Dope on the Table

May Journal [2605]

Jun 03, 2026

LIFE

Writing A Suitable Habitat has changed my life.

There’s some kind of tax you pay when you carry around ideas that haven’t been turned into creative output. That was me, for the most part. Making things. Writing. Recording music. Never putting any of it out into the world.

It’s not about the metrics. None of that matters, except it does. You have to hold two things seemingly contradictory ideas in your head at once. You aren’t entitled to anything beyond your labor, but if your work doesn’t resonate with anyone (numbers on a screen) it’s more likely something is off than you’re a genius unrecognized in your own time.

I think a lot about Fat Tony, the fictional character Nassim Taleb uses in Antifragile to offset another fictional character named Nero. Nero loves knowledge for its own sake. He pursues erudition and aesthetics. He is not attached to numbers on the screen. Fat Tony challenges Nero on this viewpoint.

“Further, Fat Tony insisted that Nero take a ritual look at the physical embodiments of the spoils, such as a bank account statement…He could understand why Julius Caesar needed to incur the cost of having Vercingetorix, the leader of the Gaul rebellion, brought to Rome and paraded in chains just so he could exhibit victory in the flesh. There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition…Again, it is not the amount but the tangibility of his action that counted — the quantities could have been a tenth, even a hundredth as much and the effect would remain the same." - Nassim Taleb

When you begin building something of your own, even a small newsletter like this one, your worldview starts to change. The sense of ownership is tangible, despite however successful you are with your professional, full time career. Taleb would call it skin in the game. It feels different when it belongs to you, and it becomes a game you want to keep playing as much as you can. I realize now this is what people mean when they talk about the beauty of building something of your own, but also what it does to your perception of working for someone else. It’s impossible to understand without the experience.

I recently met someone through my professional life who shared another version of this idea with me. He called it, “Dope on the Table,” in reference to a famous scene from Season 1 of The Wire.

All of these thoughts remind me of something Brooks Reitz said to me during my recent Q&A with him about E.M. Reitz.

Ideas have a funny way of showing up with higher frequency once they’ve clicked into place. You start to notice them everywhere. Here is another example I came across yesterday while reading Radigan Carter’s monthly newsletter:

The longer I hold HAL the more I like it. As an owner does it matter what a business like Boskalis is worth on a random Tuesday at 9:45am? No, of course not. However it is funny that HAL doesn’t bother to update the price and the business is doing so well that it is worth almost double what they paid for it. It’s like you either like what we are doing, or you do not. If you do, be a shareholder, if you don’t, don’t.

READING

I read Nietzsche’s famous Beyond Good and Evil this month. I suspect a lot of people fascinated by his work have not actually read anything he’s written because it’s easy enough to just play his hits by consuming quotes on X or something. His treatises aren’t easy to take in. I had to read his first book, The Birth of Tragedy multiple times to have any idea what he was talking about, and I could probably read it more.

I have similar feelings Henry Miller, who is one of my favorite writers and that I mainly came to understand through having dreams about his novels. But that’s a story for another time.

I bring up Nietzsche because I think his idea of morality rhymes with the thread I’m tugging at in this post. I think the creators and builders of the world might be living in closer proximity to some kind of moral truth. They are the ones who drive the world forward, and a morality or set of laws that skews too heavily towards suppressing their actions and instincts in favor of those not creating or putting skin in the game should be cautioned against. Maybe you find this sophomoric...

A WATCH

I had my eye on the J.Crew x Timex collaboration, and I was disappointed by how fast it sold out. I guess that’s the world today. The probably overpriced $200 watch can now be had for something like $500-$600 on eBay. Instead I decided to order a close enough strap from Etsy and a Timex Easy Reader. Grand total: ~$54. Well, the watch and strap arrived, and I have some thoughts you can read below.

SOMETHING TO DRINK

It’s hot enough here that I’ve transitioned away from throwing much milk into my espresso drinks. In doing so, I somehow acquired a taste for the polarizing iced espresso over sparkling water. A kind of sparkling Americano I suppose. I’ve yet to find a Waterloo I don’t like paired over ice with espresso, but tops is the simple lemon-lime flavor combination.

HOME

I’m in project mode at home as I continue my quest to live like “Bohemian Bond” once was the warm weather arrives. I’m currently in the midst of building a seating area in my backyard with a fire pit. Then it’ll be an outdoor shower, and maybe, just maybe, a bench inspired by Donald Judd’s below (originally shared by Whereisthecool?).