Vignette City 32.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

It’s all just a cost and benefit analysis with me. I’m not the kind of chump who wants to spend all of his free time trying to get rich quick day-trading on his phone on his smoke break. Sure you can swap penny stocks and maybe catch a winning hand every once in awhile, but is that any way to spend your life? After all, money is money, but you should enjoy your smoke break. That’s what it’s for. Everybody is so concerned about the benefits that they forget to figure in the cost of the costs. Just doesn’t make sense.

But I follow the markets and I read the news. I keep my ear to the ground and I like to think that I can break fast off the block when I see a good thing coming around the turn. Everybody was all about gold a few years ago. Gold, sure, it's pretty, I get that, but is that a good reason to build an economic system around it? If you’re one of those people who thinks that the whole world economic paradigm is going to come crashing down like the Leaning Tower of Pisa is going to any day now, well then what makes you think anybody is going to want a bunch of gold at that point when we are all living like Mad Max or whatever we end up doing? Do you know how much a bar of gold weighs? What are you going to do with that when you get to Thunder Dome? I mean, I guess you could use it to beat a guy to death, but still, it is an unwieldy weapon, and you can’t eat it or anything. That is a fact and you can take it to the bank; gold has almost no caloric value.

See, I am a long term thinker that way.

That’s why about two years ago I put all my money into jellyfish.

You didn’t see that coming, did you? That’s because I see the whole board.

Jellyfish sales are seasonal because of their breeding and migration patterns and certain times of the year you just can’t get certain kinds of jellyfish and it is all just supply and demand at that point, because your run-of-the-mill jellyfish seller - especially the online ones - only go on collection trips a couple of times a year. But then I come along and guess what? I have exactly the jellyfish you want, at exactly the time when no one else has it. Do you know how much a jellyfish goes for???

Well it turns out that it can vary a lot. I learned that the hard way. Going rate for a Moon jellyfish is only about 30 bucks, but that is when they are available. And I am the guy who has them when they are NOT available. I sold one the other day for $300! Just one. I double bagged it, dropped it in a cooler and handed it off to the good old USPS.

See, I play the big game.

Now I may have lost some capital early on when I was just a guy with a bunch of dead Moon jellyfish in his guest bathroom, but once I bought that old motel and had 34 bathrooms, well then things started to really get going. I figure that this year I may even make enough just off the jellyfish to cover the property tax on the motel.

Next year though, that is going to the big time for me. Next year I’m going to tell my boss where he can stick his day trading advice. Next year will be my cover spread on Medusozoa Magazine because right now in the motel pool I have two Portuguese man-of-war … men-of-war? Man-of-wars? I don’t know. But I know one of them is a girl man-of-war and one of them is a boy-man-of-war and once they start doing their thing - however it is they do that - then it will be big time.

Big time for me.


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