I make this joke with your mama
I say
The student is now the master
It’s not a joke really
More like encouragement
That she now can cook as well or better than me
I was a cook in Atlanta
I also worked the door as a bouncer
Until one night my career ended violently
(That’s a story for another day)
I also worked at Clark music selling guitars
But mostly sitting around and playing them
And writing songs
When you’re passionate about something
You obsess
And this kind of obsession is both good and bad
And also necessary
You don’t become great or even adequate at anything
Where for at least a time you forgo normal sleeping patterns
As you take in all the information your brain can handle
Waking up the next day to do it again
And again
That’s how music and songwriting was for me
Most of my life
And at times
Art and writing
The student is now the master
I say that to your mom
Eating from her plate
She laughs and says
Thanks I’m glad you like it
This is all a long winded way of explaining the last week or so
Where I’ve fallen into a study
In a way that makes me feel like I’m in college again
(Or what I assume that feels like cause I’ve never been)
It reminds me of discovering songwriting
When I could fly through this new portal and find magic and potential
It became addicting
I spent many years sacrificing sleep
And even mental stability to pursue it
To stretch myself this way and that
To see what would happen
If I was deranged and went through the portal
To see what would happen if I was ultra sober
And well rested
To see what would happen if I didn’t sleep for a year
To see what would happen
My life became a form of service
To that portal
That passion
Rather than that passion serving my life
It eventually did serve my life
But that balance was hard to find
And it took various levels of aging
Failure and success to find it
But none of that matters when you are in the vortex of a passion
It’s like the wind beneath your wings
You catch air and fly
And so you look down at the people who are earth bound and disregard their rules and regulations
Your pride kicks in and whispers about you flying in rarified air
Careful of those whispers
The devil gets in your passions as well
And has a tool
Chest of tricks that come with those blessings
Pride is at the top of his list.
And as always if you don’t humble yourself
You will be humbled.
Seeing potential
And finding life and energy within
Keeps you up nights taking what you need to know in
I’ve started a collection of NFT’s
I’ve made some good choices
And I’ve made some mistakes
There are so many factors and so much to learn
And the pitfalls of beating myself up within all this is great
I heard of this realm six months ago or more
And I only considered it as an outlet for my own work
I only thought of it as an avenue to serve my art and my career
Or the career I perceived for myself
An artist
A creator
Someone who has so much to offer that it is overwhelming
And thus I shut down
I took my head out of the realm of NFT’s
And concentrated on other things
I came back to it
Looking to collect
Looking to invest
Not considering minting anything of my own
But as investment property
The next phase after investing in crypto
A natural progression
Turns out approaching NFT’s again as a collector
Was what gave me the portal to the passion of it
That I truly needed
To really understand it
To really wrap my mind around it’s potential
And once you do that
Nothing else comes close
To engulfing your perception of reality
Like Willie Nelson discovering songwriting
You just wanna stay up forever
And Forever take it all in
As dollar signs and immortality
And the protection for your work
And the support of your family
And your family’s family
Fly around the room like bees around a honey pot
A pot of honey you can see but cannot taste
Not yet anyway
That’s what the studying is for
And to avoid the if onlys
If only I had approached this as a collector when I first got passionate about it months ago
We would be set for life
It’s that simple
Projects that came out even a month ago
That if you had gotten into early would yield you unspeakable returns
Millions
People think NFT’s are a fad
Or silly
A jpeg anyone could copy so why should I buy it ?
That much is true
They are jpegs anyone could copy but they are much more than that
And understanding the universe of NFT’s
Starting as a collector is key
At least it has been for me
But now being a collector
You study the progression of projects
And you realize that had you only approached this realm with this energy
You would have gotten into projects
Which you’re already priced out of
Projects which are invitations into groups
Which are invitations into information
Which bring more insight and power in this realm
Also projects which earn you passive income
Just by holding an NFT in your wallet
If you own a cyber Kong for instance
You can make 100 grand or so a year
(At the low end)
A thousand dollars a day
Just for holding it.
The blue
Chip projects award their collectors with financial dividends
Projects which have mooned
Spawn mutant versions
Which create DAO’s
The mutant versions also moon
And I can beat myself up for sleeping on some historical winners
But hindsight is 20/20
And crying over spilt milk does no one any good
And anyway
I’m here now
Learning
Filling my brain everyday with everything I can about all this
And finding the projects today
That will be the cyber kongz or the bored apes
of tomorrow
So passionate I became about collecting that I forgot
That I’m also an artist and my original inspiration in the realm of NFT’s has reawakened as well
And the best part is
Really learning how this works
And really seeing the potential
Will position me better to launch a project.
Ideas are flooding in daily
And your mama is so supportive of all my study
And collecting
You’re doing great she will regularly tell me
Rather than getting annoyed that I’m up all night taking in as much information as possible
Only to wake up not having slept enough to do it again
To find passion is a real blessing
There is so much to learn about this realm
So much to misunderstand
So much to teach
Projects are ranked by rarity
People who collect and trade are fully aware of this
And there are tools which give you a number which acts as a ranking to the rarity of a piece you are looking to buy
The more rare generally the more expensive
There is something collectors do
Which is called sweeping the floor
And that’s picking up the cheapest pieces in a project. The least rare
The first couple I collected I didn’t even know there was a tool you could use to ascertain that info
Raritytools.Io has quickly become my most visited site right behind open sea
But I’m still a noob
There’s tools that show you what’s minting
And when
So that you can get in early
There are clubs which give you whitelist access
To get in those you need time in
Or a blue chip profile pic piece which is like a bouncer who lets you past the velvet rope at the hottest club in town as everyone else waits in an endless line
You have to join
Dischords
And follow Twitter like a hawk
You have to network
To get those premiere drops
To mint
Which is the ability of buying many
For each one a two or three or five hundred dollar investment. Sometimes more and sometimes less
Also gas fees which soar during mints and are no guarantees
You can lose hundreds if not thousands on failed transactions in popular mints
It burns not only gas
But your mind at times.
But had you minted a bored ape back in the day
Only a few months ago
Had you minted a few of them
You’d be sitting on life changing wealth
You would be set for life as would your children’s children
We’ve never seen anything like this
It’s the golden age of collecting
Collectors are getting signed to talent agencies
Collectors are the rock stars of the future
And you can take your collection everywhere in the metaverse
It will follow you like a social credit score for cool kids all the way into the future
A much better form of social credit than the government’s idea
I can assure you that
If you had collected a bored ape
(You paid what for a jpeg?!)
Well let me tell you what you would have gotten for just collecting one of those jpegs
They air dropped collectors
One of three serums
(Airdropping is things just appearing in your digital wallet)
One serum in vile
One serum in a beaker
And the third serum in a keg
The third was extremely rare and it made your ape into a very rare mutant version
So that now you had two
Those very rare mutant versions
Are now worth upwards of twenty million dollars
And that doesn’t include or take away the value of your original ape at all which retains all of its value and becomes more valuable still
How many investments do people make
Which yield 20 million dollars
Plus bonus investments as a free gift from the company?
When people understand what these assets are capable of
the life changing wealth they are giving to astute collectors
They will stop making fun of people collecting Jpegs
I now look for collections which promote future financial upsides such as these
Knowledge is power
And learning everything I need to learn as a collector
Is teaching me how to launch my own projects and what that will take to make those projects compelling
And when you stretch out the musical aspects of all this
How music will be traded on the blockchain
How the blockchain is free in terms of expression and speech
It’s the new internet
As the old one
Tightens it’s grip on censorship
Misinformation and control
(The misinformation I’m talking about is what’s coming from the government)
As we our awakening into new levels of freedom and liberation which are exploding within these silly jpegs
Of pixelated apes and monkeys and kaiju kingz