Where Did All the Money Go?

I just received the October statement for our investment, brokerage and retirement accounts, and for the second consecutive month it's taken a serious nose dive. Not the direction I like to see my savings go. We live well within our means, contribute the maximum allowable amount to our SEP plans (the self-employed equivalent of a 401k), and make monthly automatic payments to my investment savings. And in the days since the current financial meltdown began, I've lost a LOT of money.

I don't like to talk about my finances. It's something I keep pretty personal. So I won't get too specific. But let's just say, it will take me three to four years of working and contributing to my investments as I have in the past to make up for the losses I have experienced in the last two months. And that's only if the market recovers from its tailspin very soon.

So, like many in America, I've been asking, "Where did all the money go?" If my money was there in August, who has it now?

Then I read this article titled "Where did all the money go?" and I finally grasped a very important lesson in finances. In fact, you could call it a rude awakening.

In the article, Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale explains that the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money -- it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth.

"It's in people's minds," Shiller says. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today -- who are very, very few people -- are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth."

In other words, I took my money -- real, hard, hard-earned money -- and bought something that I (and many others) thought was worth something, at the price we/they believed that something was worth at the time. Only now, that something I bought isn't worth what I paid for it.

It's as if I bought a high-priced house in a neighborhood that then went bad and the value of that house declined. I can wait it out and see if the neighborhood improves, something that may or may not happen in my lifetime. Or I can cut my losses and get out now -- before the neighborhood gets any worse and the value of my house plummets even further.

But the lesson I've learned, the rude awakening I've experienced, is more than a lesson in economics.

I'm learning that nothing really has changed. Just my value on paper. Just the vision I had of retiring three or four years earlier than I likely will. Just the false feeling of security I got with each monthly statement.

But nothing else has changed really. Not who I am. Not how people see me. Not who my friends are or the way my family feels toward me.

So what will I do differently? I won't stop saving or investing -- just maybe invest in safer, less risky options. And I may invest less and live more. Instead of investing in the future -- my future -- perhaps I will invest more in the present -- and in others.

Reminder to self:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." -- Matthew 6:18-21

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

It was different this time, wasn't it? The day after the election, the day after the U.S. elected our first African-American President. That day was different than any other day after the election had ever been. Did you notice? Did you look at black people differently that day? Did they seem different to you?

I didn't vote for Obama, so I can't take credit for this historic event. I voted for McCain, for experience, for certainty, for a party whose promise of limited government involvement, trickle-down economics and pro-life leanings appeal to me. But imagine if McCain had won.

That day after the election would have felt no different than the day before. Little would have changed. And my vote would have been a vote for the status quo -- for better or worse.

And it wouldn't have been any different.

But it is different now. A pivotal moment in the trajectory of this country has occurred. A man of color has been elected to the highest office in the greatest nation on Earth.

I admit to being a cynic, to not believing his message of hope. Now that Obama is President, I will pray for him, for his guidance, for his wisdom, for his protection. I will pray that his promises were not empty, that he will be able to bring about the positive change he pledged. I pray that he will prove me wrong. And that our nation will be different -- and better.

Words: A Rather Random Brain Dump

As far back as he could remember, all he had ever wanted was to be normal. He wasn't even really sure what normal was exactly, but it was always held in high regard by his mother. The life lessons she taught were subtle, but lasting in their impact: You don't want to be poor. But being too wealthy is something to disdain. Vanity is, well, vain. But stand up straight, point your toes in when you walk, and for heaven's sake, don't pick your nose in public. Don't stand out. But don't be common. Excel. But don't be haughty. God's grace has washed you of your sins, but don't get too comfortable.

Today I awoke from a coma. Not a real coma, but a fog that has lasted some 30 years or more.

"Live your life for something bigger than yourself."

What have I been living for? Normalcy? Some elusive status quo?

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

Words are powerful. Words have the power to heal, the power to inspire, the power to hurt, the power to destroy.

We're constantly sowing words like seeds. Some will fall on fertile soil, some on rocky soil. Some will be choked out by thorns and weeds. Some will be eaten by birds. Some will take root and grow.

Funny how I can remember some words that were spoken to me long, long ago. "Sometimes you have to act your way into a better way of thinking," a wise woman told me at a pivotal point in my life. "Don't stand like that, you look like a queer," an older neighborhood boy told me. (Ironically, his father would later leave his mother for a man.) "My dad says your mother looks like a sack of potatoes," said a kid who looked like he should have worn that sack over his head.

What words am I sowing? I need to think before I speak.

The B-52s Live at the Garden

15 seconds of "Love Shack". Sorry about the poor quality cell phone image. Must. Have. An. iPhone.

Crosby, Stills & Nash Concert

Incredible un-Memphis-like weather and a major flashback from the 70s! All in all, a wonderful evening.

Stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down!

My Job

This just reminded me so much of what my job can be like sometimes. Enjoy!

Earth, Wind & Fire Concert

Poor video shot with my cellphone, but a FANTASTIC concert. I couldn't believe how many of EWF's songs I remembered. This was part of the soundtrack of my high school days. Enjoy a few seconds of "Fantasy".

Family Vacation in D.C.

Check out pictures from our trip to the Capital.

What Gets Me Through the Day

What's it all for? This is what it's all for.

Always We Begin Again

That's the title of a great little book, a modern retelling of the Benedictine Code and a handy bedside table easy read you want to refer to over and over. Starting over. It's what we all need from time to time. And it's where I am today.

Spiritually: "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will."

Professionally: "Be the brand they want to be."

Personally: "To have a friend, be a friend."

Walking and Falling

On a recent weekend retreat to a state park about an hour south of here, I rose early in the morning for a walk at dawn. Alone with my thoughts. Alone with my God.

Fog was thick across the lake. You could barely see the end of the dock. A footpath seemed to circle around lakeside, and I chose to follow it to the left.

A song came into my head and I found myself singing. Alone with my thoughts. Alone with my God.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the robe & crown?
Good Lord show me the way

O brothers let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
Come on brothers, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the starry crown?
Good Lord show me the way

Suddenly I fell. Hard. Flat on my butt. Walking down some wooden timber steps my feet simply flew out from under me, and I came down with an unholy thud.

I must have made a sound — a grunt? a curse? — because I could see the heads of two fishermen in a boat in the lake both look in my direction. Did they see me? Apparently not. They immediately went back to watching their lines.

I got up brushed myself off and walked on, gingerly, slowly making my way down the remaining timbers and along the leafy path.

O sinners, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O sinners, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good ol' way
And who shall wear the robe and crown?
Good Lord show me the way

Then I stepped on a boardwalk over a dry creek bed, and it happened again. This time my right foot slid away from me and off the edge of the treated lumber bridge. I came down on my left knee which slid across the slippery boardwalk and barely caught myself with the heel of my hands, preventing a face plant but sending my glasses flying off my face where they hung dangling between two boards.

Let's go down, come of down
O sinners, let's go down

Okay, Lord. You've got my attention.

Did you have to be so literal?

Okay. I guess you did.

Good Lord, show me the way.

A Permanent State

Coldplay singing from my iTunes, echoes my thoughts from long, long ago:

When I was a young boy I tried to listen
And I wanna feel like that,
Little white shadows blink and miss them
Part of a system, I am

If you ever feel like something's missing
Things you'll never understand,
Little white shadows sparkle and glisten,
Part of a system, a plan

All this noise I'm waking up
All this space I'm taking up
All this sound is breaking up

Maybe you'll get what you wanted
Maybe you'll stumble upon it
Everything you ever wanted
In a permanent state

Words I wrote perhaps 25 years ago:

To live on a mesa I really don't know.

Downhill so sudden
Verbatim vast
Crepuscular plummet
So hard to forecast

Not much has changed.

God, are you listening?

Are you there?

If you are, help me understand: Why do you not answer our prayers?

A Lot Can Happen in a Year

It's hard to believe a whole year has passed since I last updated this thing. I wish I had a good excuse. A serious illness. A tragic accident. An alien kidnapping. Something. But all I can come up with is an unexplained rapid passage of time. (Hmmm. Maybe it was an alien abduction, after all.)

Since I last posted: Business has bounced back in full force. I've hired a new employee. W has become a young lady of six. P has grown into a fine young man. LJ has launched her new Etsy site. My look now includes a beard and bifocals. (I really need to replace that photo of me on this page!)

Now that I've got a little extra help around the studio, hopefully, I'll have more time to post my thoughts every now and then. After all, I do have thoughts. Deep thoughts. And musings by the megaton. And this place has been a nice place to put those thoughts in the past.

I won't make any promises, except to say I've missed the old Embryo Pig Farm and I hope to visit more often.

Cheers!

Summer Memories

Wren at the Beach at Evening


LJ and Wren at the Beach


Me and LJ at Picolo's The Red Bar

So This is Mid-life

I don't know if other people feel this way, but I have never really felt my age. A late bloomer in junior high and high school, I don't think I started shaving until I was in college. Didn't get the first hair on my chest until I was probably 20. I remember football players always seemed so much older than me, even when I was the same age that they were, and even when I was actually a bit older than them.

Then there came a period of my life where my late-blooming served me well. In my 30s, people constantly expressed surprise when I told them my age. Of course, I've never been much for dressing up in business suits and acting like my father, so I "dressed younger" than most guys my age. But I also try to stay in shape (with as little effort as possible). I took up running while in college and have stuck with it ever since. Just don't assume that means I'm running any marathons. I'm doing good to run 3 miles 3 days a week.

Well, it seems that life and reality have a way of catching up to you.

I'm 45 now. Soon to be 46. I have more gray hairs than blonde ones and a little (for now) naked spot on my crown. I have to wear reading glasses along with my contacts to see anything close up. I have this thing around my waist that makes the button on my pants scream in agony. Some people call them "love handles" but aint nobody holding onto these babies these days. Speaking of which, I'm starting to understand the collosal market demand for Viagra, Cialis and the like. (Although, I try to think of my lower libido as a God-send rather than an affliction.)

And what's with this? I catch myself getting jealous when I see a guy with a full head of thick, wavy hair. I NEVER used to even think "Gee, that guy's got good hair."

I'm also jealous of people with what seem like more successul careers than mine. I subscribe to a weekly Business Journal that I can barely make myself read because it always fills me with feelings of envy, makes me compare myself to other people being profiled in fluff pieces. And it's not simply jealousy. I wonder, "What's wrong with me? Why haven't I made such achievements with my life? What's holding me back? What character flaw do I have that they haven't got?"

Plus, I'm in that sh*t sandwich, caught between kids needing me as their father and aging parents whose needs for me are growing as well. The future now starts looking pretty scary, filled with worries like crime, college tuition, illnesses and long-term care.

There's just no denying it. I am middle aged. I am over the hill. In fact, I've topped that hill and slip-sliding down its backside. And now I've been on the downhill side long enough for that reality to sink in. The "mid-life crisis" is the shock, the denial, the attempt to stave off the inevitable. And, thank God, I believe I'm starting to get over the "crisis" part. The shock is wearing off. The denial is gone. The truth is sinking in.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not giving up or giving in. I'll still get up and put in my 3-mile run, 3 days a week. I'll still spike my hair with "product" in an attempt to look young (and hide that bald spot). I'll still look at the latest issue of GQ or J Crew when shopping for clothes. My attitude is just different now.

I thought by this time in life, things would be easier. There would be a pattern, a system, everything set in its place. I thought my business would have grown to a point where it took care of itself. I thought my life would pretty much run on auto pilot. And now I realize that was just a pipe dream, my unreal and imagined idea of being an adult.

So I sit. I am still. I listen to what I'm saying. I listen to what God is saying. "My grace is sufficient." I think of all the incredible blessings in my life. My wife. My children. Our home. My work. And I am grateful. Grateful to be on the downhill side of the hill. Mindful that there are advantages to being on the downhill side. Like gravity. Like a snowball, picking up the lessons I've learned along the way and growing larger as I go. Like finally being able to see the valley below, beginning to understand where it is that I am headed.

The race is not over. Welcome to mid-life, Jay.

Coming up for air

THE BIG ONE came through. Naming, branding and launch of a $1.4 billion spin-off company with 3,000 employees across the U.S. To say the least, my summer was a blur. Did squeeze in a week at the beach a couple of days after the Day One launch. Will upload a photo or two shortly. Gotta go. Life is calling again.

Where I'm At

A lot has happened since my last post nearly three months ago. My grand-nephew, William Blake Burns lost his five-month struggle for life on March 5. I was honored to speak at his memorial service and read from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence". (I also designed the program for his service -- a quietly simple labor of love.) I resigned the troublesome client mentioned earlier, and am still trying to collect money they owe me for services rendered. Businesswise, I have several very promising "irons in the fire" -- a couple of large, new clients and some important pending projects. If all of them come to fruition I will be living in clover and hiring up team members to get all the work done. But presently, I'm in a holding pattern, waiting on decisions to be made which are out of my hands. The snow has long since melted. Spring blossoms have peaked and faded to a lush late-spring green. Everything that once seemed dead is budding forth with new life.

God is good.

Stuck

I took this picture with my cellphone camera while stuck in traffic. It had started snowing about 2:00 and at 3:00 I had to run a package to the nearest FedEx drop-off site for an overnight delivery to New Jersey. The normally 15-minute roundtrip to FedEx ended up taking more than an hour. Most of the trip was spent crawling at a snail's pace and watching the cars around me fishtail and all the streets, both the main thoroughfares and the sidestreets, become clogged with commuters picking up kids early from school and leaving work early for the day.

Thought I'd kill a minute or two by clicking a shot looking northward on Perkins Extended and emailing it to the Pig Farm.

Hey, at least I'm not one of those poor suckers stranded when this same storm front gave birth to a record snowstorm in the Northeast.

Thank U, Alanis

It's been a while since I last posted. I've been struggling with an especially difficult new client. Trying to find the elusive thing that will make them happy. It's a client that in better times, frankly, I would have resigned. I'm wondering if business will ever be what it was just a year ago. Then, if you've been following my grand-nephew, Will's story, you know that he went in for his second surgery to repair a serious heart defect, the doctors said basically "It doesn't look good," and he is now clinging onto the frayed edges of life. And in the midst of all this, while listening to the words of "Thank U" by Alanis Morissette, I am struck with a rare moment of clarity.

How about me not blaming you for everything
How about me enjoying the moment for once
How about how good it feels to finally forgive you
How about grieving it all one at a time

Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence

The moment I let go of it was
The moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it was
The moment I touched down

How about no longer being masochistic
How about remembering your divinity
How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out
How about not equating death with stopping

Thank you India
Thank you providence
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you nothingness
Thank you clarity
Thank you thank you silence

The world is still revolving on its axis. God is still in charge. I remember His Divinity. I remember this life is not meant to be perfect. I remember that "all good things work for good for those who love the Lord." I remember that God's will is good, pleasing and perfect. And I remember to be trusting -- yes, even thankful -- for disappointment, for hardship, for weakness. If nothing else comes from difficulty, it draws me closer to God. And for that -- for Him, for His presence -- I am grateful.

Happy New You!

In case anyone noticed: Sorry I haven't made any posts in the last several weeks. I'd like to say it's because I "have a life" but really I think I just haven't had anything to say. But I have been busy. I'm solo (I hate the word freelance!) for the first time in nearly ten years, and business has picked up over the past few weeks. So I have been busy.

I've always liked the month of January. Partly because my birthday is in early January and every year as long as I can remember my Mom has made me a peppermint birthday cake with crushed bits of candy canes sprinkled over the top. But mostly because January represents a fresh start, a new beginning.

Flipping around on television the other night, I was attracted by a movie on the Lifetime channel. I don't even know the name of it, but it starred that actor who played the crotchity old father with the duct-taped chair on "Fraser". I think what attracted me was that the people in this movie seemed so real, unlike most of the people in Lifetime movies (or any other made-for-TV movie for that matter). Fraser's dad was playing this philandering more-than-middle-age man who loved his wife but kept cheating on her. He was having a years-long affair with a woman who was apparently a friend of his wife's, and sleeping around with other women as well. Cheating on both of them it would seem.

In this one scene, while on a business trip he meets a young bartender who was young enough to be his daughter and they end up having sex in his hotel room. As they're getting dressed the girl's cell phone rings and she takes a call from her husband, tells him she's wrapping up at work and will be home soon, and asks how's the baby doing. She apparently is "happily" married and has a young child.

So Fraser's dad asks her, "Why do you do it?" Why have affairs with other men?

And she responds simply, "Because it makes me feel new."

Wow. I never thought about infidelity that way. Maybe because it's not my personal choice of vices. But I think I can relate to that idea nevertheless.

I buy stuff. I want the latest gadget. I drive a fairly new car. I like new clothes. I get trendy haircuts. And I buy (and download) LOTS of music. Constantly. And I suddenly realize it's because they make me feel new.

Discovering a cool band, like the Flaming Lips or Interpol, and listening to their music for the first time. Buying that shirt and sweater that make me think I look like that guy in the J. Crew catalog. I'm someone today that I wasn't yesterday. Who I was yesterday disappointed, screwed up, didn't live up to my expectations. Who I am today is different, better. Surely this will be the one.

Talk about "looking for love in all the wrong places"!

"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul. Therefore, I will hope in Him."

Here's to truly new beginnings. New mornings. New mercies. New years. New yous.