(note: the t-shirts my kids are wearing contain all 67,000 words of “Choose Yourself!”, readable, courtesy of litographs.com)

“Did the mailman have red hair?” said the man in front of me on line, implying that my  ex-wife had sex with a mailman and then she had my daughter, who has  bright orange hair.

We were on line to get ice cream. I was with my illegitimate bastard and the guy was a total stranger in line in front of me.

It was neat how he asked about my sex life and the legitimacy of my child all in one question.

I’m cool with that.

I said to him, “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did.” Which is true. The  mailman had red hair back then, when I lived in Tribeca, before I lost  my home and all my money and dignity. And  now this man was kind enough  to remind me of that.

Maybe my girl whose affection I am buying  with sugar, is not even related to me and I’ve just revealed my deepest  secrets to this total stranger who felt comfortable asking me about my  sex life with my ex-wife.

I’m proud of me.

For no real reason.

As one reviewer of my magnum opus, “Choose Yourself!” recently said, “funny, but no good content.”

Which sounds really funny to me. It’s like I made an encyclopedia of  toilets. Because my humor is so stupid I would laugh at a book that had nothing but toilets but I would also say, very seriously, “but no good  content”.

I used to like antique stores. There’s something  magical about them. Like you might find a genie lamp in an antique  store. Or The Satanic Bible in the original Latin that can be used to  conjure up a succubus.

Succubus.

But I live in a town (a “village”) known for antiquing and so I see the scam.

It’s just old stuff.

The antique store closest to me has a hand in the window. It’s a white plastic hand, perhaps cut off from a mannequin.

My illegitimate red-haired daughter and I thought we should buy it and buy some lawn chairs.

Every Saturday a boat goes from NYC and stops about a half block from  my house and lets out about 200 people that want to go antiquing.

We were thinking of sitting outside on the sidewalk in our new lawn  chairs and waving the white hand at  everyone who passes and say “Hi  Y’all” like we were Southerners.

My shady bastard thinks this  is funny. Everytime we pass the store she goes “Hi Y’all” and laughs or  she says, “remember when we were thinking about getting the lawn chairs  and the hand and saying ‘Hi Y’all’ ” to everyone?” even though it was  only fifteen minutes earlier. Which actually makes her statement  (“remember”) funny.

Because there’s lots of things you can say to strangers that can either make them angry or make them laugh or just  make them think, “this guy is very polite and playing by the rules”.

But Jason Bourne (me, in my fantasy world) doesn’t play by the rules.

So I can say whatever I want to strangers. Who cares? I will never ever see them again. I try to then do one of two things:

I try to make them laugh. Or I try to make them feel like I love them the way their mother loves them. It’s the one opportunity I will ever  have to mother this complete stranger, almost as if he (or she) were in  my womb right now. My magic Satanic womb.

If I do one of those  two things then I get to change their lives. That is fun for me. I try to do it every day with every stranger I meet, even the guy who sells me  coffee on the corner or the random billionaire I might bump into in the street. It doesn’t matter to me. They are my child and I am their  mother.

It also has the added benefit of slowing down time. If  time were measured in “fun or loving interactions with strangers” as  opposed to “Seconds” then my life would be longer. And you know what,  since I get to write my rules, my life is measured that way. Some of the  time.

Is my daughter mine? Or an illegitimate bastard?

It doesn’t matter to me. I love her anyway.

I gave my 11 year old daughter important advice the other day: there’s no painless way to kill yourself.

“What about with a gun?” she said.

I told her about a friend of mine who shot himself in the mouth. He put the gun in his mouth and pointed upwards towards the brain.

He missed.

He shot off half his face, he went blind in one eye, and he is now in a wheelchair.

If you type in “I Want to Die” into google, my website is the first result.

My first business I sold for $15 million. We built websites for entertainment companies. Bad Boy Records, Miramax, Time Warner, HBO, Sony, Disney, Loud Records, Interscope, on and on. Oh, and Con Edison.

Mobb Deep would hang out in my office. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails would stop by. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan would want to play chess. We even made a website for a brothel in Nevada.

Then I saw that kids in junior high school were learning HTML. So I sold the business.

I bought an apartment for millions. I rebuilt it. Feng Shui! I bought art. I played a lot of poker. I began investing in companies. A million here. A few hundred thousand there.

Then I started more companies. Then I bought more things. Then I became an addict. The worst kind of addict.

From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month.

I couldn’t stop. I wanted to get back up to the peak.

I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.

Writing this now I even feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I have 2 kids.

I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been.

I lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine – from $15 million to $143 left.

There were no jobs, There was nothing.

One weekend when I had $0 left in my bank account I called my parents to borrow money but they said “no”. “College was enough” they told me, even though I had ended up paying for every dime of college. That was the last time I spoke to my dad, who had a stroke six months later.

I tried meditation to calm down but it didn’t work. I never slept. I lost 30 lbs. I’m 5’9″. I went from 160 to 130. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t move. I stopped having ideas. I cried every day.

There was never a moment when I didn’t feel sick. I had let my kids down. I would die and they would never remember me.

We moved 80 miles north of NYC with the tiny bit of money we took out of our apartment after being forced to sell at a million dollar loss.

I couldn’t leave the house for three months. I was depressed. I gained back all my weight and then another 30 lbs.

Finally I had to either die or feed my family. I was forced to choose myself.

- I started to exercise every day. I started to eat better. One item for breakfast. A healthy lunch. Tiny dinner. No snacks.
- I started to sleep 9 hours a day.
- I started to only be around people who loved and supported me. I broke off all ties with anyone who I felt bad to be around.
- I wrote down ideas every day of articles I could write and about businesses I could start. Bit by bit I started to get paid to write. If you don’t exercise the idea muscle it atrophies.
- I decided I wanted to help people every day and be honest every day. I was grateful for my daughters. I was grateful for what I had. I didn’t fight reality or regret. This was my reality and I had to make the best of it.
- Every day I came up with ideas for new businesses. I had a waiter’s pad. I would go to a cafe at 6 in the morning with about 4 books and read for an hour or two and then start writing down ideas for new businesses, articles, etc.
- I started a hedge fund. I started a fund of hedge funds. I started a newsletter. I did deals. I made introductions every day, expanding my brand new network from scratch. At least 5 introductions a day.
- I got involved in a mental health company I sold for $41 million.
- I started a website, Stockpickr! which got millions of unique users. I found advertising for it. I sold it to thestreet.com
- I had made millions again from scratch.

Then I stopped using the fundamental techniques I described above. Every time I’ve lost money it’s because I squandered my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

I was really bad. I did everything you should not do. I was like an addict. Picture the worst abuses. That was me. Again.

And then I lost it all again. Everything. Agh!

I had to start over. I couldn’t even believe I had to start from scratch atgain.

Every day without fail I focus on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. And it’s worked. I hope. I hope I don’t squander again.

People say it’s not about the end, it’s about the journey.

This is total BS.

It’s not about the journey and it never was.

It’s about right now.

Right now is the only place you’ll ever be. Choose yourself not to waste it.

This stop motion video from BuzzFeed shows how much food you can buy for $5 USD in different countries. For example, five bucks will get you 7 pounds of rice in the United States and 12 pounds in China. The video is straightforward, but the animation of food appearing and disappearing — or rather, added and taken away — lends well to the context that you wouldn't get from a quick chart.

The gut instinct seems to be "Hey, we should all move to China." Better follow that up with non-Chinese salaries.

Data Points: Visualization That Means Something is available now. Order your copy.

Steve Wozniak is said to have created the Apple because he wanted to play arcade games at home. But the Apple wasn't Woz's only game machine; he was highly addicted to the Game Boy, Nintendo's handheld that came packaged with the puzzle game Tetris. For as long as the official Nintendo Power magazine printed gamers' high scores, Woz reigned supreme as Tetris champion.

Now you can watch him tell the story himself as he revisits his favorite game. The digital edition of latest issue of Game Informer magazine features a video of Steve Wozniak getting his Tetris on while he recounts his encounters with the game and his evangelization of the Game Boy to world leaders of two decades ago.

From Woz's repeated exclamations of "Uh, oh — I'm in trouble here!" and the lack of direct screen capture, it's hard to tell if Woz is still the Tetris master he was in his youth. But it's nonetheless fun to watch his boyish amusement with the world continue to shine.