Spiral Bound Journal

Split the Difference

"Ah," Morgan sighed. "Home sweet home."

He mustered up enough energy to lock the door and toe off his shoes. For a moment, he started dead ahead at the living room space before regaining his senses. He dragged himself away from the threshold and flopped down on the burgundy couch. It didn't coordinate with much else in the room, but it had reasonable support. In moments like this, that's all that mattered to Morgan. The sofa gave him a place to veg out after annoying days in Houston.

Morgan peered at the ceiling, letting his eyes lose focus as he replayed the day's events in his head. By this point, he was used to waking up at five in the morning to make sure he was coherent enough to begin the drive from Dallas to Houston. Today, his time in Houston started with meeting his lawyer for just over an hour, reviewing the latest pushback from Rachel. While sitting in the meeting, Morgan thought about what all he had relinquished in order to keep control of his money. So far he lost custody of the dogs along with giving up his prized piano. Now Rachel was trying to claim that she paid for some of his camera equipment and wanted recurring royalty payments. Since Morgan had to keep all the paperwork on equipment purchases for taxes, this was an easier point to fight than other dispute in the divorce proceedings up till this point. Retrieving said records would eat up a sizable percentage of tomorrow's schedule. At least he was able to stay in Dallas for that.

Rolling onto his side, Morgan contemplated all the things he would need to do over the next couple days. Aside from hunting down the receipts and a couple bank statements, he had a call scheduled to interview a former CryptoCapital employee. This was for a video that had been in the making for years. Thus, this call really needed to happen. Morgan thanked providence that he scheduled that call and nothing else for tomorrow. This stroke of scheduling luck meant that he wouldn't need to shuffle tasks around in order to meet the demands of the long running divorce process. It irritated Morgan how he needed to move in a hurry to get his work done given how the afternoon meeting with Rachel's attorney got canceled (again). Sitting in the reception area for close to twenty minutes before being told about the cancellation managed to be both disrespectful and annoying at the same time. He was getting rather sick of the stalling. On the other hand, his attorney was putting in significant effort to protect the most critical assets (including those pertaining to his channel), so Morgan opted not to complain. Much.

A grumble prompted Morgan to sit up. It had been a while since lunch. The amount of takeout he was getting between the day trips to Houston and being tired after the drives was starting to put some strain on his wallet. At least Morgan had the sense to do some grocery shopping a couple days ago, so there were enough ingredients at hand to make a simple pasta dish. With a huff, he peeled himself off the couch and headed for the galley style kitchen.

As Morgan grabbed a pot for the pasta, he found himself wondering why the floor space of the kitchen was less than that of the cubicle he had while working for the home developer way back when.As it was, making a meal more involved than spaghetti required putting the cutting board on top of the stove and doing as much prep work there as possible. At least the stove had a glass top, which made the task easier. The good news is spaghetti didn't require this type of work. That meant once the pot was filled Morgan could set it on the stove no problem.

While waiting for the water to boil, Morgan pulled his phone out of his pocket. He'd looked at it maybe three times over the course of the day between all the driving and paper work review. As expected, his Twitter notifications were blowing up. Morgan has asked for people to come forward with experiences they had with two of Holton Buggs' finance-related ventures. While he had covered Holton before, Holton ended up being more of a supporting cast member in the bigger picture of a nine digit Ponzi scheme. A quick scan showed that ten of his notifications pertained to that. Many others were people suggested potential scams to investigate. Morgan knew that this was a risk of becoming a known scam investigator on YouTube, but he still found himself sagging when seeing people beg him to investigate various scams. Most of the tips weren't even that great. He had gotten one from Dana long before they met, and the premise of investigating why gurus lean so heavily on the Barnum Effect did pique his interest. He knew, however, that it would be enough of a departure from his channel that fans would question it.

Maybe somebody I'll cover it, he thought as he looked over at the stove.

With the water now boiling, he dropped a handful of noodles into the pot and grabbed a half empty jar of sauce from the refrigerator. It wouldn't be too long before his dinner would be ready enough. He figured that Twitter and anything else work-related could wait until he had some food in his stomach. For that matter, everything could wait for that moment. At least then he'd have the energy to think things through. Barring that, he'd at least have enough fuel to not fall asleep while getting ready for bed.