I wanna launch a ¢oin

FOMO cryptically and foxily leads us to a big MOFO

Nov 27, 2024

I wanna launch a ¢oin real bad. Like, for real.

This is a legitimate dream of mine, not a desperate hard scrabble after some grinning green leprechaun's cock of gold – no siree. Not a train long departed, not a bus that's left the station. Don’t be buggin me now with your fear uncertainty doubt.

No, I wanna – and I’m gonna – launch a coin that conveys something of my own personality, my impish little grin, my tricksterish charm. What color should it be? What should it taste of? Which celebrities should it be endorsed by? Which celebrities should it endorse?

So many ¢oin questions, and the scraps of answers all roilin boilin coilin round my brain. In a spaghetti tangle, a nexus of twists. NEXUSCOIN? Sounds good. SPAGHETTICOIN? Better. But maybe not. Who can say?

I'm gonna let it bumble and tumble round my thinkin hole for a little while yet and see if I can't let the fizz of all my fuzzy imaginings kinda sort themself out. It burbles like a witch's cauldron, my brain. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. TOILCOIN? No. Not nearly up enough. Let the name stew for now, move on to conceptuality.

So I could, and I should, indeed I must, have a coin that expresses my deep individuality, my conviction that only by setting up a big bank of servers chunka-lunkin away at the blocky-mines and grindin grindin grindin away for gold could I realize my dream of self, to be a self and all the selfiness that goes with it. Self-care, self-awareness, self-confidence, self-harm. No, not that last one.

Selfies...? Sure, selfies, but any Joe Schmo, any schlub-a-lub with peepers and pokers, can take himself a selfies. I'm talkin ‘bout purest self, amigo. What about that – a coin that’s pure self? SELFIECOIN. Yeah, that sounds good. Well, sorta. Let name stew.

My partner Nazzie says I should lay off the white powder, try to keep it real, but already I got that sweet sugar roundin poundin soundin all thruout my whole splay of spaghetti arteries and all my beetroot veins. Try to stop that process, hun.

You know sugar was the first mood-alterin substance to be trafficked internationally? I mean, there was tobacco and potatoes too, but sugar was the one that really hit the spot. That energy-perkin hip-hip-hooray of surgin bloodpower and capability, know the kick? How could it not become the rising sun of that bright new day of transnational grind, bro?

You could heap it into your coffee cup all day, sweet syrupy sugary coffee yeah, and then at night have some rum distilled outta sugar yeah, then maybe just scoop up the shit on a silver spoon and guzzle it in your muzzle yeah, and then you were flyin all up in the eighteenth century, wig askew and lovin it.

Saw a video, they hadda whole industry based on growing the stuff out there in the... out in the somewhere hot. Tropics of Cancer, somesuch. In the end had to ship over some unpaid involuntary labor to help out. Wonder how they do it today. Prob'ly got nanobots or something.

My partner Nazzie says I should get to work and lay off the sweet white powder and settle down to do a real thing that’s made of things, but she don't know what it is to blitz and ritz and kibbitz in your mind with a mind full of ideas. That's mindfulness, that is, when your mind is full.

She says I should see a doctor. I say honey, I seen a doctor and they ain’t nothin special to look at. No, she says, my partner Nazzie says, she says: see a doc, and maybe find a way to level out my ups and my downs, the ups of my radiant mind full of boilin bubblin originality, full of self till it’s fit to burst, and the downs of the days when I fall slumpin on the bathroom floor with no breath at all and don't even weep 'cause it's too exhausting to sob even just a little. Self emptied out to nothing at all.

But that’s just the few bad days, not that much in the scheme of, is what she can’t perceive for the life of her. Mostly I’m full of energy, perk-perkin with pumpin vitality and sweet throbbin life, and that’s when I get to see the truth, the whole truth.

And here it comes –

There's a world of bliss to be carved out of the ether of numbers and twisty wires coiling up from a serverbank all bundled together and sealed close with twisty clips like the great captains of industry, the mercantile poisoneers I mean pioneers who set up sweet sugar plantations yeah and brought over the extra help when others were trying to stop them with their well-intentioned but misguided no-no-nos.

Someone's gotta take the risks.

So I set out this morning on a quest to launch a ¢oin. Maybe it makes more sense to stay at home and grind out my brilliance on the old keyboard, tippy-tap my way to greatness on the cellphone, but I just had a feel that it was out there on the streets that my coin's birth was to take place - out there where it would happen, out there on the streets, out where the action is. STREETCOIN? Not really, but maybe in the ballpark.

Thus I set out. Besides, my partner Nazzie told me to GTFO and the wifi is down.

Out on the streets things don't initially look full of such promise for a young entrepreneur with a sore hankerin for self-realization. It's hot, hot enough to melt asphalt, the street is bubblin like the seethe in my head. Ideas smellin like hot tar now.

Flies, and things that really aren't flies but nonetheless fly, are swarmin round anythin that offers a microbial servin of protein, a sweatdrop or just a fleck o' dead skin. I'm swarmed consequent, buzzed and bummed in a buzzbomb of blackfly discontent. Irregardless of intent, and mine is pure, there's a forebodin sense that maybe all's not quite right with the world.

That's when I met the fox. Was the fox a man with a cheap fox mask strung round his face with a little elastic string? Or was it a real fox who had taken on the characteristics of man in a type of evolutionary leap, a lamarckism of faith in the eventual right outcome for us doltish clompers? That's the nub, the nitty-gritty of the whole dilemma and prob. He tried to bum a coin, an old metal-type coin, from me, hand out foxy and fey, and he blocked my path, and I looked up at the glint in his cardboard eye, that foxish cunning determination to survive.

Then it hit me. FOXCOIN. This was my spirit animal. He could lead me on my spirit quest for the perfect coin to launch. So I gave him a metal coin, the old type of coin with greasy black grime clogging up the old guy's face and words in maybe Latin. Defender of the faith. Iesus nazarenus rex iudaeorum. And then I gave him another. And then, to seal our bargain, I gave him a third coin of tarnished metal.

And now the pact was made: the fox was my grease and my guide, my greasy guide, out here on the streets, as I sought the perfect conceptual coin to launch my fortune and express my own deep deep self. Panhandling psychopomp, lead me on my way. Foxy führer, take me where the streets are bricked with virtual gold. Vagrant virgil, visualize my slaveation on a far-off sugar-isle of tropical sweetness and bring it on home, daddy-oh!

So Foxyman and I hightail it, him with his bushy tail all high and mighty, and me still thrillin to the groove of a guide through this infernal fetor, footloose and fancifully free, eyeballs peep-peep-peepin out for opportunities of where to make a super score on the coinage front.

The thing about coin is not to have a sweaty metal minidisk, Honest Abe or otherwise, in your clambake mitts - that's easy enough for the loserest loser who flops his loser ass upon a foldedup box down on loser alley - it's to have the clean pure Platonic Ideal of Coin and grasp it, grasp it tight in the purity of your soul.

My soul was pure, yes, but she wasn't strong enough alone to grasp ahold of that Ideal, so the Foxyman would help me out there. Seize and grab, like a happy Pizarro of old, or a seacaptain with a precious cargo of sugarcane-harvesters-to-be groaning out guts in the rolling hold. The thing is to see, to seize, to be pure of heart and plant your cross on the beach with a strong prayer. Every Cortés needs a Malinche, and my new foxy brother would be that soulmate and interpreter, mother to my new specie.

Down we went to the bodega, to score a quart of bootleg aguardiente. Sugary thick greasy rollaround-a-tongue kick in the headspurts, oh what a feeling. The thick blackfly cloud dispersed when we breathed out on them with our ardent expirations. The air became clear, though the bubbling tarmac stickyshoed us and tried to clasp us to its embrace. But we soldiered on, black mozzarella pizzaing thick to our soles, our very souls imperilled by its ooze.

I was well-sugared and thriving, Foxy was unsteady on his feet but high-spirited. It was ideal conditions for a vision quest. What next, by crikey? Now the afternoon was reaching a furious fiery zenith, the sun was an unthinkable and the scorch was laid on our necks like hotsauce. Foxy stopped and held my arm.

"Is here, boss," he said. His other arm stretched out libertylike and pointed unmistakeably to the torched sky. Then he wove and dove, and that little ballerina dance of the foxyshaman, shakin and bakin, caused him to stagger on the sticky pavement of the street.

Now nothing moved. I mean nothing. Walkers stopped walking and were statues. Cars and trucks were cutouts and stood papiermaché pointless on the gummed street. My shimmying animal guide came to a shudderstop and now pointed straight ahead, through and not at a delivery van, across the street to a big dude in a thick black puffer anorak and sable furlined boots, with a thick black toque or beanie pulled nearly to his eyes. How could he stand the heat and be clad so, in such a welter of clothy covering? His woolly goatee had no wilt, neither did his plump cheeks sweat. He was composed and cool in the inferno, only he, dressed as if to survive the severest winter. What in the unholiest bubblin broth of blackmagick was goin on here?

Things all started on up again. Foxyman staggered and toppled, falling to the shimmerhaze of the sidewalk. The aguardiente spilled from his dropped bottle, flaming in the heat.

"Go on widout me," he gasped, burning slightly from the flaming brulée on his trouserlegs, but uncomplaining all the while. I pulled out my shrivelled cock and splashed urine over him to put out the fire - don't ever say that I never show charity to my fellow man - then scurried on up the block to catch the cooling trail of the huge man clothed all in thick warm black.

"Go on widout me," repeated the Foxyman. He seemed content as he lay there in the scorchmarked puddle of piss on the sidewalk, his task taken to completion, the key indication now made. He'd done his bit in the ongoing quest for the purity of the ideal coin. Now the challenge was mine – mine to confront this bulky baalzebub deambulating through the demon streets of downtown and dripping for all that not a drop of sweat.

My sugar levels were plummeting dangerously low, and so I snaffled two or three of the sugarlumps I'd stuffed in my cargopants pockets for just such an eventuality. They were melted and treacly, but they did the trick, hiking my energy levels back up towards nominal as I closed in on my quarry. He was a giant of a man, getting gianter with each step he took, or so it seemed as I approached him from behind. He carried a black briefcase in his left paw, not holding the handle, but clasping the entire case within his palm. He had to duck to avoid the fire escapes; he was swelling, it seemed, and become great with cool dark power.

He sauntered and pimp-rolled calmly, but with his long treetrunk legs he made up the ground rapidly. I had to scurry like a meerkat to catch up, my puckered snout sniffing ahead of me for indications as to the nature of his being. He was not the coin himself, but he carried the coin, or he knew the coin - this much I could scent.

He was an enemy of my pure intent, that much was clear also. I had faith in my self, and my self had faith in myself. He had faith in a specter of some kind, a something outside himself that'd engrossed his body with monstrosity and vigor. I resolved to be wary, and to watch for a moment in which to snatch his briefcase, or at the very least to snatch a look at its contents.

By now I'd stepped just a few blocks away from my home where Nazzie had thrown me out to find an actual physical destiny, but already it seemed like another world, like I was another person.

Only the sugar hum and buzz was a constant, everything else was shifted uneasily on its axis, wonky and yet gloriously in place. The scorch of day was merciless and my purity of intent untainted for all the piss and sweat spilt so far, the shining self inside my sheeny skin and the consequent fuzzy cloud of blackfly and bugthings all unaltered. But the context of it all was different somehow.

Before I'd had a place, a lover, a wifi connection. Now I was adrift on the streets and the freedom was as fiery and terrifying as the taste of raw spirits had been in my tender virginal gullet. Aguardiente is the shit. Rockets and rocketfuel both.

So we walked and walked, maybe a block or maybe a hundred. It was purging and purgatorial, a stroll in hell’s antechamber.

There. The black-clad giant had stopped, taking a rest on a park bench. The park was a tiny square of parched dead vegetation in a city block, piled with vestiges of people and of cats in carryboxes. Brown shrubs, tentpoles, gray dust, beige unwashed flesh embossed with roseate pustules, white bones and ivory drawn teeth. Tiny fangs jammed in the parterres. A municipal leisure facility.

The big dude laid the briefcase down on the ground beside the bench, a move that marked him as an out-of-towner right there. He sighed and stared up into the sky where the fox had pointed before in a clipped liberty bid for deliverance. But was it really the same sky, or had it moved on to another place since? No, the dude was gazing at a different sky at this time. Nobody can look twice into the same sky.

I tippy-toed nearby and crouched behind him as if to snatch at the briefcase. But the large dude spoke, his voice clear and eerie-intimate. Even though he spoke into the sky, it sounded close to my ear like a lover’s tight whisper in the dead of night.

"There's no need to steal that thing. I was told to deliver it to you, and I have. Take it and go. What you seek is in there, little Klimt Fullcake. Take it and go in peace. Prosper, or whatever the fuck. What do I care? I done my part." Not an out-of-towner after all, his broad accent reeking of the city after all.

I hesitated, afraid now that he knew I was there. What he could do. Sweat trickled into my eyes. The cloud of blackfly became a cloud of unknowing. Doubt froze over me though the sun scorched unfailing down.

"Are you deaf or what, Klimty ma boy?" Now I could see how his breath misted out of his mouth like on a frosty day. "Take the muthafuckin case and be your way, sonny." He seemed frustrated at my lack of initiative, the inadequate purity of my intent. What did my self consist of, after all? Piss and vinegar, taunted the cloud of frosty condensating breath in the shimmering heat.

So I took the case and I walked away from the parkbench. No challenge needed to be answered, no ferocious enemy was there to overcome.

Just pick it up. Simple as that. Quests these days, am I right?

My partner Nazzie wouldn't take me back in till I assured her that I had the thing that I wanted and that there was no further need for me to guzzle up so much sugar and fret through the days and nights. Until I swore to stop going on the online that wasn't really there anymore, and no longer upset myself with thoughts of coins coins always coins.

Sugar is no longer so sweet to me. I tasted the fire of its making in full and it burned. My love is sweet and even, and that’s enough, I said.

Things have simplified radically: there’s her, and me, and then the case. The case was what I had been seeking in the dumb purity of my intent, and that same dumb purity tells me that I mustn't open the case until everyone else is as happy as me, until everyone has a case just like mine that holds inside what they need.

This is a case history. All of history is contained in that yet-unopened case. The contents of the case, be it coin or token or icon or iron or idol or the Ideal - that's still to be determined. But I have my partner Nazzie, she has what’s left of me, and we have our little apartment.

I hear the howls of foxes and dogs out on the street and I'm safe when I hug my case to myself and Nazzie hugs me and the case together, and we form an ongoing Russian doll of safety.

Do you want to open it and gaze inside? Hold my hand and hers as we all open it together? But really the case is closed. For what copper dirham, what silver thaler or golden guinea, could console you now for all that we've lost in the whole swirl and shake of our shared sad history?