Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

by Brad Listi

  The millennial celebrations of New Year’s Eve were completely misleading as well. A marketing scam, if you ask me. There was money to be made. People were buying. Everyone was in on the act, celebrating the big moment as if it were the real thing, lighting off firecrackers, waving their hands in the air, pretending to be awed. In truth, however, the twenty-first century wouldn’t actually begin until 2001. New Year’s Day 2001 would technically qualify as the first day of the third millennium, because a millennium doesn’t actually begin until the one thousandth year of the previous millennium is over with, the same way a decade doesn’t end until the end of the tenth year. A matter of plain common sense. Yet for some reason, human beings felt compelled to celebrate the start of the next millennium a year early. We just couldn’t wait.

  An arbitrary new millennium had dawned.

  16.

  All throughout the holidays, I’d been feeling pretty listless, generally disinterested in any kind of socializing. San Francisco was particularly bad. It was followed by my family’s sojourn down to Louisiana to visit our extended clan for Christmas. From Louisiana, we headed back to Indianapolis, the place where I’d grown up, and there we endured the rest of our vacation in a state of relative harmony. I wound up spending most of my time in my old bedroom, reading and watching television. I found myself particularly captivated by a book on Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest stock market investor. At the time, Buffett was America’s second-richest man. His net worth topped out at approximately $36 billion, an amount of money that well exceeded the gross national product of several small nations, like, for instance, Estonia.

  The population of Estonia: 1.4 million human beings.

  gross national product n. (abbr. GNP)

  The total market value of all the goods and services produced by a nation during a specified period.

  Warren Buffett was born on August 30, 1930, during the Great Depression. As a child, he demonstrated a prodigious mastery of numbers and a precocious entrepreneurial streak. At the age of six, he was purchasing six-packs of Coca-Cola from his grandfather’s grocery store for twenty-five cents and reselling them for thirty cents. From there, he expanded his enterprises, buying various items and then turning them around for a handsome profit.

  By the time he’d graduated from high school, Buffett had earned more than ten grand—roughly the equivalent of $100,000 in modern dollars, when you factor in the rate of inflation.

  In 1988, Buffett began purchasing Coca-Cola stock (ticker symbol: KO) in massive quantities, quickly becoming the company’s largest shareholder. At the time, the shares were worth about $10.96 apiece. Five years later, they were worth $74.50. By the end of the 1990s, Buffet’s stake in the company was valued at around $13 billion.

  His profits were enormous.

  The ingredients found in a can of Coca-Cola are: carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, and caffeine.

  A $10,000 investment in Buffett’s insurance and investment holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., back in 1965 was worth roughly $50 million in the year 2000.

  Despite his massive wealth, Warren Buffett continues to live in his home state of Nebraska, in the same gray stucco house he purchased in Omaha for less than $32,000 in the 1950s.

  As a youngster, he was rejected by Harvard Business School.

  His nickname? The Oracle of Omaha.

  17.

  Amanda’s ashes had been scattered into San Francisco Bay, not too far from the Golden Gate Bridge, on Christmas Day, a few days before the dawn of an arbitrary new millennium. I sold all of my stock three days later, on December 28, 1999. Horvak was stunned when I gave him the news.

  “How could you do this?” he said. “How could you bail? How could you puss out before we even get into Q2? We were just getting started.”

  “I could die any day now,” I said.

  Horvak said, “What?”

  I went on to tell Horvak that Amanda’s death had made me rethink some things. I told him I was tired, that I needed rest, that I needed a break from money and trading. I told him I wanted to reevaluate my position in life. I told him I wanted to try to figure out what I thought about things.

  “This whole experience has made me realize that I don’t really know what I think about things,” I explained. “I don’t really know what anything means.”

  “Nobody does,” said Horvak. “That’s the whole point.”

  My holdings at the time of liquidation totaled roughly $45,000, after taxes.

  Relatively speaking, I’d made a killing.

  Shortly after cashing out, I wrote a large check to an organization called San Francisco Suicide Prevention. Amanda’s parents had requested that, in lieu of flowers, all donations be sent there in her name.

  I sent a donation there in her name.

  I often worried that I hadn’t sent enough.

  Sometimes I felt as though I should have sent everything.

  A couple of days later, in a fit of fiscal nervousness, I took $5,400 and dumped it right back into the New York Stock Exchange, for safekeeping.

  I bought ninety shares of Coca-Cola at $59.18 per share.

  I then gave my sisters, Lorraine and Anne, $2,500 cash. I handed them each twenty-five one-hundred-dollar bills and swore them to absolute secrecy. Lorraine, my older sister, asked me if I was dealing drugs. I told her yes. Anne, my younger sister, asked me if she had to pay me back. I told her no.

  Shortly thereafter, I found myself researching the history of the stock market, because I realized that I didn’t have any true understanding of what it actually meant. Along the way, I wound up learning that the American Stock Exchange had once been called the “Curb Exchange,” a fact that amused me greatly. I felt there was something flawless about the terminology, something wickedly funny and savagely true. It inspired visions of drug deals, prostitution, and rampant capitalism, all in one fell swoop. It was poetry.

  From there, I continued my investigation, an oddly feverish pursuit that wound up leading me into a broader understanding of the global economy. What I found, by and large, tended to be riveting and deeply disturbing—not that this was any big surprise. I ingested a surreal assortment of sobering facts and figures, most of which were difficult to actually comprehend. I learned, for example, that there are approximately 500 million people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are living in what the World Bank refers to as “absolute poverty”; that every thirty seconds, 200 people die of hunger; that for the price of one Patriot missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years; that half of the world’s human beings are struggling to survive on the equivalent of two dollars per day and that half of that half are struggling to survive on the equivalent of one dollar per day; that 1.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water; that approximately one fifth of America’s food goes to waste every year—the equivalent of about 130 pounds per person; and that the amount of food wasted annually by Americans could feed 49 million hungry people.

  Eventually, I wore myself out. I put the books down.

  I sat back in my chair and looked at the television.

  Jeopardy! was on.

  I was a twenty-two-year-old American with $22,500 in my checking account.

  I had no idea what I was doing with my life.

  My ex-girlfriend had killed herself, and she had once been pregnant with my child.

  Had she gone through with the pregnancy, our kid would have been starting preschool soon.

  18.

  Another person I read about over the holidays: Siddhartha Gautama. A fairly obvious thing to do in the wake of a trauma, perhaps. But nevertheless, there I was.

  I took comfort in the fact that Gautama was an actual man. He was born into a caste of warrior aristocrats sometime around the year 560 B.C., in the Himalayan foothills of what is now Nepal. He enjoyed a sheltered childhood in a pleasure-filled palace, oblivious to the miseries of society.
He partied a lot and enjoyed the company of several concubines.

  Though the specifics of his life history are admittedly cloudy, most religious scholars seem to agree that Siddhartha had excelled in sports and the martial arts, while also enjoying a comprehensive education in literature, religion, philosophy, and agriculture management. He married a cousin of his at the age of sixteen. Her name was Yashodhara, and she bore him children.

  Eventually, however, despite all of this comfort and stimulation, Siddhartha became restless. His charmed existence wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He tired of his palace, his concubines, his family. He tired of his parties. He tired of his trust fund. He had it all, yet he was deeply unhappy.

  One night, against the wishes of his father, Siddhartha snuck out of the palace and wandered into the streets. Here is what he saw:

  1.) A sick man

  2.) A poor man

  3.) A beggar

  4.) A corpse

  Shortly thereafter, Siddhartha freaked out, essentially. He abandoned his former way of life and dedicated himself to solving the riddle of suffering endemic in all human beings. He even abandoned his wife and family. Naked and alone, he set out into the countryside in search of true enlightenment. He became a wandering ascetic.

  Naturally, his life in those days was pretty bleak. He stumbled around, starving and nude, mumbling to himself. He slept on a bed of thorns in the jungle. He held his breath until he passed out, hoping to unlock the mysteries of existence. He went on like this for about six years.

  In the end, the experiment failed. Without any food in his belly, Siddhartha couldn’t really think straight. Eventually, he came to believe that a life of complete denial wasn’t a good idea, and neither was a life of total indulgence. The trick, he realized, was to live a life of balance. There was, he realized, a Middle Way.

  Pleased with his newfound knowledge, Siddhartha went and sat in the shade of a large pipal tree for a round of intensive meditation. While sitting there, he had a series of incredible epiphanies. He became enlightened.

  In the midst of this epiphanic trance, Siddhartha managed to reduce human existence to Four Noble Truths. Those Four Noble Truths are:

  1.) All humans suffer.

  2.) All human suffering is caused by human desire, particularly the desire that impermanent things be permanent.

  3.) Human suffering can be ended by ending human desire.

  4.) Desire can be ended by following the “Eightfold Noble Path”: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

  Siddhartha went on to spend the rest of his life teaching the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Path to anyone who would listen. He died at the age of eighty. His devotees generally believe that he passed into a state of nirvana at the moment of his death.

  nirvana n.

  1.) Often cap:

  a. Buddhism: The ineffable ultimate in which one has attained disinterested wisdom and compassion.

  b. Hinduism: Emancipation from ignorance and the extinction of all attachment.

  2.) An ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, or joy.

  These days, Siddhartha is commonly referred to by his nickname: Buddha.

  19.

  It was only a matter of time before my parents and I wound up having “The Conversation” again. It happened on a Tuesday afternoon, a couple of days after the dawn of the new millennium. We were sitting in the kitchen, eating lunch. My sisters were off at the shopping mall, exchanging Christmas gifts, and my parents took it upon themselves to inquire about my plans for the future, my thoughts on steady income, an agenda, a career. It was here that I broke the news about the sale of my Exxon stock and my subsequent astronomical success on the open market. At that point, the ride was over. I figured I had nothing to lose. I came clean, told them everything. My parents were flabbergasted, to put it mildly. My mother asked me if it was legal. My father, though he tried not to show it, was fairly impressed.

  “Well, shit,” he said.

  Naturally, they were curious about what I was going to do next. I told them that I wasn’t sure, that my only real plan at the moment was to head back to Boulder and reevaluate my options. I told them that I didn’t have the mind to be making any big decisions for a while, and for the moment, that was enough to end the inquiry. They didn’t press me any further. In truth, they’d been good about that since Amanda’s death. They hadn’t really pressed me much.

  Toward the end of The Conversation, I yawned and rubbed my eyes. My mother made a face and told me that I looked like I needed some rest. I nodded in agreement. I hadn’t been sleeping well. I’d been waking up frequently in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling. All I could think about was Amanda waking up in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling. I thought about Amanda tiptoeing down the stairs. I thought about Amanda at the abortion clinic. I thought about Amanda and me, watching those fireworks on that hillside in Marin.

  I thought about Amanda sitting there behind the wheel, lost and broken with the engine running, waiting in the dead of night.

  20.

  Late April, the arbitrary year 2000. Four months after Amanda’s death. Winter had melted into spring in methodical fashion. Twelve weeks flew by in the blink of an eye.

  This was when the bubble burst and the dot-com boom met its brutal, inglorious end. In one shocking week, the stock market indexes all dropped dramatically. Carnage on Wall Street. Bloodletting. Dying IPOs. Hyperventilation. Investors worldwide were in a massive panic. Horvak called me up to tell me he had lost more than $90,000 in a three-hour span of time.

  “I think it’s going to rebound,” he said. “I’m going to make some adjustments, restrategize, and decide how to ride it out.” His voice was cracking.

  After the holidays, I’d gone back to Boulder with the intention of quitting my job and taking it easy for a while, but it didn’t wind up working out that way. When push came to shove, I couldn’t go through with it. I realized that I didn’t want to quit my job, at least not right away. I realized that I didn’t know how to take it easy for a while. Sitting around contemplating didn’t seem like a good idea. I’d tried it a few times. It didn’t work out too well.

  In consequence, I had continued to deliver pizza throughout the winter and spring. The work routine kept me busy, and it was simple and predictable. The people opened their front doors and handed me cash; I handed them food and smiled. They said thank you; I told them they were welcome. Then they shut the door. Then I walked away. It was a gestalt exercise, essentially. You wound up getting a little vignette of their world, a snapshot of their life. If your eyes were open, you’d see it: a bass guitar, red-checkered curtains, the smell of Windex, Architectural Digest, a Jack Russell terrier, three Frisbees, a Big Bertha driver, a poster of Charles Mingus in a silver frame on the wall, a yellow pack of American Spirits, and a cactus on the windowsill.

  You could learn pretty much everything you needed to know about someone based on that information.

  Personally, I was beginning to think that this was an excellent way to interact with people. Insofar as human exchanges go, it seemed pretty tough to top. Provided I showed up on time and they tipped me, everyone walked away satisfied and unharmed.

  But then, nothing much was risked in this arrangement. And risk, I’d heard, was everything. That was what the mental health experts were always saying.

  “Without risk,” they’d say, “you cannot get The Magic.”

  The Magic.

  Another fact worth mentioning: I didn’t feel much like having sex just then. My interest in meeting pretty girls was essentially nonexistent, which was odd. Normally, I existed in a constant state of wanting to have sex with pretty girls. But now I really didn’t. I seemed to have lost my taste for the thrill of the hunt. I didn’t really care about getting laid. Getting laid was dangerous. I wasn’t in the mood.

  At the same time, I kept thinking about
actually being in love. In the wake of Amanda’s suicide, it had struck me that I’d never actually been in love. While it was true that I’d loved Amanda, it was clear to me now that I’d never actually been in love with her. It was never whole, never fully functional or mature—not on my part, anyway. It was young love, fleeting and unpredictable, sometimes even dumb. It lacked the depth of understanding and selflessness of real love. It wasn’t the genuine article, it wasn’t the real thing. If it had been real love, then the relationship wouldn’t have ended the way that it did—and the blame for that circumstance lay wholly with me. The fact of the matter was, I’d never been in love before. Didn’t have what it took. Didn’t have the guts. I wasn’t able to manage it with Amanda, and I hadn’t been able to manage it with anyone else. I hadn’t realized that before, but I realized that now. People fell in love every day, all over the world, and I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t understand what it meant, and I didn’t know how it was done.

  This worried me.

  21.

  In mid-May, I finally made my exit from Fatty Jay’s. After much deliberation, I decided to ditch Boulder and go traveling for a spell. The timing seemed right for an adventure. I figured I would willfully disorient myself in hopes that it might help me to discover some kind of valuable new perspective.

  A few weeks earlier, I’d purchased a ticket to Cancún, Mexico, where I would be attending the wedding of my good friends A.B. and Jenny. They were getting hitched on the beach in Playa del Carmen, a picturesque village on the Mayan Riviera. A.B. was four years older than I was, a friend I’d made during college, and he had asked me to be a groomsman. Naturally, I’d accepted.