The Dao of Doug: A Bus Driver's Perspective

Quality Endures

Daily writing prompt

What’s something most people don’t understand?

Being short-sided usually brings with it a ‘low-cost’ mentality that ends up costing much more in the long-run. Savers understand this. Let’s take a look at Old Ironsides, and see how quality becomes priceless.

First, we need a strong foundation. Take a look at this mess hall. These tables, these chairs, this dining hall, have outlasted many pieces of furniture that have been decaying in a buried trash heap. Old growth wood, when maintained with painstaking regularity, can glow and shine for centuries. Same could be said of what we put into our body, and how we keep our muscles in good shape–without disuse. Getting off the couch and being of service to others changes everything about our energy, our body, our appearance, and how we interact with others. Doing something right always feels good. And its usually not what our ego’s wants and desires tell us in our first thought or reaction.

Strong support is needed to set sail with the best we’ve got, and once our sails are unfurled–we can go with the flow, in this example, with the wind that will set us up to go wherever we want to go! Prayer, meditation, and quiet time can create a day of smooth sailing. Try it, you’ll like it! Hey Mikey! He likes it!

Needless to say, the best defense, with proper preparation–is having a good offense whenever our enemies try to attack us.

Good orderly direction, or G.O.D. for short, keeps our deck clean and ready for whatever challenges and setbacks that may occur–because that’s just Life.

Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.

Keith Haring’s legacy, engraved here above, in white gold, is a testament to the understanding that what we leave behind, from a start in subway underground black and white outlines covering bland advertising panels–is now enshrined at St. John the Devine in his artist start hometown of NYC!

It’s always good to have a clear moral compass–even if it be that of Captain Jack Sparrow in pointing to whatever you desire the most!

Just keep steady, and point yourself in the direction you want to go–and don’t let anyone, ANYTHING, stand in your way!

I kept my feet grounded, and kept reaching for the stars!

And here is where I am today!

I’ve got people from around the world looking at my photography!

Find me on my YouTube Channel

And below–links complete with my own chapters–my diaries–of how I’ve followed my path–my Dao–even as a worker among workers!

“What if the chaos of city life could be your path to inner peace? 🌆”

In ‘Finding Zen on the Bus,’ Doug Francisco shares his transformative experience as a bus driver navigating the complexities of urban life while discovering profound happiness and mindfulness amidst the daily grind.”

“Through anecdotal essays, Doug explores how to embrace simplicity, connect with the community, and turn distractions into opportunities for growth.”

“Join Doug as he recounts the laughter, struggles, and moments of clarity that reveal how everyday interactions can lead to unexpected joy.”

Whether you’re seeking mindfulness or simply a new perspective on life, this book offers the tools to find your Zen amidst the hustle and bustle. 🌟”

Gospel-like Adherence and Spurious Uranus in Gemini

Write about your approach to budgeting.

Here’s me buying coffee saving untold hundreds not at Starbucks:

Now here’s me trying to figure out how to buy me a new car:

A mid sixties Camaro—and I even like the color!

I delivered parts to the owner of a car repair shop and because I found-out from the grease-monkey who’s works for him and on this car, that it’s for sale! What do you think he’s selling it for?

And look who’s next door!

Q. What simple tech-hack on a website that is a one-stop shop for answers to that horrible-sinking-feeling about not being able to find the right action to edit or modify an object or page?

A. The three dots in the corner! I think I mention this in another blog-post, but it came up again on Zoom as screenshare person. The three dots are a part of the ‘more’ button, which opens a pop-up to more choices on the participants’ square. Same can be said of Facebook in the upper-right corner on desktop–but may appear or disappear on the bottom of the screen on your iPhone, depending on where you touch the screen.

Point is, look for the three buttons when you’ve come to a boomer moment and feel like an idiot online.

Oooh look, there are the three dots!

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/douglas-griggs/collections/waikiki+beaches/canvas+prints

All Hail the Supply Chain

The most important invention in your lifetime is…

Mr Whipple and perhaps, Mr Clean will agree with me on this.

Paper towels:

They are just as good as sliced bread! They finally made the sheets of paper with perforations at the right size.

Sure, you got your cries over spilt milk and the large latte —when a mopping is needed—but for swiping the stove top after serving an olive oil filled omelette or pasta dish— nothing beats a piece of paper towels!

See, it’s the little things that make me mad. The modern day convenience of paper towels is a taken-for-granted invention that is almost certainly a luxury good by technology—yet it is regarded as a mundane commonplace product.

I enjoy a clean house and keeping it in order. “Swiffler” I guess you can say, is my middle name. So it is not a stretch that I use glass cleaner or other similar products to attack the cracks and corners behind doors, as a routine for the practice of doing an esteem-able act!

All hail the supply chain!

https://www.fineartamerica.com/featured/all-hail-the-supply-chain-douglas-griggs.htmlhttps://www.fineartamerica.com/featured/all-hail-the-supply-chain-douglas-griggs.html

Another Day Opens

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

I’m just living today as though it is significant! Any influence on my day today is going to have to happen in the here and now. The present is where the gift is received!

From Horseless Carriage to Muscle and Power

Did we actually go the way we should have–when Goodyear and Firestone had us rip up all the trolley tracks?

Daily writing prompt

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

View all responses

There’s so much talk in political circles about Racism and Fascism, and quite frankly, I think most of us have it wrong. Talk of Henry Ford was that he was a prejudiced white boy. It may have been the haters of industry that were angry Ford was not only the first with the production line–but paid wages well above any other manufactured good in the US. Sound familiar? He set the standard for the rest of the better part of a century, and his goodwill to a fair wage pushed other manufactures to follow his model. T– that is, and I don’t mean MSTR!

Steering wheel with hand grip for easy steer–power assist steering and power steering were decades to come!

Where the English** came up with boot, I’ll never tell--but the tides they-are-a-changing! Our leaders, as well as the rest of the world, are waking up to the fact that the wars between nations are all well orchestrated by–not necessarily the Brugge*

*Lots of places have different names in Belgium. There are a couple that really sound alike, are written similar, or are completely different. Hmm how ’bout them sprouts!”

For example: Brussel – Bruxelles, Dinant – Dinant (different pronunciation), Doornik – Tournai, Aalst – Alost, Oostkerk – Oisquercq, etc… The preferred way you call it, is usually determined by the language you speak. If you’re talking Dutch, you’ll probably say Brugge, if you speak French, you’ll say Bruges, if you speak West-Flemish, you’ll say Bruhhe, and if you’re from Anderlecht you’ll say boerderij…

**But from the land that brought us the Knights of Ni and a revisionist Camelot! (That’s not got much Spam in it!”)

Anyway, let’s zoom to the halcyon days of American Dream Cars–Muscle and Power:

Thunderbirds are Go–This is a ’66 which had the solid red banded tail lights.

And less we talk of daddy taking away your fun, how about the Charger?

Okay, hot rods, they aren’t, but check out Toms Refurb on YouTube! That’s where the Mustang stable lies!*

*Somewhere in the tri-state area where Maryland, Delaware, and Penna. Maybe Mexico!!!

So why would I want to re-invent history? So we could come out of our pods with a single middle finger lifted, and get back to community commutes?

Dear Milan,

Thanks for the historic ten streetcars (above) you gave San Fran with our 2006 purchase of 250 Bredas! Below is the last Breda Streetcar on November 12, 2025 crossing Church St.

Like and subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0idYT5L7Xw

No freeway eminent domain. No boomer congestion exurbs that have parking lots the size of football stadiums. Nope. Just reading a good book or paper or striking up an interesting conversation with our neighbors.

Compulsive Honking Syndrome and The Art of Driving a Bus

One of the treats of classroom training at Muni is the vintage videos with footage of San Francisco in the 1970’s. They show equipment smoothly flowing down Market Street with virtually no traffic and no delay. Screech forward to today’s reality—the sound of spinning tires, rad acceleration on the pedal, and long horn blasts—that are heard daily.

Before a meeting with a friend, he inspired me with a title for this chapter, and he had already come up with initials for this common occurrence heard trip after trip in his cab: C.H.S., compulsive honking syndrome. Or as I jokingly added, a part of a person’s Compulsive Horn Disorder, C.H.D.! A person with CHD may develop CHS if they do not catch the infection early on in their behavior pattern. For once set in the firing pattern of neurons, only through a meditation routine not unlike that followed by a Master Jedi such as Yoda, can the disease be remitted. Or, perhaps, by now reading The Dao of Doug.

The good news, just in: each one of us can change our habits by awareness of staying true to who we really are, and not reacting to a perceived slight by an ‘effing moron or douche bag. In slowing down my body movement by quiet time each evening, I get answers. Find your time. Can you do it in the morning, or is before bed better? In this case, I am an evening person. My do list check-off is an up and at ‘em energy best suited to the morning hours.

I never would have known this had I not stopped to question and analyze why I was jumping to conclusions or rushing to judgement about a person, place or thing that at first appeared to be in conflict with my path. Just like an automobile butting-out from the curb, double-parked, and giving me the horn, simply because they could not see the pedestrian crossing in front of me against the light. In fact, there are several common flow patterns that lead to compulsive horn syndrome, and once understood and quantified, this can provide the Dao (the manner of living) of non-reaction to breaking compulsive horn disorder. Below are the situations that can trigger CHS and lead to permanent disability with CHD.

Mined, Minted, Printed

Bitcoin: The Top Performing Asset of The Decade

The Math doesn’t lie–and yes, it’s been done by an Astrophysicist!

Let’s look at the facts: Bitcoins’ returns have beat all other asset classes for the past ten years. US Treasuries came in at number one in 2018, and Commodities came in First Place in 2022. . . .All other years BITCOIN!

As Rick Rule likes to point out, if we regress to the mean as a percentage of allocation to asset classes of two percent to Gold, hovering in 2025 at point five percent, to say, an additional one point five percent increase–would, for example, take GDX and GDXJ to a price well over one hundred–and gold price in ounces, to the moon! Many other experienced Market Makers on YouTube also now say the old 60 / 40 allocation breakdown in your retirement portfolio should shift with a twenty percent allocation in GOLD (and / or commodities) and twenty in AI or Tech or Crypto, with the standard 60 in stocks or passive ETF’s. The short form, to save you countless hours on YouTube: Is to Allocate for MINTED, MINED, AND PRINTED. (We now all know where printed get’s us.)

We keep hearing that Bitcoin is now more mature and stable, with friendly powers in the Executive Branch, and large institutions such as banks, now buying more Bitcoin and Stablecoin postitions in their own created ETFs. This graph above shows the standard up-and-to-the-right chart. The slope Power Law is the highest with BTC: more than the S & P, and more than gold (by a sliver-not silver) and the R squared number is so close to 1 that there is almost a 1-to-1 correlation with Bitcoin vs. Gold! Take a peek below on these three graphs:

The below graph does indeed show that the faded shaded light-blue x1 correlation is narrowing at a stable 5.86 ratio.

The chart below is not a Silver Widow-Maker chart, but a prediction of the next high in MSTR and BTC: mid-year 2027. (Although the work by Ryan Hogue does show May of this new year, 2026 may a ride to a peak in September 2026.)

Here’s the relieving, take a breath good news that is–keep buying MSTR and ETHA and other such tech-treasury related stocks–NOW WHILE THE PRICE IS LOW–so you don’t have to feel left out of the silver and gold markets’ rally. Buy Low sell High, remember? This is not my advice, but common standard practice as seen on YouTube podcasts. Ka-peesh?

Once again, this is the chart of the BTC/Gold power law residuals, which should make your Levi’s rise into a flush of excitement for the coming year of 2026 to 2027!

You owe it to yourself to watch the latest YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzN7sCO0maY video from BRAM, with astrophysicist Stephen Perrenod, to clarify this four year cycle thing:

As Bitcoin travels up the log chart, the time between peaks L e n g t h e n s, N’est pas? Bueno – mi hitijas y mi hitijos! All the BS by blocking the free markets in silver and changing the rules at the last minute–could be a bull run for MSTR and BTC-USD. As Ralph Kramden would say, “To the Moon Alice, To the Moon~”

What is Your Horizon?

Sung to the tune of Burl Ives Christmas Ring: “Silver and Gold, Silver and Gold . . .

I’m down about 14,000 dollars in 2025 on my brokerage account with MSTR and BITO (not to mention MSTU–realized and unrealized losses, LoL!) because I kept doing the same stupid thing over and over and expected different results. As Michael Saylor has been trying to tell me, I have to keep my MSTR Strategy shares for at least four years. And if I could wait to ten years–the results would be breathtaking. There’s a metric called CAGR*,

*CAGR stands for Compound Annual Growth Rate, a financial metric showing the average yearly growth of an investment over a specific period, assuming profits are reinvested, providing a smoothed, single rate to compare different investments easily. It’s useful for long-term planning and comparing investments with varying annual returns by smoothing out volatility, revealing the constant rate needed to grow from a starting to an ending value.

Sure enough, if I look back at a block of a four year time-frame, I could have seen a huge appreciation in my Bitcoin holdings thru the ticker MSTR, Strategy, had I not kept panicking and hitting the sell button over-and-over like a broken record. So here’s my big whoop-de-whoop on MSTR and Bitcoin for 2026, to show myself I’m not just your run-of-the-mill moron.

Below are some good screenshots about how MSTR can be a good investment if I follow the rules found in the movie, Fight Club: The first rule of bitcoin (MSTR) is to not sell MSTR. The second rule of MSTR is to not sell MSTR. And the Third Rule of MSTR is to not tell anyone about selling MSTR–and if I don’t have any MSTR, I have to buy MSTR! I have to fight!

As you can see, MSTR has been like a rock skipping on the water and dropping like a rock since Wed, July 16th of this year, 2025. Indeed, MSTR doesn’t move for long periods of time, in fact, 70 percent of the time.

There’s all this mumbo jumbo about halving cycles and the four year cycles, but if I follow the charting of Ryan Hogue investing on YouTube, the next top may not come until around September of 2026. The bottom not until around MSTR $140. If I can not hit the sell button for at least the next nine months, I should see a huge upside.

Indeed, this drop in the price of MSTR is a great time to buy MSTR: instead of buying high and selling low, I should do just the opposite. MSTR is hated and unloved, and as Rick Rule says, that’s the time to buy–just like anything else, when it’s on sale!

It’s on sale now!

We can see that the Digital Credit equivalent yield to STRK, STRD, STRC, and STRF is far superior to most other forms of non-bitcoin treasury yields above.

My bitcoin per share is increasing every time Michael Saylor buys more bitcoin, and even though many naysayers believe this is dilution, it isn’t, because the number of bitcoins increases higher than number of shares issued. Yes, fiat currency was used to create a 32-month hoard, such that payments to all these dividend payment preferred shares will stretch beyond September, statistically placing the time horizon to a much more favorable length for accretive increases.

Yield definitely goes up over time, as we see above. Perpetual Preferred Credit is being seen as much better than the debt issuance from government treasuries!

I been acting like I have temporary capital with withdrawal risk! We see below that the numbers keep getting bigger:

And Earnings Recap looks good, too:

The value will continue to go up if I continue to HODL:

Strategy is and has been staying at the top of annualized return:

What black swan events could happen? How about the shutdown of trading silver! What’s going to happen when retail buyers can’t buy silver due to a government imposed Silver rule 7? I think that silver has taken the steam out of bitcoin, but perhaps, not for long.*

*AI Overview

Silver Rule 7 was a critical emergency rule enacted by the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) (now part of CME Group) on January 7, 1980, to halt the speculative silver bubble inflated by the Hunt brothers, imposing strict limits on leveraged (borrowed money) silver purchases, which triggered massive margin calls, market panic (Silver Thursday), and ultimately, the Hunts’ financial ruin as they couldn’t cover debts, leading to market collapse.

The only thing is, there is no speculative bubble on silver this time. It’s different. We’re running out of silver in the west, as Peru and Mexico have stopped shipping silver. China has also blocked silver from being exported out the country. Whoops. Oh well, we don’t produce that many EV cars or solar panels! Ha.