This story owes itself to a professor (a great professor!) who fell from grace in my checkbook, fell from grace because he recommended I attend a guest lecture on cryptocurrency which truthfully left me totally disoriented, knotted, stupider, weepy – grew me thin under acroamatic confusion, insecure about my mental horse-handling, changed my life for the sucky worse. I draggled myself to this below-par lecture, at this professor’s square-meal-hearty recommendation, his council, what a disappointment, a cyclopean waste of an hour, still frankly fuming. 

I showed up thinking the guest speaker was ultra savvy, terrific, totally aces – post-lecture I thought he was an unlucky blast, a blight, a literal curse, the opposite of a four leaf clover, was hating this guy so much, mentally writhing, still chewing on what went down that day, the day I became permanently disoriented, near beer directionless, like permanently just-took-a-twirl, all of this metaphorical doggerel specifically relating to economics and business and investing and my understanding of them.

The topic of the lecture, already mentioned, was cryptocurrency, which I found to be confusing and non-intuitive. 

The guest speaker kept repeating that using bitcoin was like mining gold, that it required no central government apparatus, that the answer is mining but that mining doesn’t actually create bitcoin, rather it creates rewards, which I think you’re meant to give to friends, family and benefactors. That it’s resource-intensive because it castrates computers. It somehow relates to hash browns, you’re meant to pay out of pocket, and it’s normal to feel hopeless around bitcoin. It relies on a muscular phallocracy, but also men can wear skirts in 2017 and somehow this relates to bitcoin. Bitcoin effluvium is being studied for its effects on the lungs. Recently people keep asking what kind of art should be made in times like these, and the artists have responded by making art about bitcoin, and the internet, and blockchain, especially art that says the word ‘algorithm’ and then ‘skidoo’ and then there’s an explosion, and that’s when the bitcoin is made, or how the art is made, depending on who’s doing the stuff with the bitcoin hash brown value. 

Since it was “explained” to me, I’ve yet to regain confidence or compass in my intellectual capacity. My prior understanding of business, economics, and entrepreneurship has been expunged in favor of shadow doubts – I was supposed to become a spoiled fat city fortunate investor, and now I fear I’ve sailed too near the wind, and find myself totally disoriented, irritated, and with a great deal of antagonism towards the drippy guest speaker who vampired my self-confidence out of me that day. I also feel like I want to rhetorically insult my professor, whose judgement I used to trust like a sling, who told me not to sleep on the opportunity to see this guy speak, and now, oh mercy, I’m permanently confused, and there’s a heliotropic curvature to my cranium, I feel like I literally don’t have a backbone anymore. 

Can’t even get the image out of my head. The drippy guest speaker sitting like a bed-sitter at the front of the cosmically hot egg-shaped spare lecture room with big crystalline blinds covering the one window. And me, having shown up with my back-combed hair and yellow shirt, a leather workbook, expecting to learn something, never should have gone.