My Customs Story

I read a few financial newsletters. One of my favorites is The Daily Dirtnap, by Jared Dillian. He’s mainly a sentiment and charts guy, big on ETFs over individual stocks, leans conservative politically but doesn’t beat you over the head with it, and writes about his six cats, with pictures sometimes. He’s also a Progressive House DJ with a decent following on Soundcloud and is finishing up an MFA. Earlier this week he wrote about coming back into the U.S. from a recent trip to the Caymans, and the weird reception he and his tattoos got from the Customs agent in Charlotte. He told readers to send him Customs stories, so I sent him mine.

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The Heavy Heavy

I’m a little late to the party, perhaps, but so very stoked to have found out about The Heavy Heavy, a fantastic rock and roll band from Brighton, UK, who just happened to be in Northern California this week on their very first U.S. tour. I caught them at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco on Wednesday and last night a little closer to home at Little Saint, in Healdsburg. Fucking great to hear young people making my kind of music for a change.

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Let’s Be Honest

The 45th President of the United States of America is a horrible person. He’s a boor. As put in a recently popular description of why he’s unliked in the United Kingdom, “Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.”

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We, The People…

One day, when we look back on our lives, we will be defined by the way we behaved in this moment.

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Rules of Civility

I was just a kid April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in my hometown. My family – mom, dad, my younger brother Robert, and my baby sister Monica – were in the dining room finishing dinner when I rushed in from the TV room to announce the news. Both my parents had grown up in the east, in Brooklyn, but they’d lived in the south long enough to know a thing or two about race relations, and were savvy enough about “the times” to understand King’s assassination would be a momentous event, that it might change everything.

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