What I Talk About When I Talk About Money

The Coin in the Pocket

I put a pot of water on the stove for spaghetti. The water takes its time. Little bubbles cling to the bottom like unspoken thoughts. Outside, the Los Angeles sky is a bruised purple, the specific color of a sun trying to punch through a layer of lingering winter haze.

I’ve been watching the gold charts again. It’s a habit now, like checking the mailbox for a letter you know isn’t coming. The line on the screen climbs—a jagged mountain range ascending into thin air. Sixty-four percent in a year. It feels unreal. A number whispered in a dream.

The voice from a video in the Bloomberg Youtube channel on the screen speaks of 1980. It speaks of Paul Volcker and interest rates of twenty percent. It speaks of confidence. That is a strange word to apply to money. Confidence is what you need to ask a girl to dance, or to cross a busy street without looking. For the economy, it seems, confidence is just a collective agreement not to look down.

I’m reminded of that scene in No Country for Old Men. You know the one. Anton (Javier Bardem) stands in the gas station, the fluorescent lights humming above him like trapped insects. He flips a coin.

“Call it,” he says.

The old man behind the counter is terrified. He doesn’t know what he’s betting. He thinks it’s just a quarter. But Anton tells him the coin has been traveling twenty-two years to get there. It has seen pockets and registers and hands, and now it is here, spinning in the air, deciding everything.

Gold is like that coin. It has been traveling for thousands of years, heavy and silent, waiting for us to call it.

In 1980, the coin landed on heads. Confidence returned. The dollar flexed its muscles, and gold retreated into the shadows. In 2011, it landed on heads again. The inflation we feared never walked through the door.

But now? The water on the stove is boiling—a rolling, chaotic sound. The analyst says the conditions are different. The debt is a mountain taller than the gold chart. The interest rates are negative, a ghost of what they used to be. The coin is spinning in the air, and it hasn’t landed yet.

I look away from the jagged peaks of the chart and open the local news. I need something real, something that isn’t just a line on a graph.

I find a story from yesterday, January 14th. It’s about a park up in Altadena—Loma Alta Park.

The Board of Supervisors just approved four million dollars to build a new teen center there. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme of global finance, but the article mentions something else. It says that when the Eaton Fire tore through the area last year, destroying so much, Loma Alta Park somehow refused to burn. It stood there, a green island in the ash, untouched.

And now, instead of hoarding that luck, they are building something on it. A place for teenagers to “just be,” to escape the isolation of their screens and the smoke. The county isn’t buying gold bars with that money; they are buying shade structures, walking paths, and a safe room for kids to talk to each other.

It brings a smile to my face. A small, quiet thing, but enough.

We spend so much time worrying about the crash, about the moment the coin hits the counter. We worry that our lucky quarter will get mixed in with the change in our pocket and become just a coin again. But then you read about a park that wouldn’t burn, and the people who decided to plant seeds in the ashes.

Maybe the crash isn’t the end. Maybe it’s just the fire burning down the fence so you can see what actually remains—and what is worth rebuilding.

I drop the spaghetti into the water. It fans out, then softens, surrendering to the heat.

“Don’t put it in your pocket,” Anton warns the old man.

I turn off the screen. I drain the pasta. The steam rises, vanishing into the purple twilight. The gold is just metal. The coin is just a coin. But the park, and the dinner, and the air in your lungs—that feels like the wealth that counts. Perhaps the wealth for the mind.

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Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I do not own a crystal ball, nor do I have a direct line to the people who turn the great gears of the economy. I am just a person sitting at a kitchen table, watching the light fade and boiling water for pasta.

The words written here are merely thoughts arranged in a specific order, like jazz records on a shelf. They are not instructions. They are not a map to treasure or a shelter from the storm. The markets are a living, breathing creature, indifferent to your hopes and certainly indifferent to mine. If you decide to wager your coin based on what you read here, remember that you are the one standing at the counter, and you are the one who must make the call.

Please, trade carefully. And never bet more than you can afford to lose to the wind.