Sad but true: Very often the only item that can be carried away from a monumental financial blunder is a hard lesson earned. Lost money sometimes cannot be retrieved and on all-too-frequent occasions the financial drubbing one incurs cannot be ameliorated to an appreciable degree either. You are left holding an empty bag containing nothing more substantial than a shitload of proverbial “experience”—the same onerous stuff those graybeards and dinosaurs and fossils who hang out down at Louie’s Café every morning drinking coffee and playing dominoes love to take turns expounding upon for seeming hours on end—and that definitely doesn’t seem like a fair, equitable trade-off from a mile-high perspective. Yet it’s all you’re gonna get out of an ugly transaction gone unmercifully wrong, so you might as well crunch down on that bitter pill in your mouth, learn the basic life lesson to be learned from every calamity, and quickly move on to other more pressing and less dispiriting matters. Stewing over past mistakes never rectified them, but doing so needlessly steals from the diminishing pool of time facing every mortal human being on Earth’s crust, which is code for anyone reading this.
Fred's Soapbox 