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Hey Why Are the Sprinklers on 24x7?

Not sure about you but if this cacophony of noise about a crisis, meltdown, flood, tsunami, dire straits, teetering on the brink, collapse, all natural, depression era, unprecedented, global, massive scope, foreclosurization, all time high, all time low, wall street to main street, pals with terrorists, dangerous, precipice, liberal, erratic, tax and spend crap about real estate investment instruments, politics, world markets what the American people are really feeling doesn't subside, I am going to unplug.

Since my social circle is not Main Street, it is more of an Avenue off Main street with really nice homes and a lot of type A folks who worry more about earnings announcements then the rest of the world, I am beginning to hear a steady stream of exhaustion creeping into conversations. Now keep in mind these are people who can work 60 hours a week, talk intelligently about red wine, afford to have their yard maintained, micro-manage their kids, eat Zoloft as a food supplement, and talk t o you while on the cell phone and doing email all at the same time. Still with the deluge (can you believe I missed that one previously?) and the theater hurled at us 24x7 they are losing their shields. Seriously when did our proud country resort to berating itself as a means of getting through what is arguably some tough economic times?

This weekend I went to visit a friend who is a well paid professional with an advanced degree and found him huddled in a quivering mass shaking badly muttering something about another matched set of luggage from QVC. After I splashed some bottled water on his face he came to. He said he had "gone to a dark place" and wasn't sure what sure happened and the last thing he remembers is playing CSI Miami On Demand and then he blacked out. If you have seen the show you get it.

The point here is stop. Just fuggin' stop. Enough already with the analysis, interviews and catastrophic predictions of cataclysmic events. Who in their right minds asks the expert of the day to speculate on assumptions? As far as I can tell our banking industry got a little around the turn at the Mortgage party. Those people tipped back a few too many interest only 5 year ARMs, smoked a few bowls of some serious appraisal ganja, and then preceded to try to drive home after popping a couple of fudged earnings applications. Then they failed to eat enough food, the buzz turned into a drunken fog, they began to lose their social graces as their subconscious boiled to the surface. Suddenly their addled brains told them they were smarter, better looking, and could do deals like this faster and more profitably than a crack whore at an electronics' convention that specializes in sci-fi dirty talk.

No points, interest only, ARM, REIT, Derivative, LIBOR, Al Gore, hell I am a finance guys and this stuff seemed way out the park. And on the way home from their financing orgy they pulled over the financing sports coupe with a supped up NYSE engine redlining at over 11,000 and hurled, spilling greed out their systems like poison. To be clear, greed is good and in moderation it is very good. But to binge on it forces the karmic pendulum to swing back. And like so many Judd Aptow movies you see it coming, hell you even wince as you know the poor bastard who is karmically getting called out, is going to catch it right in the…

Nuts, this whole this is nuts. If you want to know what happened read the Nobel prize winning economist in The NYT Paul Krugman. He is spot on and not listening to what he is saying is not smart.

Also WTF is up with the guy from Fox's "The Shield" masquerading as Joe the Plummer?

Or is that dude from Slither who is the town rich guy who gets, um, infected?

Breathe folks; we need to put all that energy we are using to generate angst into something more useful. Let's settle up some long standing debates like the Jeanne vs. Cat Women debate.

Mary Ann or Ginger (btw Mary Ann by a long shot, she's from a farm for Pete's sake).

Peace out.

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