For one thing, in 2009 Bitcoin wasn't even a glimmer in the eye of the Euro. Or in the eagle eye of the dollar. 1 Bitcoin in 2000 = $0. It was not until 2011 1Bitcoin= $1. There is still no bitcoin emoji on my laptop. It's May 28, 2025. 1 Bitcoin = $107,307.80.
What? My $7 cup of coffee in 2009 seemed insanely expensive, which is why I even mentioned it to the guy who was interrupting my flow of thought as I typed a newspaper column that paid me $150, soon to swell into a one hour lecture at Chatauaqua, New York, where I would be paid $10,000 to deliver it, and share the podium with Mikhail Gorbachev. I was at the top of my game, a well-paid author present in every egghead's Kindle.
Eggheads didn't, of course, own Kindles. Not overtly anyway. They had BOOKS, and if they were real eggheads, LIBRARIES. I was a professor, breaking my back schlepping hardback Proust from library to office. If I'd been caught with a Kindle I'd have been called before the Dean and remonstrated. This was also the time when cell phones and computers were not allowed in the classroom. It was OK to smoke, though. All authors on book covers did.
In truth, my own cell phone was straining its storage because of all the books I'd downloaded from Amazon. Why would I need Kindle 1, 2 or 200? Discretion is the better part of a professor. My erudition was breaking my back, but my reading was done under the cover on my cell phone.
That morning, I had already observed with amusement a small cardboard sign next to the cafe cash register: "We take Bitcoin." "No kidding," I said to my favorite tattooed barista, "Why don't you just make the coffee free and we'll be even?" I imagined Bitcoin as a kind of bead, the kind that rained down from floats at Mardi Gras: great loot during Carnival frenzy, worthless on Ash Wednesnay.
The guy who brusqued my thoughts was not a Kindle plebeian. He was an Apple snob, like everyone aiming for egghead status. He was sure that Apple would snatch up Kindle like an absent-minded philanthropist picking up a toothpicked olive at a benefit. For the toothpick.
After I got rid of the Kindle worrywart, I reconsidered. I lit up. Downloading books was a vice, like the porn magazines and vodka my colleagues stashed behind books. I was a serious poet-journalist about to share the air at Chautauqua with the guy who dissolved the Soviet Union, I felt that Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, Lenin and ugh! Stalin, watched me from behind the cash register with its amateurishly handwritten sign,
It's 2009 for Chrissakes, the beginning of a new millennium! The end of ideology and history. The golden dawn of poetry. Peace! I believed, and still do, that poetry was and is the currency of the future. I didn't know that to get there we'd have to go through the sweatshops of Bezos, the rise of a small KGB shrimp trying to resurrect the Soviet empire, the attack on American democracy by fascist bullies, a demented would-be kleptocrat king, and a tulip, I mean Bitcoin, craze!
Had I known any of this I'd have bought 100 shares from everyone I met in Silicon Valley in 1996, and listened to that barista who now flies over my head in her own jet. "The future is not ours to see, " the Beatles told us, but the truth is that I did see it. I had just overlooked a few miserable decades.
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