Steps

What is supposed to happen next?  The air is full of this question, signaling the next stage of things, post-drash.  I'm about to start a grief group, purpose and effectiveness unknown.  My days still begin with a note of the heavy and sad.  But increasingly, they veer toward impatience.  I want to accomplish something, and more than one thing, each day.  

I have had a go at understanding bonds.  My financial advisor, a.k.a. Bill, a West Texan, tells me I need some.  There's a hole in my portfolio, a.k.a. cash, that is just screaming for bonds.  There was Barry Bonds, of course, and he figured prominently in local baseball attendance for a time.  And I know more about Barry Bonds than I do about the corporate or municipal investment-grade variety.  At least Barry could be counted on for drug abuse and courtroom drama.  The sort of thing they sell at Fidelity Funds can only be counted on to push you over the edge of madness or, even worse, drive you into terminal boredom.

Still, I give myself high marks.  The "buy bonds" item has been on my To Do list for weeks.  I have even had a look at websites that explain coupons, rates and the difference.  Maturity, too.  Actually, I thought I had a fair amount of that this one.  As for yield, I have yielded far too much over the years.  But to face the matter soberly, I really have tried to understand how and why I should buy one of the 10,000 corporate bonds, say, available online.  A fixed income guy at Fidelity has talked me through it.  More exactly, he has talked me down.  Because bonds, in fact, almost anything numerical, get me so exasperated so quickly that these days I lose patience and civility.  

The Fidelity guy guided me through the retirement website quite effectively.  The problem is, once I had a sketchy idea of what bonds were, I had no further interest in the matter.  This is a function of what is politely termed attention span.  Or, more provincially, bandwidth.

The width of my band remains narrow.  Okay, so even when the channels were wide open and I could bounce such matters off the ever-grounded Marlou, the idea of bonds would still have left me dizzy.  Still, the two of us  would have hit upon an acceptable solution, such as handing the entire matter over to an acknowledged professional.  Yes, West Texan Bill fits this category, but he is for want of better words, a little too American.  He urges me to take responsibility here.  Buy my own bonds not have some money-grubbing trader do it for me in a bond fund.  Marlou would have scoped out this overall picture, scented either delay or disaster, and pushed me in the general direction of professional help.  She would have known that if I didn't get professional bond buying help soon, one or both of us would need the psychiatric variety.  That's how much bonds dent my psyche.

Which I don't like laughing off entirely.  After all, learning new things keeps us young.  It's just that when the learning curve gets impossibly steep and the available gray cells impossibly few, one has to give up.  Better to make a move, even a conservative one, then to leave investments uninvested.  Right?

Oh, who knows?  Some higher power may be guiding me away from impending market disaster.  By dithering, I may be making the shrewdest move possible.  Or maybe the opposite.  For now, there is the sense of trying to not leave things alone, and facing too much that is not getting done.  So I'm trying to push the Sisyphean rock a little faster these days.  If I can't quite pull in the bond helper yet, by the time I do I will have fought my way through a certain body of bond knowledge and be better off.  Maybe.

Bond Street, that's where I'll be.  Along with Barry, the guy from Fidelity and the recent jewel thieves.  And with a little luck, I won't be taking any more trips on the Queen Mary 2.  I'll buy the sucker with my bond bonus.  And staff the thing with 2,500 of my closest friends, then set sail.  Probably with a passenger load of approximately six.  Everyone gets his own deck.  Introvert City.  We might meet in one of the dining rooms, by accident, every week or so.  The odds are not very high when there are twice as many restaurants as patrons.  But you've got options, don't you?  And options are what bonds are all about.  That and coupons.  So you clip your options, stuff your coupons somewhere, and head for dinner.  All aboard, visitors ashore, gangway up, ahoy.

No, the real point has to do with the reacquisition of effort, discipline and, yes, even patience.  This may not help me with my essential life, but it could help with my mood.  There is some sad knowledge that I drag around.  I'm not sure if it really dampens my mood as much as it tempers my actions.  Whatever it is, there's not much to be done.  But the mood, well that's different.  And that's the real problem with bonds.  Because the battle is ultimately a hopeless one, fighting too long will only make my mood deteriorate.  The trick is to fight it long enough to get into combat shape.  More training than military action.  What I actually need is something winnable, like my voice.  I was once a bass, but I am now a sort of crow.  What emerges from my vocal cords these days in rehearsals with the Menlo Park Chorus certainly sounds more avian than human.  And the range has shrunk to approximately five notes.  Which is why God designed scales.  I'm starting to do them, even going to the chorus website now and then to have a shot at the music.  Effort.  It's all uphill, but even in grief, one can take some steps, regain some control.