Random Reader Reaction

I sent the email last week:

Friends and colleagues,

Warmest regards,

It took me like 6 hours to craft that exceptional bit of prose, but I think it turned out quite nicely.

To be truthful, I had already been pretty checked out for the past few months. Ever since I got my PE offer, things were almost pointless. Most recently, I’d taken to coming in at like 11:00am and, in general, not really giving a FUCK.

I still got everything done exceptionally, of course, and I still came in some weekends, but it was almost just out of habit. Then when the summer started and the clueless “ex-entrepreneur” MBA summer associate starting coming to me asking for help, I would just peek up at him from behind my kicked up bare feet, and tell him: “Give me a shout on Monday.” I’d look annoyed, as if he’d interrupted some sort of bare-footed piece of analysis he’d never be able to comprehend, and to accentuate that I didn’t really want to be bothered on Monday, I’d shoot him a look of I-don’t-give-a-fuckness that screamed: “What’s more busted bro, your dot-com or your girlfriend’s face?”

And now I’ve left, and I’m jobless. Well, I’m obviously not jobless, but that’s the liberating feeling of all breaks along The Track:

Innovative graphic design courtesy of Mercer Management Consulting (they’ll take whatever business they can get, apparently).

The Track is what separates man from beast. It’s what separates Banker from every other ungainfully employed idiot that exists out there. It’s magnificent in its simplicity and supreme in the rewards of its end-state.

And thank god it’s set up how it is. When an “artist,” writer, or other unspeakable is “in between jobs,” he ends up giving blood 12x a day, wearing homemade jorts, and living off Gray’s Papaya (or whatever the outer-borough version of that is). When a Banker is in between jobs, he’s just fucking around for a couple months with >$100k savings until the next leg of The Track begins.

I’ll admit, I’m rather enjoying waking up whenever the hell and going to the gym 2x a day. Just this week, I watched Transformers in the theater at 3 in the afternoon after lifting. Halfway through that exceptionally manly movie, I felt like a meathead trader I was so jacked up on testosterone. I almost picked a fight with the dude in front of me, but instead of absolutely destroying the 85 year old, handicapped Asian man, I went home and stood in front of my full-length mirror and watched myself rapidly change from my street clothes into my Banker clothes.

One second I was an innocuous American car, wearing shorts and a polo. The next second—BAM! I was transformed and growling back at myself in a $3k bespoke suit, 1000 feet tall, ready to shoot M&A lasers out of my elbows.

The Optimus Mother Fucking Prime of Banking, baby.

Then I chuckled to myself and made a clever joke about the demise of Optimus Subprime, a once promising autobot.

Now, I’m going to “travel.” I’m not entirely certain why, but it feels like the right thing to do. There are a handful of developing third world nations I’ve heard are worth visiting: Turkey, Croatia, Fire Island, et.al., and this is the time to conquer them, if ever.

I may go through the motions of seeing a couple sites, but the experience is more so that when I do start work and people ask me what I did during my time off, I’ll be able to casually say: “Oh…I was traveling.” And then, we’ll bask in 15 minutes of stimulating conversation about the insanely high prices of Icelandic beer and the rich body of Turkish tobacco. After a few days, I’ll start circulating some lavish sex stories involving me, an excess of HRK, and several runway models with broken English—just so the word gets out that I’m “’bout it.” The message will disseminate, and I’ll be set up well. Actually—if I didn’t take this time to travel, I’m not even certain how I’d break the ice.

Anyway, after rounding out the European leg of the trip boozing on my boy’s yacht in Istanbul and abusing whatever the Turkish word for “baller” is, I might even stop home for a spell. I project I’ll be able to stand at most 2 days before I’ve grown disgusted of my friends that were fun in the moment but never made it past community college and will have completely exhausted my phonebook of elementary school teaching sluts that try ferociously to reel me in with their expertise in homemaking. Poor suburbanites.

Soon after, this break along The Track will be over, and my next “adventure” will begin. While it is fun living this jobless lifestyle, I’m glad I’ll be back at work in a few short weeks—the economy needs me.