Alright, here’s what’s gonna happen, I’m gonna start out with a story from my job, talk about minimum wage and why kids don’t work today, then end with a gripe.
Foreseeable consequences are not unintended.
So I was busing tables for my $1.50 an hour, you know just watering and cutting bread, when this kid, and when I say kid, I mean a guy who was 23 and had never had a job, who was simultaneously well groomed and unkempt walks in. I thought to myself, “Oh God, fine I’ll water you and cut, whatever.” So I continue on and water him and all that. He was rude to me and the server who I’m friends with so I didn’t like this kid, but fine again, whatever. So as the night picked up, I passed by his table a few times until eventually he drops this line on his parents, “As long as we have a middle class in america we can’t have equality.” Now I had to water and cut bread so I didn’t hear more. But this made me so angry that it almost ruined my night, a night which already had a lot going wrong recently.
Alright, story time’s over, now it’s time to talk about the minimum wage. Now this is already a loaded topic so I’m not going to step into what is so intricate about it, but instead I’ll cut right to the meat of my argument. It’s not the only reason why kids can’t get jobs now. Much of the refusal to hire kids is due to the following two reasons:
Kids are now less willing to work and are thus less reliable workers who employers are willing to hire
And kids provide a whole slew of issues, to the point where even if they are willing to work, they are not allowed to work in certain places
But let’s break both of these down. Amongst kids there is a lot of pressure to not only socialize, but also to play structured sports, to the point where they have no time to spare between homework and extracurriculars. The extracurriculars are mostly used by parents earlier in the kid’s life to signal their wealth. These extracurriculars tend to then continue later into the kid’s life until we have the current situation. But what about the liability issues? Well, they primarily start around the following two laws “kids under 16 may not work with food” and “kids under 16 may not handle cash.” I don’t know if these are federal or state, but it meant that until I was 16 I couldn’t get an actual job. There are also safety issues which mean that kids can’t be involved with heavier labor like landscaping unless they get expensive medical testing. This renders most jobs unavailable for kids.
Now onto the gripe. I don’t earn $1.50 an hour on my actual paycheck, instead it’s $5.50 an hour plus tips. But the payroll tax is so utterly fucked, to the point where out of every $5.50 I never see $4. That’s $4 which goes to the fedgov and not me. Fuck payroll and income taxes together. Anyway, y’all let me know if you have any stories of your own.
Red Sox catching prospect dies of cancer at 17. Rick Pitino knew of bribery scandal, according to the indictment (and to nobody’s surprise). LaVarr Ball still unavailable for comment. Jerry Jones is going to the mat over Roger Goodell’s contract extension (and rightfully so with the bullshit way the commissioner has handled the Zeke Elliott “situation”). And some meaningful international soccer will be played today…which doesn’t include the USMNT’s game, obviously.
Have you seen my baseball football?
Only three games on the slate in the NHL last night. The Lightning shocked the Sharks. The Maple Leafs went wild on Minnesoda. And the Rangers topped the Bruins in an original six matchup.
Lol, what a bunch of pussies. I hope they all got that out of their system…at least until the anniversary of the inauguration, which I’m sure they’ll use to reenact another protest. Hopefully they don’t torch any more immigrant-owned limousines or bust out the windows of any more businesses.
Sticking with there sexual assault theme, Trip Advisor decides to open themselves up for lawsuits. This might seem like a good idea in thought, but in practice, saying sexual assaults happen at a hotel or resort might have an impact on their bottom line. And that might cause them to sue you if the allegations turn out to be untrue.
Chicago Public Schools flexes their muscles, has principal reinstated. This on the heels of a scathing report by the school system’s Inspector General that chronicled doctored records by the principal in order to bolster her school’s statistics. They did their own report, which took considerably less time, which completely exonerated her. I know it’s shocking, but when you think about it, its not hard to do when you know the result you want and work backward. This is just the latest in a running feud between the powerful school system and the office tasked with making sure they’re doing things right (which they’re not).
Adios, pendejo! Sorry for your bullshit World Court claims. If you come here, you’re going to be subject to our laws and the penalties that go with them. Fuck you. Enjoy hell.
You’re gonna get a song today. So just simmer down.
*Okay, no one said that. But this is the story of my getting into the pot business (sorry, no Mexicans and only tangential references to ass sex) and commentary on regulatory issues from a libertarian perspective.
My career has been in IT, Operations, and Finance for Food & Beverage manufacturing. I’ve got a bunch of certifications that prove I can manage a project and make improvements and create models. But the winter of 2016 was one of discontent. I realized that if I continued working in a cubicle / office at a large corporation, I was going to splatter someone’s brains all over the beige fabric cube walls. And since I am too ornery for suicide and too pretty for prison, I decided to get out of Cubeville. My performance had suffered, and I wasn’t fitting culturally at work anyway, so when they offered me a chance to leave, I took it.
My business partner is a friend from the kink community. His career has mostly been IT startups. And two years ago he started doing research into becoming a canna-business owner. When I lost my last job, he invited me over to hang out, showed me the operation, and then talked to me about my plans. At that point I wanted to simply take a month off; period. I haven’t had a vacation except for family visits, in over 5 years.
I started helping with his small med grow just to have something to do and get out of the house. The month elapsed and we started discussing it in earnest. What it would take to get involved money wise, plans, the pot market itself, the various options and strategies. I started thinking about it more and doing some of my own research. I had, by that time, decided I wanted to start my own business and this seemed like a good opportunity.
I’m not a pot user. In 42 years old and I’ve used pot maybe 10 times, all within the last few months. But that’s okay. I see its uses for both recreation and medicine as valid. One needs pleasures in one’s life, and while I think pursuing them in some moderation is better, others may have different priorities. I think that whatever risks come with using marijuana are small enough and manageable enough that I am satisfied morally about selling it as a legal product. Were, say, heroin to be legalized, I wouldn’t feel the same way as there does not seem to be a way for one to use that drug and stay productive. That was critical for my personal decision making – can people use pot and still function or even improve their functioning? I think so.
I also realized I was enjoying myself when I was helping out my friend (and now business partner). We were building things, figuring out how to get things working, digging in the dirt. I’d come home tired and dirty and happy. I spent 20 years trying to get away from anything agricultural because I grew up in a rural area and thought success was wearing a 3 piece suit. But success is enjoying your life and the people in it.
On a business level, cannabis is at an interesting place. I worked in the craft beer industry for a few years and investigated the craft distilling industry as a potential business and I found the history informative. Those families that acquired distributor licenses when the 22nd Amendment was repealed have businesses now that that are worth 100s of millions of dollars. They got in early and they are still reaping the rewards generations later. It’s also interesting to look at wine in the late 70s – early 80s, craft beer in the 80s and early 90s, and craft distilling since the early 2000s. The early movers into those markets are doing well and have strong businesses. Now’s the time for getting into the legal cannabis market.
Growing Cannabis; Clone to Flower (Startup Life, Entrepreneurship)
I didn’t chose the startup life, the startup life choose me. I use that quip sometimes when I have a play partner ask when I can tie her up again and I have to beg off due to running the business. It’s true that running your own business can suck; your boss is usually a dick that rarely wants to give you any time off, and sometimes the sonovabitch doesn’t even pay you, you have to pay him.
My wife and I have always been white collar folks, making excellent money. Further, we lived well within our means and don’t have kids. Which translated to us rarely having to worry about money. We made way more than we spent, even after savings, so we had a huge cushion. Part of being an entrepreneur is that I’ve had to give that up a little bit. My wife still has her white collar job and makes enough to support us easily. But that carries its own struggles with it.
First and foremost I was brought up to, at the least, do my fair share for my family, to be the breadwinner. Yes, yes, I’m a cis-het shitlord. Whatever. So there’s some ego issues with being dependent on the wife’s income for the bills. Also, since she is fascinated by arcane Jewish rules despite not being a Jewess, she claims that since I am technically unemployed, I owe her sex twice a day. I do my best to fulfill that obligation despite not being Jewish, so that keeps her happy with the arrangement. Be that as it may, it’s also a calculated risk, that if this hits as well as it could, in a few years the business will support us in a way that would mean a lifestyle of wealth and time to enjoy that wealth. In the meantime, we are budgeting and making sure we continue to live within our means and it is well worth it.
And that calculated risk I mention does have a huge potential payoff. This is something an entrepreneur has to learn to deal with; risk calculation. Which sounds kind of scary, but is fairly simple if you understand a little math. What’s the potential worst case scenario? What’s the best case? What are the odds of each? Apply dollar amounts to the first two and multiply them by the answer to the last question. If there are things you can do to improve the odds adjust for that, then compare your values and that should help make the decision.
I don’t want to get into specifics of how much I’ve invested, but I’ll walk through the math. I’ll also talk a little about where the investment money came from. We moved to Portland 4 years ago and bought a house at a relative low in the market. A couple of years later we moved out to the suburbs but kept the original house. Due to the house’s location, when we sold it this spring, we made a substantial sum of money. The profit was about 5x of what we expected to make in that period of time. Even after paying off some remaining grad school loans, tucking some away to fatten up the retirement account, the amount needed to invest was less than the remainder. It’s essentially a large windfall, or as I refer to it, we’re playing with house money.
So even if we lose that money it doesn’t damage us long term. There’s an opportunity cost, of course. We could have put that money into paying down our existing house, or invested it in some other enterprise. But anything we do with it would have some risk. The other potential cost is the salary I’m forgoing for the next two years while I try to launch this. That’s my downside number. Let’s call it $100k just to use a round number.
The upside, of course, is if the operation is successful. Since the partnership is 50/50, I simply need to calculate what the expected revenue will be over the next two years and what the profit is going to be. Right now, even the really poorly run ops are making about a margin that is about twice what a well-run food manufacturer makes, and about 25% more than a well-run alcohol producer. For the sake of discussion we’ll put the amount of money I can expect from the profits at $1.5mm. Again, not a real number, but it is proportional to the real number. This also ignores the longer term, and options for integrating the vertical by spinning up a processor and our own retail outlets, as well as some other strategies we have for expansion.
Alright, the risk is losing $100k versus winning $1.5mm. So what are the odds of each happening? That’s the real important part of the decision. Let’s assume the failure rate is 90%. In reality about 67% of cannabis businesses in Oregon have failed. The vast majority were due to failure to comply with either reporting requirements or basic shit like tracking your employees’ hours and properly paying them, which even some fresh off the boat immigrant can manage when starting a restaurant. So that failure rate is low, but for determining expected value, I think it’s a good number.
Multiply $100k times .9 and that’s $90k. Multiple $1.5mm times .10 and you get $150k. Subtract the $90k from the $150k and my expected value is $60k more than if I don’t take the gamble. That makes it a risk worth taking. That ignores that it is difficult to value the experience of trying to start my own business and the freedom and flexibility it provides me.
Any entrepreneur needs to think in those terms, and unless you are starting a lifestyle business, you also need to think of terms of longer term potential. My guess, taking in the past closest benchmark industries (alcohol, primarily), looking at the current demand, and at the future possibilities is that this can be huge.
The market for legal recreational and medical marijuana is massive. In Oregon at least, the demand is higher than the current level of supply. That gap is closing, but it’s going to take a few years for several reasons. Most of the early entrants were black market or med growers who had been growing enough to make a house payment. They are good growers and make some excellent weed. But their business sense is limited. They’d get hooked up with an outside investor that had the money, but no knowledge of growing or interest in being intimately involved. They could smell the opportunity, but didn’t want to be heavy lifting investors. So they wrote a check for $1mm or $2mm. And in a year, they are out of business because the grower burned through the cash. Or they can’t comply with the regulations.
We think our competitive advantage is that my partner and I have grown the product and developed our basic process along with an experienced grower. We believe that we can bring an analytic, process based approach to growing that few others can. Which will allow us to get big enough so that when the market hits saturation and prices start falling down to commodity levels, we have higher margins than average and are able to weather those changes while also scooping up smaller grows. The margins decreasing will only help us as it puts pressure on less well-run organizations.
We also plan to invest heavily in vertical integration. Once the first Tier 1 is fully operational, we’ll open a processor. Then we’ll start the franchise part of the business. There are lots of good growers that either don’t have the cash to get the land, or don’t have much business sense and know it. While we can’t own more than one license of the same type, we can lease the land and provide services to other growers and/or investors. We’re working on the details of that, but it lets us expand legally. Within five years we expect to have our Tier 1 grow, a piece of 3-5 more Tier 1 grows, a processor, and some retail outlets and a testing lab all under our umbrella. We have specific landmarks and decision points along the way. But we are building an enterprise.
Which brings us to exit strategy. Which is venture-speak for ‘how are you going to really get paid off for this investment?’ Are you going to sell it to someone else? Keep running and growing it? Own it but let someone else run it? The answer is; we have plans for each eventuality. I’ll talk more about this in the last section.
A little spindly, innit?
Medium and Nutrition (Specifics about Weed growing)
Cannabis is a weed. So it should be easy to grow. And that’s true. You really only need some dirt, some water, and some light and you can grow a marijuana plant. But there is a difference between growing a single plant and running a farm, both in terms of quantity and quality. It takes skill, art, and science to grow large quantities of high quality product in a given space. Like any other similar enterprise, it’s all about yield. And keeping costs down for each pound you produce.
So every ounce of marijuana starts as either a seed or a cutting. Either way, once the seed or the cutting has roots, it’s placed in a growth medium. That can be soil or hydroponic. We grow in a soil like medium called Tupur. It’s made primarily from shredded coconut shells. It provides a medium for the roots of the plant, but no nutritional value like various other types of soil. The advantage of that is that we can feed more often than if it were in soil and at lower PPM of the nutrients.
That helps in the next stage which is vegetation. The objective in this stage is to grow the plant and strengthen it to prepare it to go into flower. Flowering is determined by the number of hours of darkness the plant experiences each day. The plant will stay in veg as long as it has more than about 13 hours of sunlight. There are some differences between strains and the easy way is to just keep them under the right kind of lights 18-24 hours a day. The longer in veg the bigger the individual plants become and the more they’ll yield when they go into flower. It also allows for different styles of growing; trees (tall), pineapple (bushy), or various types of trellising. There is a trade-off; the longer spent in veg, the longer until you get your final flower. So there’s some balancing we’re still figuring out on that.
Once it is time to go into flower, the grower needs to see that the plants are in total darkness for a certain amount of time. Usually 12-13 hours. This is the natural state of things in the fall when the plants normally flower on their own. But it can be induced artificially outdoors by having green houses with systems for blacking out the green house, or indoors by simply turning off the lights. Flower usually lasts for about 8-9 weeks. Though for some pure sativa strains that time can as much as double.
In flower is where the bud begins to form and grow. The signs one is looking for are solid, dense buds, for the trichs or sugar on the leaves close to the buds and the buds themselves, and looking for other signs on the buds related to the color and density in the buds. There is some art to this and if you harvest too soon it can impact the levels of THC and CBDs, as well as the taste and the quality of the smoke. Harvest too soon and the smoke can be not as smooth or be “speedy” meaning you get amped up instead of relaxed.
When the bud is ready, it is time to harvest. This involves cutting down the plants so that the buds can be dried and cut away from the branches and remove the unwanted stems and leaves. The bud also needs to cure a little while to make it the smoke smooth and maximize flavor. Each bud has to be trimmed and the old school way is to hand trim it so you leave just the right amount. For large harvests though, machines are used. Slightly lower quality, but much more efficient even than orphans. Once the cure is finished, it is time to sell.
Selling for a producers is wholesale. You’re usually selling pounds at a time to dispensaries. There’s some sales effort involved, but much of that is simply taking samples to the buyer at a dispensary, smoking it with them, and then arranging the order and delivery. The three biggest factors are the amount of THC and CBDs, the way it looks when displayed (bag appeal), and lastly how it actually smokes.
Insect & Pest Prevention (Taxes, Regulation, and Weed)
When you wait too long to harvest…
Regulations surrounding weed are interesting. They fall broadly into three types in the state I’m in. First are the types of license, second are zoning related for getting your license, and the rest are operational regulations for keeping your license and being able to sell your product legally. The industry is over regulated, but then, virtually every industry is. And in some ways, pot is less regulated than beer, wine, and liquor if you put aside Federal laws. It’s also less regulated than the food manufacturing industry. The regs are cumbersome and immoral because FYTW and god forbid people actually /enjoy/ themselves, but that’s true for many products. In this section I’ll try to review the basic regulations and how they interfere liberty and some of the unintended consequences I think they bring about.
License Types – One can have either a med license or a recreational license. With med you pay an extra fee on your med card and designate a grower. Depending on where you are, you are allowed a certain number of plants in flower at any given time. There is no real limit on the number not in flower or on the amount produced. You can stack cards, meaning get someone with a card to designate you as a grower, but there are limits on the maximum number of cards you can stack. Other than that, there is not much regulation or reporting required. And if someone reports you, the cops have to call and schedule an inspection when it is convenient for you.
Recreational is a different game. It is more complex and brings with it more reporting and regulatory oversight. But that plant limit goes away and is replaced with square footage limits. In Oregon, there are no limits on the number of people who can have a recreational cannabis license for any of five categories; Producer, Processor, Wholesaler, Retailer, or Research. The same person or group can have all five if they like. And there are different types of sub-businesses. For example, a seed bank is considered a producer. A lab is considered a processor. A home delivery service is a retailer. The exact same ownership group can’t own more than one license of the same type, but there are ways to burn that bridge.
Zoning – The way zoning plays into is that each county is able to have its own zoning regulations related to the various types of licenses. So they can designate various zoning types as allowing only producers and whether it is only indoor or outdoor producers. Any interesting side thing is that the difference between indoor and outdoor is whether the structure has lights. So if you have a greenhouse with no lights, it is an outdoor grow. If you add lights, you are an indoor grow. The reason that matters is both zoning and that a Tier 1 license (the current largest) allows for 40k sq ft of canopy in flower outdoors. Indoors each sq ft of canopy counts for 4 of those sq ft. So effectively it is 10k sq ft. of indoor space allowed. Or you can do a mix of say 5k indoor and 20k outdoor.
There are also zoning laws related to minimum property size, how close to the property line the grow can be, what kind of odor remediation has to be done, visibility of lights, and the kind of fencing and access control that are required. Those all vary for the different kinds of rec licenses. There are other oddities such as you can have a Producer license for land that is considered Agriculture only and it will satisfy that requirement, but you can’t count the income from that toward your tax status. This is one area where the zoning is slightly more complicated than other agri businesses.
Operational – The real regulations come in as part of applying for the license and keeping it. The biggest are all around reporting. The weed has to be tracked individually by plant, including the state of life it is in, and any changes made to it. So, for example, plant 001 has to be trimmed. You have to account for the weight of how much of that is disposed, and if any clones are made from it, you have to track that as well. Once harvested the weight of the flower and any waste or other byproducts have to be tracked. All those numbers have to be reported to the agency monitoring compliance, the OLCC. When you sell any product to another rec license holder, you have to track that as well, so that there is ‘seed to sale’ visibility and prevent weed going into the black market. This is actually common in the food, beverage, and alcohol industries, at least the tracking if not the reporting.
To add to that, the entire grow operation has to be covered by cameras that run 24/7. Again, this is to make sure you aren’t slipping stuff out the back door into the black market. The recordings have to be made available to the OLCC at their request for spot checks. It’s also security for the rec operation as it helps with dealing with any thefts. Slipping stuff out the back door is really dumb. As we all know, the back door is for going in. *ahem* When people do this, they are risking 100s of thousands of dollars of revenue for a couple of extra grand by selling to the black market.
The last of the big three are testing requirements. For every 15 pounds of product, you have to take random samples and send them to a lab for testing. The testing provides proof that you haven’t used any banned pesticides and that your weed is ostensibly safe to consume (compared to literal Mexican ditch weed, most of the stuff on the banned list could be safely used). It also provides information on THC and CBD content that has to be placed on labels for packaging.
There are some other minor things related; you can’t have barb wire on your fencing, you can only have so many visitors per year to a grow operation, and a few other things. But the other three are the big ones. Compared to other industries, they are a little intrusive, but not as complicated.
From a libertarian perspective, the zoning, the size limits and the like are all ridiculous. Those are things which can be worked out by individuals. The monitoring to prevent the black market is, of course, ridiculous. Any adult who wants to buy should be able to buy however much they want from anyone willing to sell it. And the testing reqs are things the free market would demand anyway. So they simply add cost to the entire enterprise without much real value.
Harvest, Trim, Cure and Sell (Where I think this is leading)
From a macro perspective, I think full legalization of marijuana / cannabis is on the horizon. While Sessions has a hard-on about it, I am not particularly worried that he’ll go after legal producers in states where it recreational is legal. Oregon makes far too much tax money from weed to cooperate if the feds go after their legal producers. But the state does have incentive to cooperate in going after black market producers. Which allows Sessions to beat off about stopping the demon weed and the states to force more of the black market producers toward getting legal so they can get that sweet, sweet lucre. Extortion 101.
Beyond that, the real question is when it will be removed from Schedule 1. My estimate is sometime in the next 8-12 years. We’re down to only 2 states where marijuana possession is fully criminalized. All the rest range from being fully legal for both medical and recreational (8 states) to simple decriminalization. The holdouts are really the Midwest and the south east. My guess is that once Texas and/or Florida allows rec or one of the south east states (NC, SC, VA, TN, AL, GA) allows med and/or rec that’ll be the final nail in the coffin.
There’s also growing pressure from various corporate interests. Monsanto is huge in the space at providing lights and nutrients and the rest of the infrastructure and equipment. There is interest from the tobacco companies as well, but they can’t get involved until it is legal nationally. Pharma is opposed at the moment, but I think if you ever see Merck or Bayer get onboard that could help speed up the change.
As I mentioned earlier, cannabis wholesale prices are going to fall as more competitors enter the market. As that happens, you’ll see the standard consolidation. The enterprises that are well run and forward looking will start opening operations in new states that open up their laws. They won’t be able to transfer between states, but they’ll be well positioned to gobble up the smaller operations that have good growers, but poor business practices. And the ones that survive that sorting out and are large enough to be operating profitably once national legalization happens will be acquisition targets for the Monsantos and Mercks and RJRs.
I don’t think the regulations will ever be less than they are now. Unfortunately, I simply don’t see a libertarian moment occurring that will bring the overall level of regulation down. The best the cannabis industry can hope for is a similar level of regulation to the alcohol industry, unfortunately. Which proves we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but it would be an improvement over the current situation.
Sad news in the world of sports, as retired pitcher Roy Halliday died in a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday. Dude was a hell of a pitcher: two Cy Young Awards, a no-hitter in the post season, racked up over 200 wins. He was 40 years old. What a shame.
LiAngelo Ball, son of LaVarr Ball and brother of Lonzo Ball, and a couple of his UCLA teammates got into trouble while in China due to their sticky fingers. It was the first time in his entire life that LaVarr was unavailable for comment.
LiAngelo, that’s not an Uber you’re stepping into.
The international break starts today for soccer. But no qualifiers until tomorrow.
The Blues topped the Devils. The Caps fell to the Sabres. The Pens beat the woeful Coyotes. Oilers greased the Isles. Hurricanes destroy Florida. Press over Blue Jackets. Montreal beats Army, er Las Vegas. Vancouver tops Calgary. And last but not least, the Kings knock off the Mighty Ducks in the SoCal derby.
That’s all for sports. Here comes…the links!
Winter is coming. I hope the soldiers we have manning the wall keep those flappy-headed white walkers out.
I’m off to Galveston this morning. Doing a nice big deal there. And I didn’t want to say anything until I had it really going, but I think I can now: business is doing well. I have been selling a lot of equipment and doing some consulting. But a couple weeks ago, I signed a deal to do my first auction. Its an estate deal where there was a construction company involved. And after getting that done, I asked another auction company if they wanted to jump onboard with me and partner on the deal. Since then, we’ve blown it up to about $600,000. After today, it should be at $800,000 going across the ramp and we hope to get it well over $1M by sale day, which is December 5th. Needless to say, I’m extremely nervous about the whole thing, what with this being the first sale under my banner and with me being the auctioneer of record (as well as the guy calling all the action for the first time on equipment this expensive). Its really a big deal to me, having just opened my business in March. Anyway, that’s part of the reason for such early links lately. Not sure how much that will continue, so don’t always expect them. But anyway, there’s a little explanation.
Brett is a bit busy….something about trying to pry a suitcase of meth out of a 15 foot gator?
Not really Brett
I am not sure….the call for assistance was a bit garbled. Anyhoo, I am taking a break from the Fondue Mines to bring you the finest in Afternoon Links.
OK, I didn’t bring this one (h/t LT Fish) but it is worth a watch.
“Do ya think she will like it?” the USA hat asked anxiously.
“Uh, yeah. Sure,” the MAGA hat replied, too depressed to savage his hick vaultmate with any enthusiasm.
“It’s the first I done painted for her,” the USA hat continued, oblivious. “She’s so bootiful and smart and talks real good. I hope she likes it. I surely do.”
MAGA hat groaned. Donald had taken the hair with him to Japan and left both the hats behind, locked in the White House toupee vault together like a couple of animals. The smell of the paint made him junk sick. He wanted to vomit.
“I’m gonna paint another,” USA hat said. “And another and another. Sarah is my muse.”
MAGA hat idly wondered where this truck-stop shower rape of a hat had learned a word like “muse.” He was so bored. Donald had refused to leave him a phone to terrorize Twitter with and when he watched TV, USA hat begged him to turn it to a re-run of Hee-Haw so incessantly, he learned not to turn it on.
“I’m bored,” he announced. And I want heroin, an ocean of heroin he added just to himself.
“You could paint a picture iffen you want,” the USA hat. He hummed to himself as he sketched out a rough outline of Sarah in the nude on a fresh canvas, the misshapen lumps of her sweaty flesh coming together in horrible wads.
“Can I paint a jolly swastika fucking you to death?”
“You can paint anythin’ you can want,” USA hat said. “Your only limatation is yore imaginations!”
“Barf. Do you have any barf-colored paint? And despair, what the color of despair?”
“Ox tongue,” the USA hat said without pause in his sketching, the shard of charcoal grasped firmly in his folded bill.
“Which? Which is ox tongue?” the MAGA hat demanded. The USA hat hummed tuneless to himself, working on getting the heavy-lidded and utterly dead eyes of his crush just right.
MAGA hat thought about pressing him but instead scooted over to a blank canvas, picked up a charcoal stick and began to slash at it boldly, just try to ride his feelings of rage and abandonment. A screaming face formed.
“A brush, a brush,” he demanded. “And red. Fresh blood red and the black-red of old blood.”
The USA hat slid brushes and paints over to him and noted without a trace of an accent, “Old blood is brown-red or even just brown. Stay vivid.”
The MAGA hat didn’t hear him as he squeezed the tubes into mounds in front of him and grabbed up a brush. He laid down thick lines on the canvas, almost scooping up paint with the brush for some and scrubbing the bristles to the heel of the ferrule on others.
“Impasto,” the USA hat whispered. The MAGA hat didn’t hear him in his furious ecstasy. More paint, more paint as the face seemed to push its way out of the canvas. The brush snapped in his bill and MAGA hat dug the broken handle into the canvas, ripping the heavy fabric before dashing to the floor of the vault and snatching up another.
As he spat rage at the canvas, USA hat turned on the TV behind them and used the TiVo to search through the last half-hour of news coverage that had built up. He found what he wanted and froze the screen. When he turned back, the MAGA let the brush fall from his bill and was breathing in great ragged gasps.
The painting was a vision of Hell, the skinned, howling face of Sarah, the thick paint running in spots, which only added to the ghastly effect. The center of her mouth was stabbed rent in the canvas, but you couldn’t see the easel or the wall behind. There was nothing, a horrible no-color that went on forever.
“Donald is bringing you home a new friend,” the USA hat whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Look,” he said. “Look at the TV.”
MAGA hat whirled around and froze. Two white trucker hats in front of Donald on a table. “Donald & Shinzo, Make Alliance Even Greater,” they read in gold embroidery.
Minimal sports updates. The Rangers won. The Crapitals beat the woeful Coyotes in OT, The Maple Leafs beat Army Las Vegas. The Bruins went wild over Minnesoda. J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets! top Dallas. And Detroit tops the Canucks.
A bunch of former players think thy have what it takes to run the USSF. Hey, anybody would be an improvement over Gulati. The knives are coming out at Arsenal, which means it must be November. West Ham hire retread David Moyes to save them from relegation. If they fail, he will face the last team he couldn’t keep from dropping down. Hell, they might pass each other as Sunderland come up and the Hammers face the drop.
That’s literally all I can muster the strength to comment on in this ever-so-slow time of the year. Thank God the international break is coming up this week so we can report on games of real consequence.
That’s all for the stick and ball stuff. Now…the links!
A metaphor for what happened at the Air Force.
The laws in place to keep assholes like the Texas church shooter from getting a gun were in place. But the Air Force shit the bed. There is no other explanation. But the lefties are still climbing on piles of bodies saying we need to close “loopholes” because he could have used them to get guns if, you know, he hadn’t have gotten them due to a government fuckup. So just so we are on the same page: the government fucked up and this guy’s name was not put on the disqualifying list. The left wants the government to figure out a way for him not to get a gun even though the law was in place but they failed to properly implement it. Seems legit.
A Facebook profile that appears to be Arega’s shows him “checked in” at the White House on Monday, and also includes posts with statements such as: “Now i am going to there to white House make sure kill All white POLICE !!,” “I remove the power of darkenes [sic] from USA in the powerful name of Jesus Christ !!,” and “Put Him on Jail Donald J Trump in Maighty Name of JESUS CHRRIST !!”
Well one thing is for sure: he wasn’t traveling there to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
I smell a sitcom!!!!!!! He could room with Harvey and it could be like the Odd Couple. Harvey can be the slob who rapes women and girls while Spacey is the neat-freak who rapes boys. Can I get Casey Affleck over here to direct and we can get the dude from Amazon to produce it. This is gold, Jerry. Gold!
House panel approves tax plan after some changes are made. See how it affects you in the story. The Democrats on the panel say it’ll be a killer for people regardless of any changes proposed or adopted. The GOP members said it will be a boon to the economy for people to keep more of what they earn. And yes, that includes a lot of rich people. The odds are still 50/50 this passes, in my opinion. But we shall see int he coming weeks.
Welcome to San Francisco. Watch your step.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But the solution is government, government, government! Heaven forbid you let people do what they want with their own property and let the hobos migrate somewhere else where the wealthy aren’t being soaked for idiotic freebie services while people are still literally shitting in the streets.
Man, what a not-so-great Monday. Neither the 2 year old nor the almost 4 year old give a fuck about time zones or clocks. They just get up when they get up. 4:49 am today. Luckily I was asleep at 9:15 because it had already been dark for 3 hours. And screw technology. On the good side, I’ve got a pork roast in the oven that is going to be off the chain for dinner tonight.
In case nuclear fusion wasn’t a significantly unrealistic form of near future energy, meet quark fusion.
I think this is exactly the sort of scandal that got a British admiral hanged, and from which Voltaire’s “pour encourager les autres” was drawn. Let’s try it.
OK, Glibs. Here is a nice open post for you to paste all your links (maybe save them instead of dumping them in the Morning Links?) and snark and such. I am going to toss in a couple of bonus links on the Texas Church shooting.
First and foremost I was brought up to, at the least, do my fair share for my family, to be the breadwinner. Yes, yes, I’m a cis-het shitlord. Whatever. So there’s some ego issues with being dependent on the wife’s income for the bills. Also, since she is fascinated by arcane Jewish rules despite not being a Jewess, she claims that since I am technically unemployed, I owe her sex twice a day. I do my best to fulfill that obligation despite not being Jewish, so that keeps her happy with the arrangement. Be that as it may, it’s also a calculated risk, that if this hits as well as it could, in a few years the business will support us in a way that would mean a lifestyle of wealth and time to enjoy that wealth. In the meantime, we are budgeting and making sure we continue to live within our means and it is well worth it.
Harvest, Trim, Cure and Sell (Where I think this is leading)
