Jul 27, 2022

On Rivershedge as a Name

The following content was originally solicited by a friend on Twitter: Hooafury.com or @HooaFury. I wrote it just for fun for him and he put it to his blog recently with a lot of complimentary intro context. Thanks brother.  Minor edits here. I figured this blog needed an explanation.
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I’ve been asked a couple times about my online moniker “RiversHedge.” Here is the story.

Chapter 1 -- Razor’s Edge

My starting position on my online name was originally related to having read a lot of Somerset Maugham (1874-1975). Now there is a name that doesn’t pop up much anymore, but he was big on colonial lit and my mother’s generation (1920-1982) read him assiduously. His major novel “On Human Bondage” I do own but have not read…yet. I have, however, read a ton of his short fiction mostly about the bored English colonial expats on rubber plantations in Malaysia at the turn of the century (which one? To ask is to be unaware) drinking their gin and tonics and having affairs and bitching about their colonial boredom. Meh, and no wonder that that mindset has more or less been cancelled now, but it is OK lit if one is the right frame of mind. I enjoyed the voice quite a bit back when I used to read. Before social media that is. Ha. 

The book that I do  remember, and the movie by the same name – a universally panned flick with Bill and Brian Murray, a movie I actually liked – was “the Razor’s Edge.” The leading epigraph of Maugham’s book, from the Katha Upanishad, something I studied in college within my Religion degree, goes like this: 

उित जात

वराि
बोधत ।
ुर धारा िनिशता दुरया
दुगपथवयो वद ! ॥ १४ ॥[57]

Rise, awake!
Having obtained these boons, understand them!
Like the Razor’s sharp edge is difficult to traverse,
The path to one’s Self is difficult.

—Katha Upanishad, 1.3.14[55][56]

There are other translations of course, but the sense is mostly the same in all. I mean, it is translation after all. Here is another version which is the actual epigraph in my 1945 Blankiston edition: 

The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.

So, I like that framing a lot. Life and the path to understanding – salvation if we must – actually is pretty hard if one has any age at all to think about this. If one has lived a long life and been through some hard stuff, the Razor’s edge language is a good expression of the way things do work. I wanted that name, RazorsEdge, in about 2011, for my newly minted finance blog (this one). But there were maybe about 5000 sites or more with some variation on the Razor’s Edge name. So, I had to look elsewhere.

Chapter 2 -- River


Ok so I couldn’t use "RazorsEdge" now. I then decided to focus on the word “river.” Why river? At first it was convenience thing because I was living on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River: nice house, big lot, a bunch of rooms, a giant garage (after 11 years of no garage or driveway in snowy MN this was important). This is a type of brag, yes, but then again, I lost all of that in a divorce and Global Financial Crisis so it is maybe less of a brag now. But the word and image of "river" was present in my mind every day back then; I could see it...and smell it. 

I then tied that concept and awareness of river, and the affinity (alliteratively like a Viking or Anglo Saxon) of the word to Razor, to my past thin reading of the Greeks, e.g., Heraclitus (I've been insecure about my pronunciation on this but it looks now with a Google search like I could go either way).

The least that people probably remember about Heraclitus, if they are aware at all, is about his “flow metaphor,” or in my own words or translation: 

No man steps in the same river twice
He is not the same man, and it is not the same river.

There is a shit-ton of conflicting interpretation and rendering of that passage and some doubts on provenance and reliability. But the basic idea is more or less constant: that life is a flow state and that we need to acknowledge the primacy of change and adaptation over stasis: both river and man "flow" but yet are still one. Yeah, I liked that expression too and I decided to take it. I’ve since used the word "river" in all sorts of settings: e.g., dating profiles, Instagram, whatsapp, and other usernames (many changed since so don’t try to hack me too hard). I love the river metaphor, though. It works. 

I have since[1] then extended this river-sense thing in other odd ways. For example, I’ve now done 11-12 years or so of quant finance. The quant angle sounds weird to the topic at hand, right? And what does it have to do with “river?” But here's the deal: one of the things I ran into at a later stage of my finance journey was the mathematics of stochastic calc. The equations of the differential calc that I dealt with for my purposes, stuff I could not really read all that well, represent, in notation, pretty much what I was doing in my amateur simulations in quant finance. They described exactly what I did in code. They were efficient communicators of my black boxes. That much I understood. But here is the real point: 

The thing about stochastic calc is that it often represents “flow” and/or “dispersion” over time (i.e., a river if you don’t get it yet). The most famous of these equations, imo, is the “heat equation” which is a “diffusion equation” which has been quite useful in finance.  

This diffusion construct has history you can look up but let’s pin it down for me in general terms: diffusion = flow = river = retirement-finance = this blog = "me" in some important way. In the 1930s, a Soviet mathematician A. Kolmogorov – it takes a communist to understand capitalistic retirement, right? -- used the diffusion framing to formulate the “Lifetime Probability of Ruin” by way of a partial differential equation (PDE) that looks quite a bit like the heat equation. In retrospect this turned out to be more easily simulable than I thought. For example, I never really understood the math all that well, but I did finally get the principle. That’s because I once taped the Kolmogorov LPR PDE to my fridge for an entire year to try to “see” it. I never really “saw it” until one night I had this dream where the coefficient of the second term was flipping around in a loop -- flowing maybe? -- in my dream. Gross, right? But I woke up and said to myself “Damn, I know how this f’r works” and then I walked 3 feet straight to my computer and coded that thing and it worked almost exactly like it should. My point, such that it is, is that I’ve had great respect for flow states and flow math (rivers, to be blunt or dreams or retirement or...) ever since. The river metaphor always made strong sense to me after that. Didn’t help much with the dating sites or relationships, heh. But “river” was now front of mind.

Chapter 3 -- Hedge

I retired way, way, way too early, circa 2008, during a move, divorce, and the global financial crisis. I was more or less forced into it (the move, divorce, retirement) by circumstances which I will explain briefly, thinly and thusly: my now-ex, a globetrotting CEO with a fair amount of visibility, and in retrospect not a completely terrible human though at the time it was dark-days, was working in FL and induced me, or persuaded me (I "agreed" to it but in retrospect it was not on fair or informed-consent terms), to move to FL to put our marriage and our kids together. 

This all is a bit off topic and a little bit of an axe-grind, so bear with me here, I'll get to the point soon. The week (or so) before we moved, after the movers had taken everything including the furniture, the boxes with most of our household goods, and our cars, she pulled me aside and told me she’d secretly packed two piles  of boxes (not one) and rented two homes (not one) and then informed me that we were to split! Turns out she had another dude down in FL waiting for the last year. This was not a legally defensible position for me [2] so I moved. She then dropped a petition on me right after we finally moved. Erg! 

This has nothing to do with the “razor-river name” topic, right? Pretty much yeah, but then maybe this: in the aftermath of all that crisis I started taking a strong interest in protecting and “hedging” my portfolio. The risk of losing what I had and compromising my protector-continuity-position around what I’ll call a present-parent (my then "occupation" for more than a decade) was way way way too big for me. I needed to hedge myself...big-time. I also, not all that unrelatedly, became at about that time a LP and GP in a hedge fund startup with a dude that had run a $billion for ~12 years. So, I became a hedge-funder. Let’s say that was about 2010 or so. So here we now have the genesis of the word “hedge” as something I thought about and lived. So: “Hedge.” Get it?

Chapter 4 -- RiversHedge

This should all be obvious by now, right? We have slid from "Razor’s Edge," a metaphor for the complexity of walking an honorable and difficult and maybe even spiritual path in life, but a name that was more or less unavailable as a web or blog-site name, to “RiversHedge:” 1) a different metaphor for where and how I have lived over a real life, and 2) how I think about life in its flow-state sense and also about a life imbued with its risks as well as how one might face those risks. I thought this name was a not-bad way to frame me. The latter (rivershedge vs razorsedge) is "better" in a pretty strong way. And it was available online. Good. 

I still like the name. It seems to suit the tasks and paths and endeavors on which I embarked a decade ago. On the other hand, I will say that no one has ever really understood it (except maybe now that I explain it here). Also, I will say that the most common error is on use of the possessive or plural depending on how we look at it. People will sometimes write to me and say “hey, Rivers (or River's)” Sure, maybe that is a grammar incomprehension thing or something but it's ok because I’m pretty sure no one thinks about it or cares nor have I been clear. The incomprehension is a sentiment that I understand and with which I agree. I’ve never tried to explain it before now so I can’t really bitch about it. But the proper intro or salutation would be “Hey, River” since: a) River’s is possessive, not root or name, b) Rivers is a plural I did not intend since blog names hate possessive apostrophes, and c) the root “River” is the whole point of “me,” my past home, my history, my disposition, my conception of life and finance, and my future. Hedge was mostly just for fun. And so:

RiversHedge


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[1] Some of this post-dates the blog name. Just integrating some memory and thoughts here that seem to cohere in retrospect. 

[2] Lawyer: "short of a tug of war on the jetway with your daughters' arms, either you go together or you stay solo. I went.







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