Lunch with a Bulgarian "Investment Banker"

I always enjoy my friends from the former Easter block. They have unexpected opinions. Today I had lunch with my friend Peter, who used to be head of investment banking for Merrill Lynch's Moscow operations. Peter is in enjoying life. He has been married to a Penthouse Pet (Russia) for 12 years. The lady is a wonderful mother, and is smoking hot. Peter caught me glancing at his wife in a mirror. As an individual he long past jealousy. Instead he turned to me and said "... behind every penthouse pet is a man. A man who is sick to death of banging her and wants a new experience. Familiarity is the taproot of contempt." As a single guy, who was on the outskirts of the dating world in high school and cobbled together some flings and experiences in university, I always felt I missed the boat. Peter had not sympathy. "We all get jaded and are dissatisfied. This is why so many crime boss die in their bath tubs through auto affixation ... even with a chicken in their ass." There are more tears from realized dreams than from unrealized ones. The reality of something very attractive might not be wonderful as the image. Peter's primary complaint about his "Pet" her high protein and fibre diet has turned her into a nigh time fart mill. Not my first thought

A modern Oswald Spengler

Today I sat in Starbucks and spoke with terminally ill professor. He was a modern Oswald Spengler. Civilization is on a onward collapse. Humans are tribal and violent. A deeply pessimistic view, nevertheless, a defensible one.

Your past, and telling people about it.

It is hard to get caught in a lie. But generally this not accurate. We create stories about our past so we can continue in the present. Getting caught in a lie about about your past is really manifest ineptitude with insufficient cover. I hate speaking with people about the past. In a rags to riches story, they want to talk about the rags. It makes them comfortable. So to avoid these conversation, I avoid this narrative. In the past I took risks and periodically failed. When I discovered what I was good at, I became that person. Failure never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. It shocked me. It did not happen. But there are others who want to live in the past because they are comfortable in it. They do not exist or matter. It will shock you how much they do not exist or matter.

Charvet

My last post was about an escape to Paris. Another favourite thing ... Parisian tailors. OK this is going to hurt your wallet. But the experience is worth it. More than 150 years old, Charvet is a remarkable shirt maker. Coco Chanel, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Oscar Wilde, the Kings and Queens of Europe, Debussy, Monet, Fred Astaire, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wright, President Jacque Chirac of France, Bing Crosby and Noel Coward are just a few of the clients who wore Charvet shirts. Imagine every facet of your shirt, custom tailored to your own body. Just the right amount of pull, resistance or slack where you like it. Mother of pearl buttons. Quality stitching. The most luxurious dress shirt fabrics anywhere in the world. Silk lined cuffs and colours, and silk guards just in case the cotton should chafe your ever sensitives skin. $1 Can Thousand per shirt ... However, if you need to look good, it may be money well spent.

Memories and the Present

In the last month, I attended three art auctions, traveled to Paris, and oversaw the wind-up of a family investment business. I alos made a mistake. I attended fund raiser for a college I attended for one year. In these dire times, universities are challenged. Just like teacher, local symphony orchestras and booksellers, they are fighting for survival in a global market. What required relocation, study in libraries, and the gentle tutelage of an academic, can now be done on on-line from any location. The college experience is now web-enabled and looking rather costly. Just as the average tax payer compares their tax package going to school boards, and money they spend on colour TVs over the years, they realize they are not getting their bang for their buck. From black and white to colour liquid crystal, manufacturing has delivered the goods. Local educational institutions have not. There is little a teacher can do to increase their productivity on par with global manufacturing processes. Hence, local small colleges, who do not have distinct advantage are in trouble. This college is no exception. Let me back up further. I attended this small college, in a small prairie town, before going off to a better known university. It was my first step out of a blue color but wildly ambitious neighbourhood. I belonged there, because I loved and liked so many people in that area. However, my interests, impatience with the lack of opportunity, and realization that I could be much more than what people I assumed I would be made me impatient. Attending this college was an extension of this experience. It was filled with nice people, from comfortable homes, who assumed that I was not supposed to succeed. I was not blond, blued eyed, or willing to repeat back what I was told. Although I read voraciously, much of my thinking was still the result of a hair brained, parochial, but caring church community. Have no doubt these people were intelligent. Further, my parents were struggling financially. The farm economy had collapsed, our oil and gas service firm was worth nothing, and the family chicken farm which now supplies KFC for Western Canada, could not turn a profit. Things were grimm. I could not get a job to save my life. However, could start businesses, and would fold them when their profitability turned. This instinct proved to be my path to the future. I entered this college, with a first year slate of philosophy, calculus, linear algebra, english, and physics. I studied and had a 97% average. This was not supposed to happen. The dean made this very clear to me. In the reception for students with the highest GPAs of the year, he turned to me and said "... I do not know how you did it, but we will see through you. The game will be up shortly." For an outsider, I had done much to upset the status quo. I had run for office in the local legislature. Further, I asked the prettiest girl in the college out and she went. I wrote the GMAT exam, got a good score, and planned for an MBA. But the challenges of keeping cash flows in line with expenses, helping my parents, and keeping up my grades, got to me. At the end of the summer of my first year, I was fat and deeply depressed. The girl threw me away for a novelist/computer scientist. I pulled together a BS (hon) in mathematics through distance studies and desperate times in Kingston for my residency requirements. Everything felt like a desperate failure. I began running to keep calm and sleep at night. I started an MA in politics at a provincial university, and they were not impressed. I picked away at a graduate degree in the history of religion and completed a thesis. This was finding legitimate intellectual space for central religious beliefs in the world where I lived. I also learned how to run multiple businesses under growing global competition. I learned how to manage currency risk, retain labour, manage cross-border finances, and develop and implement strategy. I turned around failing businesses, drank so much coke that I now have too many crowns. I went bank to school hoping for something better, and studied operations research. Honestly, I wrote a thesis on how to move oil through pipelines efficiently. I won a gold medal because learned everything the hard way. I stayed and also took a degree in industrial relations. I loved being in an intellectually vibrant world. But I returned to the world world. After a few years in Chicago, working as an actuary, and commodities trader, I returned to my prairie hoping to "make a difference." I was roundly punished for the effort. I was fired from a low level civil service job. So I departed, and began the globe trotting role of consultant with AT Kearny, and investment banker with Solomon Brothers. It was good. I bought things that I had never had before ... bespoke suits, property, watches, businesses, art, and the company of women that I had only seen magazines. Some of these experiences will stay with me. I like business, I collect art, and found out that even drop dead gorgeous women fart in the morning. Where I sit today. I am visiting scholar in Finance and IT at a large Canadian business school; I concurrently hold a position as a senior advisor in a national government; I own properties Madrid, Chicago, and a personal "hobby" ranch in the mid-west; I am on the board of governors of a British University; and, I own an investment firm, an agribusiness firm, and a oil services firm. I run 10KM every morning and my London tailor's suiting looks good on me. Yet the past haunts me. The last line of the Great Gatsby reads "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The novel is about a man's struggle to achieve his goals by both transcending and re-creating the past. Yet humans prove themselves unable to move beyond the past: in the metaphoric language used here, the current draws them backward as they row forward toward the green light. This past functions as the source of their ideas about the future and they cannot escape it as they continue to struggle to transform their dreams into reality. The reality of my past and present were underscored to me when I went to a recent re-union of my little college.

When I was asked what I did, I recounted my role in modest terms, leaving much out. I was enthusiastic about my visiting scholar role, because I discovered the role of mentor and teacher. I am not sure I have anything to over young people other than guidance in resolving ambiguous business decisions. However, the president of my old college greeted me with the rejoinder "I hope to god they are not letting you teach!" Not to be stung, I responded, "I teach in the executive MBA program in the Dubai." I know I gave as good as got, but it hurt. The girl was there. She was not as pretty as I remembered. Blond and a little dumpy. My current girlfriend, who is a tall blond in in 40s, a former catalogue model with an MBA in finance, who lives at the palates studio, looked far better. Nevertheless, the girl let me know that I had lost out. An old professor began speaking to me about the struggles I had and how hard life at been for me. A former fellow student, now an MD in Montreal began condescending about the struggles of intelligent women and how I had done so well for my background. Then there were the requests for cash. Phrased roughly in the terms of "If you are doing so well, give us money." I was then told I did not have deep pockets. At left, with my girl to an art auction, where I purchased a few abstract expressionist paintings and did not sleep for the night. I felt beaten up. In days, I took off to France. To heel, to put distance between myself and the experience and to heel.

I returned to my favorite spot in the whole world. The Shakespeare and company bookstore in Paris. Established by American ex-pat who sought to escape North American in the 1950s for the intellectual life of Paris. When the former owner was alive, it was clear he just sought escape.

Durring my college years, I stayed here and attempted to write a novel. I did not. I ended up writing a theological book (published) and several mathematical theorems (published). The former helped me keep my sanity by reconciling religious experience with my past, and contemporary reality. The latter got me into AT Kearny and the world of statistical arbitrage in commodities markets. Perhaps I was not going to become Earnest Hemingway. It was a place to reconsider the past, the present, and enjoy the wine and food of france. I walked the streets of the Left bank, haunted bookstores and art galleries and slept deeply. How could I reconcile the past, the present, and these peoples' role? I Resolved not to follow the past the Great Gatsby. How am I going to do this? 1.) I am going to live the present and look toward the future. Ask not about where you are from, what you overcame, and what you had to do to get there. We are going to the stars. 2.) There is no such thing as history, there is only a frontier. History happened to someone else. 3.) I am not going to apologize for what happened. It happened and if you cannot deal with it go away. 4.) I am concerned about what tomorrow, next year and what the next decade looks like. 5.) I am concerned about friends, family and loved ones. After that the world can bugger off. There is considerable wisdom in Henry Ford's line that "... history is bunk." He understood how constant consideration of the past could constrain the present.