By Jose Ademan RODRIGUEZ
A friend in Spain, born in the small Malagueño town of COÍN, told me that as a child he was very surprised by the references that existed about his town. When his parents came to the city of Barcelona, he already had the certainty and confirmation that his town was really famous. Even the Americans knew him! Indeed, in the streets or in bars, all the beverage, chocolate and tobacco vending machines read: »INSERT COÍN».
My friend saw that as a dedication to his people. And of course, he was proud and boasted of being from COÍN, this important but mysterious Andalusian town. He came to think that the famous ''Insert COÍN'' meant something like ''being from Coín'' or ''made in Coín'' or ''Viva Coín'' as if it were an ancient Latin motto or something divine. For his new little Catalan friends, Coín became a "mysterious" place. When they went to the fair or entered a game room, or when they approached the slot machines, the COIN appeared everywhere; Coin over here Coin over there. How good he felt! Coin was the greatest. But, only when he entered the school, his fame ended. The other boys started carrying him and he stopped bluffing.
"Coín means 'coin' in English, silly!" Fuck it! And his little world collapsed.
The same thing happened to me the first time I got on a plane with the EXIT on the door, I thought they said success for my trip, as a welcome. And Oli, I fooled him one day by playing French with a twangy »locu de fonsi» but he didn't buy it: »You call me siphon ass backwards, piece of culiau!».
Nowadays, out there, from time to time he brings it out as a joke, like when they stop to buy a coffee at a highway gas station. But the opportunity to joke around is getting scarcer because the machines that accept coins are disappearing. Now, everything is bought by bank card or directly through the cell phone. But what my friend still doesn't know is that his rematch is just around the corner. His moment and the fame of his town are coming back thanks to this cryptocurrency they call BitCOIN.
Even my fishmonger told me about the Coín-ese. And I think I made a fish face from the way she looked at me. And all this because of the rise of BitCoin and other "coins". All cryptocurrencies. Bah, I don't know much, but they say that they are electronic currencies, that they are encrypted and that they are outside the control of governments or bankers.
"That she gave birth to you, black! What were you talking about?!”
Aren't they kidding me, che?
They say that the most powerful is Bitcoin, they say that it would be like gold, but digital, a 'reserve of value'. One specialist said that “Bitcoin is not a hundred times better than gold, it is a million times better than gold, and there is nothing like it”; another madman said it resembled a "swarm of cybernetic hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth."
Also, no one knows who invented that. Legend has it that a certain Satoshi Nakamoto gave it to the world at the end of 2008. But shortly after it cracked and disappeared like a father who goes out to buy butts and never comes back. More than ten years later, the orphans have become millions of faithful who follow him, venerate him and pray every morning:
"Father Satoshi who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, (...) Give us today our daily bitcoin."
Recently they launched a great campaign that filled Madrid and Barcelona with Bitcoin advertising posters: it appeared on the Gran Vía, in the Plaza Cibeles, on the Paseo del Prado or in front of the headquarters of the Bank of Spain. I even saw one next to the Sagrada Familia, just before going down to the subway. Those photos went viral as they say now. My friend is going to be happier than a dog with two tails. I called him, but he doesn't give me any more ball.
I read in the newspaper that there were more than a hundred Bitcoin ATMs in Spain. He looks at you. I have never used a credit card to pay and I have never withdrawn money from an ATM. Me, if I don't see the face of the person who gives me money, I don't trust him.
There are people who say that this new twine is here to stay. Would young people have to buy something just in case? Maybe yes, or maybe not… Do you think that the finance mobsters are going to let there be changes? And lose control of Mr. Money? A crazy person came out on TV saying that the revolution is already underway and that thanks to cryptocurrencies we will achieve financial independence. Really? Who is it?! Anyway, is there any truth in all that lies?
If you want a truth, there is that of the great Argentine liar and folklorist Quique Dular, who said the following: “Tell me the lie that is most worthy of being true. That's the truth". And even if it seems a lie, everything that seems a lie is not true. Although the biggest lie is "I'm not interested in money." That's how false man is.
The truth is that I am half a donkey in that of the twine. He never interested me. I did not have financial education nor did I dream of having a lot of money. How strange because generally the great hope of the poor is to win the lottery or that a son will turn out to be a professional soccer player or singer. But no matter how good money they give them, they will burn it and return to the starting point. Poor families stay poor for a reason. Tradition must be respected.
The number of boxers who were left without a mango despite winning loads. (Kid Pambele, Sonny Liston, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier, Holyfield, Tyson etc., etc., etc…) or soccer players…
I already told you, in this same newspaper, that Beto Kandalaft once brought a player from Cordoba to Spain, to make him sign with Valencia. That was going to change his life, him and his poor mother who worked as a cleaner. But the black refused and turned. When he arrived in Córdoba they asked him why he hadn't signed and his answer was: "And what if I'm peeeseta?!"
Now, if you really want to get rich, the best way is to follow the middle-weight rule that another boxer used to sing, Zurdo Rivadero, king of the pedestrian:
»♪ With half a peeeso I bought a chaaancha and that chaaancha gave me a little pig and all that with half a peeeso! ♫».
That is the true anthem of the capitalist investor! You have to make money work. And nothing more.
I repeat, I never liked finances, nor savings, and even less banks.
Now, I'm going to plagiarize myself, doing a kind of literary onanism. Sure, I'm eighty-two lollipops! And I am just an intuitive who puts into play the sediment of my experiences with the support of a pocket cultureta extracted from wandering around those worlds, and always on the edge...
I also touched on the issue of plagiarism. One finds out late, like any good ignorant or cuckold, that in his youth Valle Inclán copied a Dostoevsky novel in its entirety. Literature feeds on literature and not on farm animals! Originality in pure or virginal style does not exist. Paco de Lucía, perhaps the greatest guitarist, along with Guillermo Gómez, once said: »we all copy each other. It is not created out of nothing, there is no such thing as pure creation.
Automating your finances could help you achieve your goals by helping you create positive long-term habits with you… https://t.co/Ph6wbgUguZ
— Brent Moors Wed Jul 21 15:01:48 +0000 2021
That's why I'll take a paragraph from my article »Do you like a calm Sunday? Much more than fucking Monday!
»The best invested money is the one you spend every day. In the cemetery there is no milonga; the drawers are all still. I always said that you don't have to die with all your money on, nor with all your health on. Just as money is to throw away, you also have to throw away a little health in life. One of the few things that could not eradicate me is my great virtue of throwing money away, as compensation for so many loose misers, sometimes spending more than I earn (it takes more insight and intelligence to spend it than to earn it). Luckily: I hope it continues to be like that!, because money is not to suffer, but to enjoy it. I even save a lot on health by drinking quality wines! I have colleagues who earn more, much more than me, but it annoys them that I can do what I want almost always. How can they not be angry, if in twenty-five or thirty years of work their great consolation has been getting up at seven in the morning thinking that after fifteen hours they will go back to bed?
The best money invested, these assholes don't know, is the one you spend; and if not ask someone who works in the morgue. I am convinced. I will not leave a damn as an inheritance. All my patrimony will be affective, because of the other, $ USA $, I will give it adequate USE.
And the only truly serious thing is having worn out your dreams (of ideals and of bed), to the point of not allowing yourself the luxury of staying home on Monday mornings, and thus enjoying a restful calm, without getting up early. working means going out
in a hurry, not saying “Good morning”, anyway… not creating a community. It should be noted that for the Argentine, getting up early is not a vocation or an obligation to work, nor to start work from dawn, it is to be “light” to surprise with bad arts, it is to fuck your neighbor; hence the well-known “get up early”, I justify and applaud the forced early riser, the one who sleeps in someone else's bed, that one does get up before dawn.
To the guys who brag about money, ask them if they work Monday mornings. If so, they will reveal themselves as poor slaves. Smart, rich guys don't commit the rudeness of working on Mondays. I am not rich, but I consider that working on Mondays is an exploitation of oneself, forgetting that self-compassion is necessary. I convince myself to revalue myself that others work so that I can sleep. And it is I myself who set my working days, holidays and mourning, because I never felt subjugated by any boss, employer or director; Better this way, because there is no worse master than the one who has been a slave. And I came to the conclusion, more than thirty years ago, that I didn't have to adjust to such disgrace: put up with the frayed nerves of Mondays and their lunatics, bad humor swinging on swollen eyelids, and avoid the cavernous "hello" that it emanates from a constricted face, which is more like a duodenal eructation than a greeting. It even seems that they have hairs in the heart! I already see them too much during the week at the time the garbage is taken down. In the search for money, the spirit rusts and cordiality and sympathy are exhausted. A party with friends is a continuity of work; more than sharing, they use it to engage clients or followers, and they have no room for sincerity as a common act.
Lots of workers who like termites that push and whose most precious achievement is to be on the payroll, have their driver's license up to date, receive the bonus and put their asses on some beach during the summer. People who allow us to think that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have money and those who don't even know what they want. Middle class jumping through a minefield of tributes and credits, trying savings that are sad. Victims of productivity that drag the skepticism of the frustrated talent, who will eagerly wait to know how the menu is served in the nearest bar restaurant. And I don't want to talk about the shitty smell of sweat. Some will be pleasantly lying like me, on this Sunday, like pigs rolling around in the mud to hydrate their skin. Work, labor, sacrifice...
The great lie of the exploiters and leaders of human sheepdogs! Even a Jesuit (with all due respect) murdered in Bolivia in 1980, Lluís Espinal, composed the lyrics to a song called Spending life, where he pointed out that God has given it to us to spend it, not to economize on sterile selfishness. I ask myself: is it possible to spend life? Yes, spending can spend many things, some jeans, for example, the last firecracker on New Year's Eve, knowing that after that the everyday will come, the routine, that this does wear you out and wears you out. But life… Spending is a poetically unlucky word. To spend life, only quantity of time is required, not quality of hours. It implies sustained and relentless effort. You can even spend it dreaming something beautiful between the sheets on a Monday morning, sheets where you can still smell the remains of the weekend with the disappointment of the hebdomadarian routine to come! Not even words can be spent!
The logical thing is to have money so as not to work (or work less), and not to work like a donkey to have money. Hence the saying: "There is no mountain so high that a donkey laden with gold will not climb it."
To certain impertinent little guys who ask me: "How much do you earn?" I answer them: “Much more than you imagine and less than you suppose”, a wise answer that leaves them in the balls, because if they assume that you earn a lot, three things can happen: they envy you, underestimate you or boss you around. The one who has the most money is not freer, but the one who needs it the least (guiding premise of my life since I had the use of unreason). Just enough twine to live, because what is left over is to show off.»
And as Perla Vivián, one of the most elegant women I met in Córdoba, rightly said: "Those who want little are full of everything." This about the Pearl is very true, like God is alone, so full of everything, but alone. "There are men who work as if they would always live, and live as if they would soon die."
Many grow old in the attempt to have money, fame, success. And in the end, they discover that they are slaves to sad, bitter, material, vulgar things.
Being rich because of my training and condition is knowing that Pugliese is in Madrid or Paris, taking a plane and coming back the next day, without that altering your economic pulse or that of others. Or go by scooter from Río Cuarto to Gigena to feel
Troilo as I did with Mario Balliano, my best friend from Río Cuarto, a brilliant architect whose life was screwed up out of envy and for being an authentic person where they fit.
In any case, being a potentate is not so easy, the same happens with crazy people: it has its price. The millionaires, for example, do not have the remotest idea of what friendship means, because they believe that whoever approaches is to get their money, so they live installed in doubt. And distrusting everyone, they become repulsive misanthropists who only listen to the accountant, his lawyer, or someone who throws their cards at them. They have a mixture of suspicion and envy of their equals, and they do not even have the right to pity from those below, who hate them. In the end, their luxuries are getting more and more expensive. In general, they "love" their children so much, they feel so attached to them, that at twelve or thirteen they send them far, far away, to the US or Switzerland, in order to "improve" them.
Oh dear silver! what damage you have done for the world! How you have pushed people… The Argentine soccer manager who had the most »silver» was, without a doubt, Alberto J. Armando, with his »metaverse» of the sports city, on the waters of the Río de la Plata, where he planned to build the new Boca Juniors stadium, in a country where there is plenty of land! The amount of sand that was deposited in the river was incalculable. They thought to emulate Amsterdam or Rotterdam with their containment structures for fear that the Netherlands would disappear engulfed by the waters (even the fear is exacerbated today by "global warming"), to control its flow.
This delinquent of Armando wanted a virtual candy box and ended up being the equivalent of the ruins of Pompeii, but without Vesuvius. He was the expert in destroying the xeneize institution in the long run. He had money, a lot of money… There was another in Córdoba who had money, a lot of money… Armando Valentín Pérez sent Belgrano to relegation, when things began to shuffle badly, with his laziness, negligence, neglect of functions (he even stopped going to the court, according to what they tell me), but I had money, a lot of money...
Walking in history, Juan José Pizzuti, coach of this famous Racing de Avellaneda team (José's remembered team), champion of the intercontinental world of clubs in 1967, put in the heads of his players a year before winning the cup : “Guys, there is no mango! Either we save ourselves, or we all go to hell!” Self love, wounded honor is what fills you with wisdom.
Demosthenes, who is the classic orator par excellence, was laughed at because he had a stutter. Many Basques who made fortunes as landowners in the Argentine Pampas began selling milk with a cow on the street... The great stadiums of the Argentine Republic (Boca, River, Independiente, Vélez, etc.) were built during the time of the modest leaders of neighborhood, small merchants, people from neighborhood centers, greengrocers, bar owners. After the 1958 World Cup, when pompous business leaders arrived (such as Armando, Zaccol, etc.), they looted the finances of those clubs, or melted them down.
Our countrymen like that aphorism: "Tell me what you presume and I'll tell you what you lack." They have not yet realized that wealth is forged on the anvil of humility that makes them scholars of survival. Albert Einstein, in February 1923, came to Barcelona to give lectures on relativity. The county council reserved a suite for him at the Ritz; however, he preferred to stay at the modest hotel "Les Quatre Nacions", and scolded the Councilor for Culture at the time: "I am a humble citizen and I have taken the room that corresponds to my category". What history did not record is that, as a result of a night visit by a young lady to her room, the famous anecdote arose: the only intelligent thing that came out of a woman's mouth was Einstein's prick. He was already a leading figure among men of science.
The Henry Ford automotive company began as a modest garage. Aristotle Onassis sold little whales (that is to say) in the port of Buenos Aires before becoming a shipping magnate. Bernie Ecclestone sold hot bread and used motorcycles; now he is the absolute owner of the F-1 car, and is one of the greatest fortunes in Great Britain.
Some directors enlarged their sports institutions. They were normal people. One Don Pepe Amalfitani president of Vélez Sarsfield who rolled up his sleeves to work for some problem in the stadium, with his little red wine and his paternalistic attitude when a player needed a reprimand, like that… from affection and respect. Ask Daniel Willington.
Don Antonio Capellino was another from Córdoba who made the Institute a true social and sports institution, the pride of Alta Córdoba. I can say that he was like a father to me. When I arrived at the age of 18 to study in Córdoba, he gave me Lactode with an A in his Inca laboratory. How to forget it!
But it seems that the money thing… had the precedent of Mr. Amadeo Nuccetelli who started selling raffles together with the criminal Armando. After offering himself to several clubs, he ended up in Talleres, and was lucky, at the end of the 1970s, to be the best soccer expression in Argentina, demonstrated on numerous tours, until the debacle punctuated by Bochini in that controversial end of January from '78 that made all of Córdoba cry (even its founder Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera's eyes moistened, thank goodness that, prudently, he is still behind the church). But the truth is that he did not recover and sank! Years passed, and now Andrés Fassi arrived, an itinerant from the world of football. And they say that he has… a lot of money!
Time is the best witness… time to time.
And a Goyeneche tango reminds me of Enzo Vivian, »Camouflage». He used to sing it at friends' gatherings and with him we forged a close relationship in the city of Grenoble, right where Oli was born, like a magical conjunction of affections. After Falucho Laciar's triumph at the Palais des Sports in Grenoble, we finished it off with a barbecue in Paris at the house of... who?... my best friend, María Elena. More luck impossible!
