warm up with Jake this morning and then ran a loop in 20:39. Jake didn't try to stay up. He of the back to back to back hard days. I ran 7 minutes slow afterward to get rid of the effort.