Brotha Mike's Work in Huston, and the Nature of Our Work...

Yes Voignier, your Merlot is in...

The past few weeks have kept us more busy than the proverbial one legged man in an ass kicking contest. Keeping all parties motivated and moving forward has proven to be a task of Herculean proportions. Indeed, Sister Ruth has created more than her share of episodic and emotionally draining psychodramas that are mostly related to Dr. Emily's and Other Brotha Mike's money and some sort of perceived misappropreation of her inheritance on the sale of a family lobster boat off Maine's coast. It appears that Sister Ruth's life is a kind of work of art that is dedicated to resistance, and neurotic expression of sadness and loss in spite of a rather rich life that includes children and religious affiliations from coast to coast.


Mike and Emily have remained good sports through their abject humiliations, while Sister Ruth as required police intervention 3 times in 3 weeks. Meanwhile, Brotha Mike has been helping out street teams improve their information gathering process in relation to how consumers think of boxed wine, before and after free our free samplings and some of the advertising efforts of our sponsors and benefactors.



We were most distressed to read how you fell asleep on your terrace overlooking The Central Park, as snow covered you head to toe. We were happy to hear that your neighbor's St Bernard was able to dig in and wake you up, if only to raise his leg in a warm offering to help fight your frost bite, which he no doubt was able to sense had set in as you sat, stone cold and stone drunk. We hope you are recovering well, and we trust that your law suit against that French company that bottled the voignier that you drank is well under way.


Mike has coordinated our audio interception efforts, which was made easy by a new flow of funds from one of our sponsors, who interestingly enough had worked with Brotha Mike on another project concerning a certain energy trading company that no longer trades on the public market. One of our sponsor sat on the board there, and dismissed himself at the first sign of improper activity, which Brotha Mike help to uncover using his special talents. Brotha Mike's work with these major elements in the boxed wine, media, packaging, and related businesses opened the door for us, increasing our budget by 10 times over. His close relationship with several of the C level officers and directors of the companies for which we toil has made our requests for funding nothing more than a simple phone call to various CFOs in our sector, whereas before, Dr. Emily would work for hours drafting pro forma accounting sheets and grant proposals that amounted to our barely paying the gas bill for transportation along our cross country route, as we track the elusive America taste for Boxed wine.

Brotha Mike's influence has freed up Dr. Emily's time to focus her effort on other things, when she isn't trying to offer cold comfort to Sister Ruth, who, as Jimmy puts it, "just won't be told", if you will. Ruth, and her boyfriend are convinced that she was jived out of her family's money, of which she has eaten up many years ago, when she traveled to Tibet, just after giving birth to her second child, who is doing well in the private boarding school outside Boston that Brotha (her uncle) Mike pays for her and her little sister to attend. Brotha Mike has been traveling to Huston for the past few weeks, helping to prepare evidence for an upcoming trial of certain individuals who he helped to expose a few years ago on behalf of a group of hedge fund investors and directors of a certain public company with a stock price that had "gotten ahead of itself", as Mike put it, leaving big money investors and many middle class Americans with their pensions attached to this company a little short at the end of it's wild run on the public markets.

Mike gets noticeably angry, and Dr. Emily says it "pisses him off right down to his socks" when he begins speaking about his work in Huston. In spite of the trial and sentencing of the individuals responsible for the great hoodwinking of the public market in their stock, Brotha Mike believes that it remains "a damn shame" that so many people lost so much money for trusting a group of guys who basically stole it by simply calling themselves "the smartest guys in the room" with no apparent sense of irony or modesty. Apparently, they were just showmen and snake oil salesmen, who have stolen many hard working American's futures, and those who will no doubt be called to pay in part to care for them in their retirement.

Without mercy, a small band of thieves took from the rich, and the not so rich alike, to make themselves and a select group of assistants, including band of exotic dancers a lot richer than their skill and talent would ever merit in a market place based on such things, rather than politics, strange ideologies and ideas that reduced and confused the nature of liberty, freedom to nothing much more than liberty for businesses to arranged crooked deals, and freedom to fix prices and wreck established businesses that could not squeeze enough profit from American's need for cheap energy. After a few shots of something other than Boxed Wine, of which we sledom tire, Mike opened up about his work in Huston. He reflected on what happened there, and how he felt: "when I think of all the hard working pipe fitters, garbage men, nurses and teachers who minded their business, and paid their taxes and squirreled away their savings in funds managed by sharp guys and their friends, and listened and trusted other sharp guys on the phone and in there big fancy office parks, who helped these these bums... and how they are cleaned out because nobody said the emperor had no cloths until it was way too late and losses mounted and retirees have nothing... it makes me sick. I'd like to see these guys and all their little dressed up smart ass friends who wrap themselves in the flag, and call it "the American way"... all th elittle bastards who helped them rob pensioners.... I'd like to see them all in Gitmo, with bags over their heads, right next to the POWs who raised up from the outside. These guys attacked this country from within, and it makes me so mad I can just shit!"

This group of "smartest guys in the room" worshipped Adam Smith's invisible hand, and made it something more akin to God's hand, and not simply the same rule of law that lions follow, or insects as they feed off others. This half baked religious belief in free, unfettered markets at all costs, swept the land, via its preachers in Business schools across the world, who never bothered to qualify their lectures with warnings about the events that lead to the Irish famine, where the government stepped aside at the same urgings, and let millions starve to death, or say, Russia's command economy that killed millions in the Ukraine, as grain sat in piles that would have fed them. Mike grows spitting made as he addresses the "Free markets" that personally lost him $80,000 dollars allowed this small group of "traders", steal affordable energy from the state of California, while the share price of their company rocketed. Who could have stopped it, when Wall Street's inexperienced, bought and paid for "analysts" signed off on the company's methods and their madness for lack of better terms, if you will.

It turns out that as much as it is "what ya know", it also remains "who ya know", and knowing Brotha Mike has allowed us to go from a band of merry men and women assigned to taking the pulse of the American consumer to an army of marketing research professionals, with health benefits that include dental, and eyecare, as well as retirement incentives that include 401ks that vest immediately. The increase faith from our sponsors we own in no small part to Brotha Mike's reputation which clearly precedes him. Now that we are in the black, as companies with cash bother to put it, I spend a lot of time approving or denying requests for money from our small army of market researchers, interns, catering staff, maintenance crews, security teams, teamsters and audio visual teams.

Yes, Voignier, it appears that my soaring imagination has lead me to the role of nothing more than a bean counter; this in contrast to The Little Prince who once chased his dreams to the moon, where a dying rose urged him to pay attention to the invisible things, and leave the bean counting to landlords and their tenants, the CPAs and their tax advisors, the bankers and the cashiers, the toll collectors and store clerks whose music amounts to the ringing of their cash registers. No, Voignier, it turns out that I have become that which I loath, a simple bean counter rushing recheck my figures, rather than that little French Prince I keep inside, the little guy who puts hot mustard on his Freedom Fries, and chases his dreams to the stars, his dreams of talking roses and better boxed wine, across North America and parts of Chile. Woe is me Voignier, woe is me, if you ill.

As I dole out funds for this and that necessary good or service, such as dential work for some of our workers from The Riverside Park, wose teeth of long since vanished, and the other costs that keeps our operations moving forward, our dream of a chain of boxed wine stores spreading across the nations, and parts of Chile, seems to fade like some distant memory of a half understood urge on the bus ride to school while thinking of a have rememeber bovine teenage girl one never spoke to directly in that 7th grade health class. And so, I have resolved to re-write out business plan for the great chain of Boxed Wine stores that will in time overtake the big box retailers that offer bottled wines to our core audience for Boxed blends.