High fidelity sister chromatid repair
I’m on the phone with my one part therapist, one part sister, one part copy-editor, one part mystic when she makes me swear on the “life” of my childhood bear that I wouldn’t make exactly the mistake I make a week later. You’re not supposed to be thinking of your lesbian friend scolding you over FaceTime and imagining laying a thirty-plus year old Dakin plush bear into a small casket and laying it into the ground of your family’s backyard during and after the forbidden. Stranger anxieties have happened. She visited with her girlfriend in the middle of October as houseguests at my home. It’s rare to have friends that close and that pure around. The two girls are like Valkyries. Tall blonde, blue eyed, sapphic contract killers. You let them loose in the “downtown secret neo-reactionary libertine” basement and watch them insult every living thing with a wink a smile. I love them to death. They’re the most clever monsters I’ve been so blessed to have as close friends. One of them left a Playstation 1 copy of “Parasite Eve” with me. They are like sister priestesses that care about my soul even my karma, especially as I squander it into the dark.
But this isn’t a story about breaking taboos. Not this time at least. There will be plenty of time for that in the future. The point here is inconsistencies and contradictions. The cause and effect chain of life (and art) is one that is less a chain than a haze.
Correspondence can keep you grounded. As above. So below. But the fog of war (and art) is very real.
This isn’t about mistakes.
No this is about pain.
Men don’t get many opportunities to rebuild their entire lives out of nothing.
In the old world it was easy.
Were you a Royalist or a Roundhead?
Who cares.
Join a mercenary core.
Get out of England.
Flee the steppe.
Join a war-band.
Be a privateer on a ship.
I described to my mother the story of Sir Francis Drake. Sometimes you have to be a monster to synchronize into the gray morality of all things. The descent is all that exists. Sir Francis Drake was first Francis Drake. He was a slaver, a pirate, and a scoundrel. But entering the court of Elizabeth I, he left as a knight, a privateer, and a naval commander. Finding the right royal house to find patronage in is something every striver learns fast.
You can keep citing examples of this story. You aren’t here without conquerors and killers in your lineage. Go down to the layer of invertebrates you’ll find plenty of them. As a man, follow your Y chromosome haplo-group far back enough and tell yourself myths about who your great great-great grand-rapist was in the hills of Eastern Europe. Or maybe somewhere else, we’re not being discriminating here. I’m sure some of you are Abbos who’s ancestors could predict the future through delirious chant and visions in paintings but also cannibalism. If you are a woman, I guarantee your forefathers were ruthless.
I didn’t start in finance because I wanted to. It was a case of absolute desperation. I’m an artist and an engineer by trade. This wasn’t where I was supposed to go. But life takes you places when you’ve hit rock bottom.
I spent the better part of last year living unemployed and in a waking nightmare surrounded by decay. No further details are relevant. There are states of the abject that are comparable to religious experiences. They serve as a kind of foundational mythology to where you go next. You find God there, but it gets boring after too many retreads.
What matters more is rediscovering how others have fallen into even more purgatorial spaces.
Finance men are the last conquistadors, they’re the last slavers, the last Rimbauds, the last Byrons. Among Boiler Room outcasts I have met men who have climbed through broken glass and arsenic to define levels of wealth that would make most people shudder.
But what is left?
The desire for more is endless. I’ve seen this bottomless desire in the art world but in a far more abject and paradoxically artless form. It’s a Sadian accursed share. We built our excess to spend it into the void. We gathered friends, lovers, and allies, to crush them like we’ve been crushed the same. The constant search tree of war descended on us as Satan falls like lighting. The tragic part is there is no payoff. You don’t find God in The Bridge Party drug room, even if the God cameras scan your face.
There has to be a better way.
Men don’t get many opportunities to rebuild their entire lives out of nothing.
The finance world is one of the last places where you can get on a ship, sail out, kill your enemies, and still sail home to fuck the queen and join her court.
You get a Sir title and become a knight.
I talk to stock brokers a lot now. I talk to salesmen a lot now.
They’re not what you imagine them to be.
If I said there was a man named Carmine who runs a lending firm?
His mother died when he was seventeen years old. His father remarried in months and threw him out of his own ancestral home. He had to become a door to door salesman at eighteen. Built a call center in New Jersey by nineteen. Is now a millionaire at thirty three with his own company after being abandoned by his own family.
What about a man who may or may not be named Frederick. A dandy black man. He has a Dragon Ball Z tattoo on his neck. He was displaced, done. No future beyond the constant desire for more. He weaves myths to his clients. Builds stories around buyers, sellers, ISOs, he was born in poverty and now has ascended to a state of myth.
What about a former junkie and sensitive professional liar named Greg. He met a young man driving a Maserati in front of a restaurant when he was seventeen years old. The young man with the car, Yuri, an Israeli national founded a lending firm in his early 20s selling subprime housing loans and contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. Yuri mentored Greg, turned him into a personal Dybbuk, bound as if by Solomon via sigils on mezuzah. Greg still has spells of body tics. A leg that shakes too much, a nervous twitch, he flicks his pen between his fingers weaving between each in and out on calls. Greg can close on anyone. He will gaslight you into a friend in under five minutes as if by magic. He comes in with his face cut deep in razor scars every day. Greg sells millions in financial products a month.
There’s a young man named Asher who plays in a shoegaze band in Williamsburg. He grew up fixing cars at his father’s repair business in the Hasidic part of Brooklyn. Arm tattoos barely peek out his sleeves.
There are the saleswomen. All of them are beautiful. Eight-plus-out-of-ten beautiful in designer everything like body armour. Professional yappers that can convince anyone to part with their money to them in ways most sex workers could only dream of. In the art world, I watched bohemian mids give away every hole for a line of cocaine. In the finance world, I watch liar priestesses take everything from a man with a sentence and give nothing back in return.
The unifying thread between all these people is that there is no unifying thread. Everyone squandered something. Everyone learned the hard way and found their way to a ship of fools, rich fools, that sails to war daily. There is every kind of loss imaginable in the office, a penthouse at the top of a midtown skyscraper. Every tragedy you can dream of is there, a menagerie of heartbreaks.
What is it that separates people that learn this secret from the ones that never? I’ve talked about this with Carmine a lot. Why do people continue to clock in at a dead end job every day when they can pillage instead? It’s not arcane knowledge that you can just learn sales. No, what separates the salesmen from the rest *is* “rock bottom” itself. The strength of will it takes to have hundreds of bad interactions with hundreds of people a day, to learn the art of industrial scale gaslighting, to learn lying as a service - it’s a mystic initiatory experience. It’s something you can only learn when your limbic system is marred by trauma. You can do nothing else because you are already experiencing trauma flashbacks. I spent my first two weeks in the office in a dissociated haze. A distant ringing was the soundtrack over delusions, the nightmare of memory. The job itself became freeing, the only way to escape the state of the present. Then the money started coming in. I’m not just good at this, I’m incredible at it. I don’t think I could have ever taken this very strange risk in this very strange industry if not for mystical trauma. Every saleswoman/salesmen is sculpted out of marble into a weapon. Those skills are then applicable in every arena from the office to the streets below. Everyone is a mark and every interaction is manipulatable and pliable.
My actual therapist, not the Teutonic lesbian, told me I experienced something this past year she calls complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Its a form of PTSD unlike the kind where a grenade goes off next to your platoon because it is instead an injury by a thousand cuts. You don’t get CPTSD from war or a sudden event, you get it from prolonged exposure to traumatic hidden and often public psychological abuse, especially from a loved one. There is a form of trauma in every salesmen, in every broker. It’s the origin story of the dark triad. The kind of guy, the kind of woman that can take your money is the kind of person who’s nervous system could’ve been obliterated the year before.
These are myths about rebirth and transformation.
In The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom creates a thesis of human behavior. Among it is that popular ideas of stress are simply wrong. Stress is not exposure to too much hard work, but rather the lack of it, falling in the social pecking order. To be passive as if by ennui is to experience decay. Men who retire die faster than those that keep working. Babies that get less stimulation experience neurological atrophy. Our bodies, our minds, our souls themselves die without the constant stimulation of raw life and our constant participation in the game. You have to work, work hard, experience pain, experience trauma to reach the kinds of success others will sit around and hope luck will impart on them.
Life doesn’t “happen to you”.
You take it by force like your ancestors did. You wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t taken it by force.
Bloom says in The Lucifer Principle:
“we have to restore our sense that stimulation can be exhilarating. We have to realize that challenge is not our enemy but our salvation and that the dangers we have interpreted as stress come from something far different than what we’ve imagined. They do not spring from ambition or the drive of the dedicated. They come from isolation, separation from the social beast, removal from the superorganismic unit that gives our life its meaning. Our pains do not proceed from over-activity but from the loss of control and the feeling that we are allowing ourselves to be shuffled from the pecking order’s peak. The solution to our problem is not a good vacation. Our hope and our pleasure lie in rolling up our sleeves and going to work.”1
What every broker I ever met has in common is unassailable desire for more. It is a hunger that coats everything. Brokers live in a secret society like the Hashashin. There are ways of speaking, ways of being, ways of honor. Climbing up is a series of initiations. There are micro tribes within tribes. Unlike the art world where free agents backstab with impunity, the lines in finance resemble the fraternity, the sorority. Loyalty is to the inner circle, the marks are outside, and achievement is something you can’t fake. Numbers don’t lie. You make it, or crash out. There is no other way.
In a way I dance between these worlds. I can observe it and understand it. Witness it and live it at the same time. If you start something as a bit, it doesn’t matter that it was a bit at first, you become it anyway. If you start something to silence the ringing in your ears, you also become it anyway.
High fidelity sister chromatid repair is the process where a damaged section of a chromosome is accurately repaired using the identical sequence found on its sister chromatid which acts as the template for repair; It is the most accurate process of DNA repair.
You can borrow from your soul as you can borrow from your sister chromatid. Repair, rebuild. You have to remember who you were, what you are, and where you are going. Thrust headfirst into it and let the “stress” fall over you in waves. Rebuilding is old world, it is primordial. Your ancestors lived lives of unimaginable hardship and cunning for you to be here and read this right now. Start acting like it and have fun.
Have a ship of privateers and a place to hold court.
Bloom, Howard - The Lucifer Principle p 130