Billy's Silly Blog

On Retirement

Retirement is a great time of life...except that you have time to do a lot of things you should have done all along but which can have deleterious effects on your mental health, like helping with the housework and watching the stock market.

You watch the clock when you are working
And the stock market when you're retired.
When you're working no more and stocks go through the floor,
You may think about getting rehired.

But there's far more of value than money,
A good broker will improve your life;
Since the stocks that you bought that he said were so hot
Have now tanked..you'll see more of your wife.

Well that is one view of our total dependence on the economic system for our welfare.. we work for 40 years to be independent, and some yahoo in the government changes the rules and our investments go down the toilet.. straight flush...

But something seems odd with this income trust decision which wiped out $25 billion of capital in one day. This amount is roughly the equivalent of 100,000 houses.. so say the city of Windsor, with about 100,000 houses was one day discovered to be built on a swamp and the houses all had to be bull-dozed for reasons of safety. No one would argue with the safety order, but it seems obvious to me that there would be a major investigation as to how we got into this mess. Some P Eng or architect would undoubtedly lose his licence.. but there has been NO hint of an investigation as to why Flaherty had to bull-doze $25 billion of income trusts into the ground. Apparently the real estate and investment markets differ in ways that I can't understand.

My brain is in need of a rest.
Things here are becoming quite stressed...
Since Jim Flaherty's gone
Had the tax rules redrawn,
And now income trusts have been depressed.

The stock market is having a cow,
My nest egg's an omelette now..
I'll invest in Labatt
Then I'll drink, knowing that
Beer goes down, then goes up anyhow.

I know that doesn't make much sense, but if you came here, you weren't looking for sense. Nothing really makes sense.. those who look for sense generally understand they are subject to delusions. Nonsense is the only thing that makes perfect sense. Nonsense is the "white noise" or the aether in the universe. Chaos theory which is so prominent today could as easily have been called "Nonsense Theory", everyone trying to make sense produces nonsense. Which brings us back to politics. Oh wait.. we are talking about retirement here. Retirement makes sense, since it releases people to intentionally produce nonsense, without hurting people for the first time.

Which is what I am doing here.

Of course, retirement is the perfect opportunity to pass along some of the wisdom we have accumulated to future generations. Before we forget it! And luckily I have several grandchildren under 10 years of age who still confuse age and wisdom, and listen to my renderings. While they are playing with their GameBoys! But I don't ask for much.. and I continue....

“Now Grandpa you are aging, as you limp and lurch along
I know our time is limited, that someday you’ll be gone!
I’m interested in history, in older people’s lives.
Please tell me your philosophy, and how did you survive?”

“Well grandson we all knew the role determination plays
That grit and ceaseless effort was the anglo-saxon way,
So I took the bull right by the horns, I grappled day and night,
Even when the bull was winning, I would not give up the fight.
Advice from your old Grandpa after living long and full,
Don’t bother wrestling horns my son, just learn to shoot the bull.”

Retirement is a time for summing up one's life - the accomplishments of our generation.. Our generation entered public life as "angry young men"...successfully rebelling against a war in an Asian country, using marches and folk music as their weapons of choice. The US government had a difficult time explaining the purpose of the deaths of 60,000 American troops and almost 1 million Vietnamese, trivializing it with the name of a game, "Dominoes". I have never learned Dominoes, and I don't intend to die trying. But to this day I can't explain what the West was doing there. Perhaps trying to keep the Russians, fresh from their successes in Afghanistan, away. No senior government officials have ever been held accountable for over 1 million deaths, but the war did have some notable successes in propagating Vietnamese restaurants throughout the west, stemming the growth of those communist Chinese restaurants. Interesting to note, my buddy Bob Turcotte does a wonderful rendition of "Alice's Restaurant", a song that asked some serious questions about the morality of killing Vietnamese, and dumping garbage. He has many of the same misgivings about where we are headed as I have, but more intellectual energy, and he can still pull off the "angry young man" routine.. When I try, it comes off as "grumpy old fart"! Silliness, for me, is far easier than analysis. For interesting analysis, Bob's blog can be found at:
http://www.bobturcotte.com/

My name is Georgie Bush and I would like to start a war!
We've had some good experience, we've been through this before.
As seen there in my resume, my group called "Uncle Sam",
Has prospered in Grenada, though we fumbled in Viet Nam!

We oft' use local partners as in Nicaragua's case,
Or in Chile. We can interfere then leave without a trace.
But knocking down two towers in the middle of New York
Should require some retribution - now our big guns we'll uncork.

We will launch a big invasion. That Osama was a fool
To send a bunch of Arabs to a US flying school.
You'll go for my proposal? Well if not, I'll have it known,
I'll hire that Halliburton gang to wiretap your phone.

posted by bill @ 7:31 PM