window into bedlam

Right. So I was at the car dealership the other day waiting for my car to get fixed, and they had a TV in the waiting area tuned in to CNBC, the NBC money cable channel. I hadn't seen any TV for about a year.

There's that crawl thing at the bottom of the screen, and it kept running the words "Hot gas in crack." The phrase seemed simultaneously obscene and meaningless, but somehow connected to something called "the gasoline crack spread trade," which I also saw going by on the crawly.

I had no idea what any of this means, Seeing such stuff only communicates to me that this is not the same world I was born into.

Since then I've gotten a pretty good layman's explanation of what the gasoline crack spread trade is: "(A) buy & sell trade [done simultaneously] between the Gasoline futures contract and the Crude oil futures contract. One would buy the crude futures & sell the gas futures [or vice versa.] Hence a "crack spread" whereas a plain old spread would be done within the same futures contract by buying a near month and selling a farther out month." Thanks, Marysara.

I can understand that explanation, sort of, to the extent that such things can be understood at all in these chaotic and frightening times. I even basically now understand what collateralized debt obligations are and how they work, although I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around credit default swaps.

Mostly, after this brief glimpse through that window which affords a view of what passes for "reality" in some circles (i.e., a couple of hours of watching television), I've decided that our society is truly insane, unhinged, and berserk, and that I'm still a hippie after all these years, and the only way to deal with this society is to drop out of it completely.

For a couple hours, I watched people in suits yelling at each other, sometimes drowning each other out in their hysterical rage, while incomprehensible and cryptic messages from a gone world crawled across the bottom of the screen, accompanied by numbers and abbreviations which I'm sure mean something to somebody, but which appeared to me to be as inscrutable as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

No wonder economists and bankers tend to have high blood pressure.

My neighbourhood has been overrun by baboons.

I'm going to move to Oregon, build a mud house, and learn how to grow cabbages, potatoes, tomatoes, and green, five-pointed medicinal herbs. That's my response to it all.