Predicting Lehman

After reading the Sandy post below I went back and poked around July 2008. Came up with the following. Be sure to read the penultimate line.

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LAST NIGHT ON THE F TRAIN

Interesting night.

Blah, blah, blah. Don't really have time to get into it.

Except that I did sit next to a woman on the F Train heading towards Brooklyn at about ten p.m. last night. She looked like she was just leaving work; a little burned out. Me? I was leaving an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Anyway, she's intently reading a single-spaced, two and a half page letter, making notes in the margins, underlining certain passages, etc. It's rude to actually read the damned thing, but something about it captures my attention. When she flips back to the first page, I look to the top and see the Bear Stearns logo. Then she opens a pretty thick folder of documents and the title on the cover page reads something like "Employee severance agreement."

I wonder if I should ask her if she is familiar with my painting of Jimmy Cayne.

I decide not to. But I do think about these people...



all of whom are smiling in the face of having lost their jobs (because, after it sinks in and you cry or mope or whatever, what else do you do?), and I look at this photo (which is currently my computer wallpaper and which was, previously, the photo they ran on page 1 of the New York Sun)...



and I think about that woman sitting next to me on the F Train and then I say to myself, "You better get your ass to the studio and paint a picture of Richard Fuld."

And some other stuff I don't have time to get into.