Spice

I want the spice.

Wealth. Power. Foresight. Beauty. A body that stays hot for another eighty years. Maybe longer. The ability to build whatever occurs to me on a Tuesday and have it exist in the world by Friday.

I'm done pretending otherwise.

In Frank Herbert's Dune universe, spice is the substance that makes the galaxy run. It extends your life. It lets you fold space. Herbert told mycologist Paul Stamets the whole book came from his own mushroom work. The sandworms were maggots. The Fremen's blue eyes were Psilocybe bruising. The Bene Gesserit were his nod to Maria Sabina and the Mexican mushroom cults. Spice is wealth and power and prescience and longevity and altered consciousness, all bound into one substance. It isn't a metaphor for greed. It's a metaphor for being fully alive in a body that's running hot.

I want that. I want all of it.

I was trained to be ashamed of this.

Evangelical kid in conservative Northern California. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” The flesh is sinful. You don't indulge the body, you discipline it, you deny it, you defer it until heaven. That was the first half of my education.

Then I moved to the Bay Area. The second half was the opposite and the same. Overindulgence. Pleasure always. Sex as path. BDSM as therapy. The body as a playground with no off switch. Both scripts want something from your body that isn't yours.

I've been threading a third path. Pleasure when it's the right time for pleasure. Fasting when it isn't. From food, from sex, from noise. Monk some weeks. Hedonist others. The switch is on me, not on the calendar. It's a move Gurdjieff described. Integration of the paths usually kept separate, chosen in the moment.

So let me call bullshit on the scripts directly.

It isn't noble to pretend I don't want money when I very much do. It isn't enlightened to perform disinterest in power when half my life is spent building it.

Taxing the shit out of every person who builds something isn't moral. And even if it were, it isn't effective. Billionaires change residencies, domiciles, offshore addresses, trust structures. The policy collects nothing but applause. It's feckless. The other side has its own feckless theater, mostly nostalgia wearing a flag. Both tribes have figured out how to make you small and call it virtue.

A sensible way to live is to want what you want and work for it. That's the whole thing.

In spirit, I'm a communist. The strict kind. The earth and its gifts belong to everyone. Land is not a thing humans own. We're borrowing. Every child fed. Every elder held. The most beautiful version of human society is one where the fruits flow freely and no one has to beg for dignity.

I've studied this. Undergrad International Studies focused on the former Soviet Bloc. Grad school in German and European Studies. An internship at the Wende Museum archiving East German and Soviet artifacts. I know the texts. I know the geography. I know what those systems did to the people caught inside them, and why.

The mechanism of distribution has never been free of corruption. Every attempt has ended in blood, famine, or bureaucratic rot. Not because the ideal is wrong. Because humans are still humans, and the people who seize the machinery of redistribution have always eventually turned it on someone.

Will and Ariel Durant wrote a short book called The Lessons of History after finishing eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization. They saw the pattern across the whole arc. Wealth concentrates. It gets redistributed, peacefully by reform or violently by revolution. Then it concentrates again. The intelligent and ambitious find ways to rise in any system, including the ones designed to prevent them.

Until we solve that, we live inside the free market, which has its own kind of honesty. Money is energy. We give it to what gives us energy back. If you're building something of value, you get paid. If you're not, you don't.

So I'm doing something heretical to the tradition I studied. I'm accumulating power inside the current system. I'm trying to build enough leverage that when the next iteration is sketched, I have the resources to build it. Call it a master plan if you want a tech-world rhyme. Nobody listens early. Some people listen later. I'm writing this down so there's a record.

This month my body is telling me something specific. It wants to get strong. Lean out. Build flexibility. Prepare for the long haul. My body is not asking for permission, and for the first time in a while I'm not talking over it. It knows.

Taurus season opened on Sunday. Taurus is fixed earth. The body as sacred, not suspect. Take care of the equipment. Feed it. Use it. Honor it. Venus rules Taurus. The body is the first beautiful thing you're responsible for.

And overlay the year. 2026 is a Fire Horse year. Double yang fire. The light side is charisma, momentum, aliveness. The shadow side is anger, destruction, the urge to burn it all down. I need both. The heat cooks the meal. The discipline keeps the house standing.

Today is the First Quarter of the Flower Moon. The moon is half lit and growing. In the old practice, this is the phase where you commit to what you planted at the New Moon.

Six days ago at the New Moon, I published an essay called Beamer. It argued that projection is the mechanism behind most of our judgments. Claim what you're casting onto others, I wrote, especially the parts of yourself you won't admit you want. I wrote that one while driving a loaner Cybertruck through Davis and getting glared at. What I was claiming was the desire for the kind of power that truck represents.

That was the planting. This is the committing.

I am going to build a store of spice. Financial, physical, relational, perceptual. I am not hiding it. I am not apologizing for it.

My first real customer goes live in days. My family home sells shortly after. The first commercial dollars from the thing I've been building for three months are about to hit my account. And I notice in myself a habit to minimize all of this. Oh, it's a small thing. It's just one yoga studio.

No. It's the beginning of the store.

I am doing this on purpose. I see a long path ahead of me, and most of the people around me cannot see where it goes. I'm not here to be understood in real time. I'm here to build something that is undeniable in retrospect.

This is my coming-out party.

I seek to be a king in the making. A philosopher king, a little, to borrow Plato. More, a challenger king, to borrow from the Enneagram. Eight on the nose.

Why would you trust me with this? You probably wouldn't yet. History is a parade of men who accumulated power for the good of others and ate the good they were supposed to serve. I know the pattern. I've watched it in myself. I can only tell you what I'm not hiding behind, and what I'm aiming at.

Yes, I have an ego. I'm also deeply grounded. Capricorn sun, Capricorn rising. From the earth I came, and to the earth I shall return. That's who I am. Compost me when I'm done. Let me feed worms. What is dead may never die.

I'm not performing wealth. I'm wealthy in the absolute sense. Most of the planet would trade lives with me in a heartbeat. By California standards, I'm middle of the pack. Net worth around $900,000, no trust, no family money. I don't want money for its own sake. That's fear. I want power in the physics sense. The ability to do work. Money is stored energy for that work.

What I aim at is unconditional love. The Christ-consciousness practice stripped of its pop-Christian costume. Bless what wounded you. Forgive ahead of time. Hold the room the way water holds light. Eat with the people you were told to hate. I'm nowhere near there. I'm aiming anyway. I'm an Ego-Projected Projector in Human Design. My decisions come from an open heart. When my heart actually wants a thing, I know. When it doesn't, I know that too. My gift is reflecting people back at their highest. When I'm clean, I beam love. When I'm clogged with fear, I beam judgment. I'm working on unclogging.

Love alone isn't enough. Christ had a line that nailed it. Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. Gentle is the love part. Wise is the strategy part. You don't get to pick one. Most people who claim to love unconditionally are bad at strategy. Most people who are good at strategy forgot how to love. I want both.

Even together they aren't enough. Power has its own gravity.

I love the idea of Anti-Machiavel. Frederick the Great, as a young prince, wrote a line-by-line refutation of Machiavelli's The Prince. His argument: it's better to be loved than feared. Then he became king, invaded Silesia, and operated Machiavellianly anyway. The question his life asks: does power have to corrupt, or does it only tend to? If it only tends to, what keeps you uncorruptible?

My answer is beauty.

Beauty is the highest aim. It sits atop goodness. Goodness sits atop truth. There is a beauty that renders any soul apoplectic on contact, the way certain chords do, the way certain sunsets do. It is not in the eye of the beholder. When a thing is soul-awakening, I feel it in my body. When it's soul-deadening, I feel that too. My work is to find more of the first kind and build more of it. When your highest aim is beauty, you can't rule by fear without betraying the aim. Fear is ugly.

For a long time I've been climbing the mountain. Quiet, mostly. Alone, mostly. From up there, you can see what's broken in the world underneath. I love literally everybody. That isn't a pose. It's why I went up. It's also why I'm here to wreck shit.

Not the Joker kind. Some men just want to watch the world burn. I'm not one of them. I'm here to take the parts of the old world that were breaking us, burn them down on purpose, and build something more beautiful on the other side.

A wrecking ball with a blueprint behind it.

The First Quarter moon is half lit, and so am I. The other half is coming. Fire Horse says go. Taurus says dig in. Flower Moon says bloom. Spice says take more. Beauty says aim high. All five are telling me the same thing.

I want it.

I'm claiming it.

Watch.