I know it seems like about 3 weeks ago, but “The Pandemic” was 4 years ago now and that seems insane to me. I swear it was barely yesterday we were doing happy hours on Zoom and my usual routine of coughing to cover a fart was turned completely on it’s head.
When I think about that period of time I think about a few things, firstly my absolute dependence on Busch Light, truly the cheapest beer I have drunk since I was 15, secondly the sheer boredom of never leaving my house or doing anything of any note whatsoever. Finally and most relevant for this 10 minutes of nonsense, I think of Tiger King.
Writing this for a sort of mid-Atlantic audience I often find myself describing things for both Americans and Brits. I do not think I need to do this with Joe Exotic and Tiger King. For a solid 3 months, Tiger King was everything and everywhere. I hate watching shows everyone says I have to watch. I have never seen one episode of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Wire or The Sopranos. If everyone tells me I MUST watch something it has the complete opposite effect on me, but this was during the pandemic, there was no sport to watch nobody was making any TV so there were reasons I caved and watched it.
I could not go one terribly forced Zoom call to someone without them telling me that it was the craziest thing ever and that I wouldn’t believe what I was watching. As Laura was on every single one of those Zoom calls with me and she has a lot more control over the TV than she would admit I caved and watched it.
Side note here, Laura would argue that she does not control the TV. In the past 3 months I’ve watched no less than 14 seasons of “Sister Wives”, 2 seasons of “Selling OC” and I am now 3 seasons into a show called “This is us” which makes literally no sense to me whatsoever. So any arguments that she doesn’t control the TV should be dismissed out of hand immediately.
Anyway on what felt like day 1643 of getting up, putting shorts on, cracking a beer and sitting on my couch until it was time to go back to bed we started Tiger King. For once, every person who told me to watch it was right. It was incredible, we watched the show, the making of the show, the Netflix watch party of the show, YouTube videos on the show, YouTube videos of people watching the show…. Fuck me it was a desperate time to be alive.. For a solid 3 weeks we came up with theories, looked at whether when life returned we could drive the 90 minutes to Carole Baskin’s sanctuary and even entered an online Pub Trivia night based around the show… Again thinking back, it was the most incredibly desperate time of my life..
Then just as quickly as Joe Exotic’s polyamorous gay marriage entered our lives it disappeared. Slowly life got back to normal and I was no longer trying to work out how much money the person who had their arm ripped off by the tiger got and whether or not I would take that amount to lose my left arm. I started leaving the house again and apart from a complete and utter suspicion of every other human in my sight for about 18 months and having to remember how to drive again everything was kind of like it was before Covid, just a bit different.
The other thing I did whilst sat on my fat ass at home was get stupidly into cryptocurrency. I watched videos, I bought some Ethereum and became “that guy”, the one with a surface knowledge of a topic who spent hours trying to convince his wife we could retire in 4 months if we just remortgaged the house and put it in to Crypto.
Around about a year later both of these things had disappeared from my life, replaced by cruises or darts or the new dog or whatever the random specific thing I was interested in for 3 weeks was at that time. Apparently I haven’t got ADHD, but if I haven’t then fuck knows how anyone who has got it functions. I can’t even write one of these blogs without at least three “side notes” (The irony of this being a side note is not lost on me)
Imagine my surprise when one day I was scrolling through Twitter, desperately trying to get my immediate hit of dopamine when I saw a tweet from a crypto influencer I had followed tweeting randomly about whether or not there would be a Tiger King season 2. Two completely unrelated things, or so I thought…
The next day he announced that TKING, the Tiger King crypto currency was being launched. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why but I knew right then I wanted some. It was a Thursday night and I spent 3 hours researching and figuring out how to buy it. I bought $200 worth there and then.
We were doing a little staycation that weekend and by Saturday at about 3pm I was 14 Miami Vices in, floating round the lazy river, the thought of my $200 the furthest thing from my mind. We went upstairs to get ready for dinner and as is often the case I was waiting for the ladies in my life to get ready, so I thought I would check if it was still worth $200 or if I had wasted it.
I opened the laptop, jumped through the many hoops needed to confirm my identity and for just a second couldn’t breathe. I was up to $1,000, in 2 days!
From that point I was balls in. I joined message groups, I spent my evenings researching how much I could make, it became my life. The general chat around it was that if they announced a second season we would be millionaires and the day the 2nd season actually came out we would be billionaires.
I remember it like it was yesterday the day the second season was announced. We were on the boat from New York City to the Statue of Liberty and I saw the tweet. Everyone else was staring at Lady Liberty (Much cleaner than I expected) and I was logging in to some random app on my phone to see where we were at. My $200 was worth $20,000.
I wanted out. A brief chat with Laura and 25 minutes dicking around trying to sell it and I took half which was useful timing as I was in New York and that profit covered about 1/3 of my Uber bill for the weekend.
What this meant was though I had $10k still in there just waiting for November 18th when Season 2 came out and it was mentioned in the show! I was going to be able to retire.
November 18th came and I was going to Washington for a work conference but was ready to cash out, until I herniated 3 disks in my back going through security at Orlando Airport, was blue lighted down the runway, taken to the nearest hospital and dosed up on enough Morphine to keep me asleep for two days.
When I came too the first thing I wanted was not my doting wife, or children (just as well really because none of them were there) but my phone to see how rich I was.
Well season 2 was shit, they didn’t mention the coin once and my $10k was now worth $5 oh and I had a $9,900 hospital bill. The coin had gone up over 10,000% at one point yet I still came out of it $100 worse off than when I started. I looked at the historical prices as some sort of sick prank on myself. At the exact time I was in the ambulance my coins had been worth over $50,000. When I figured it out I nearly asked for more morphine.
I’ve never heard of Joe Exotic since that day and frankly if I never do hear his name again it will be too soon.
The Shroders in Florida 