Paying Alfred

I wrote you about getting a call from my old college buddy Alfred, who asked me for a couple thousand dollars. It took me a couple of days to come to a decision, but in the end I wrote him a check for $500. 

My analysis of his situation continues to be that there is a lot he isn't saying. As I explained in my last post, the story he gave doesn't work because the timing is wrong: he says he spent a bunch of money looking after his mother, but she died several years ago. What has he been doing since then, that has gotten him into a financial crunch NOW? The first time I asked this, I got an artful non-answer. When I pointed out that he hadn't answered—and also said, Fine, don't tell me, I don't need to know"—he added that yes, there was more to it: his tutoring business had fallen off during the pandemic. I did not bother to remind him that the pandemic was four years ago, so this explanation is as bad as the other. The timing is wrong. So one way or another, he is not telling the whole story. And if it is that important for him to hide parts of the story, those parts must be pretty ugly. I assume that it's probably something like drugs, gambling, or—at the absolute best—skull-cracking financial stupidity.

How did I make my decision? Partly I just sat and mulled. And partly I read Tarot for it. You recall that I started reading Tarot something like three years ago. What's more, even if you think that the cards really are random, there is an advantage for someone like me—who is often afflicted with indecision—to use an external tool like the Tarot to come to closure. Sometimes, after all, any decision is better than no decision. (For a more thorough account of the mechanisms by which divination works—including at least two mechanisms that even the most hardened skeptic would acknowledge—see this article from October 2016 by John Michael Greer.) I won't reproduce pictures for all the cards that I laid out, but I asked a number of questions and the answers seemed pretty consistent.

If you think that reading Tarot is dumb, feel free to skip the rest of this post. (Though there is a little more narrative towards the end.)

An odd phone call

I got a peculiar phone call yesterday morning. It was from a guy I knew in college—so, forty-some years ago. We were buddies then, but I've really had almost no communication with him since. Oh—one exception: when I went to my fortieth class reunion two years ago (as mentioned briefly in this post), he was active in planning the event so I communicated with him a fair bit in the run-up to the reunion. And we chatted several times at the reunion itself, catching up on the last forty years. Although … now that I think about it, he really didn't tell me much about his life, or his circumstances. But he was good at asking conversational questions.

I'm going to have to give this fellow a name, so let me call him Alfred, after the great Alfred E. Neuman. (There are … reasons … that this isn't a crazy name to choose.) Anyway, Alfred sent me a text message Friday asking for a call over the weekend. He said he wanted my advice urgently on something. So we set up a call for 10:00 am on Saturday. He was cordial and pleasant, asking after my news and then asking what other college alumni I'm still in touch with. I told him I talk to Marie and to Schmidt, and he asked about them. Then he asked about my professional work, and about my professional opinion about a topic that has been in the news a lot lately. By this time we had spent almost an hour in conversation, and it felt like we hadn't gotten to the point yet.

Then he asked me for money.