The best weekend in Winston-Salem is about to happen

I'm looking forward to this weekend.  Fourth of July weekend is the time of the Heavy Rebel Weekender in Winston-Salem.  It's three days of classic cars, hot rods, rat rods, retro dressed pin-up girls, rockabilly and psychobilly music, and even coed mud wrestling.  I don't have the cash to check out the actual show indoors, but I'm hoping to show a bunch of people my art on the streets and hopefully get some work.  This is as cool as Winston-Salem gets, and I can't wait.  If you like any of the scenes listed above, here's the link.

Looking at a world beyond jobs

Those of you that know me from California know that I'm that taxi driver who falls through the trap door in this clip.  When I wound up in North Carolina years ago, right as the economy was collapsing in late 2008, I couldn't find work.  The Great Recession seemed to be the reason.  But as NC crawled out of the recession at a glacial pace, I still couldn't find a job.  That was a problem I've rarely run into, and never for a pro-longed period of time.  When I was homeless in California, I didn't have the resources to actually work a job, which kept me from working for a year.  But if I'd had the chance to stabilize my life for a while, I could have found something. 

But in North Carolina, it was different.  There were few good paying jobs where my earlier skills as a writer or video guy were helpful.  The BMX, skateboard and TV industries, where I'd worked for years in the 80's and 90's, don't exist here.  So I hit all the local restaurants, figuring my three years experience years ago would help me get by while I looked into other options.  I couldn't even get an interview in a restaurant.  WTF? 

As I looked into the larger picture of jobs in the U.S., I found that there were tens of millions of other people nationwide who couldn't find jobs either, or couldn't find good jobs.  It really hit home when I went to a job fair in Kernersville (NC) a couple of years ago.  I had a doctor's appointment that morning, so I didn't get to the job fair until 10:30 am or so.  It was held in a huge church north of town.  The local Pepsi bottling plant was hiring 100 people, and and Herbal Life was planning to move into an empty factory and was taking resume's.  I walked in and headed to the big multi-purpose room in the church.  A person in the line coming out the door snorted, "The end of the line's that way."  I followed the line of people around a corner, and into a hallway well over 100 feet long.  I kept walking, passing about 2,500 people, all trying to get hired for those 100 Pepsi jobs.  The church was huge and the line went from one end to the other, then finally into a full size gymnasium, then it wound all the way around the gym.  It was so depressing.  Hours later, I made it into the main room, and I gave my resume' to a lady at the Herbal life booth, she smiled and laid it on top of a stack of resume's a foot high.  On another table behind her, there was an even bigger stack.  Paper resume's were still accepted then.  I never heard from any of the companies I applied for that day.

As I stood in line that day, I listened to people talking about how to find a good job.  My thoughts were different.  I was thinking, "I should open up a snack bar next to the line for all the people waiting."  Years of hanging around highly entrepreneurial people in California, and my years as a taxi driver, which operates as a small business, gave me a different point of view.  Most of the people in that insanely long line kept plugging away at finding a job... any job.  I realized that I needed to create my own job. 

Ultimately, I stepped up the artwork I do, and started making money with it.  Not much, but something.  I'm still plugging away at creating my own job comprised of art and writing.  The more I looked into what was happening in the U.S., with technology replacing so many jobs, I realized that the only way we'll be able to move forward as a country is if MILLIONS OF PEOPLE create their own jobs. 

If you watch the video above, you'll see that as many as 70 million people could lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years.  Teens are already having trouble finding jobs.  Lots of middle aged people like myself have lost jobs because of technology or outsourcing, and are having trouble finding good paying jobs.  We've all heard of the college graduates saddled with student debt that are working low paying service jobs because they can't find a good job that needs their degree.

This isn't just lazy people or drunks or unskilled people that are struggling.  There are people throughout society looking for good jobs.  Millions of them.  And there will be tens of millions more in the coming years.  The numbers are so large, that we can't visualize them.   If we take the estimate of 70 million people from the clip above, how big of a crowd is that?  There are 31 huge pro football stadiums in the United States (Remember, Jets and Giants share one).  They average a capacity of about 70,000 people.  So if all those 31 stadiums were filled to capacity, that would be about 2,170,000 people.  To equal the 70 million people that could lose their jobs to technology in the next 20 years, we'd have to fill all of those huge stadiums,with completely different people, every day for 32 days.  That's the ridiculous number of people we're talking about. 

This huge issue is what I'm focusing on these days.  As I build my own business, I'll be looking at the ways people are starting new businesses and industries, and the other aspects of this issue.  This will affect you.  It will affect your kids and grandkids.  This is big.  And the politicians are too busy arguing with each other to dive into this issue.  A lot of the top tech business people are worried about this.  While successful tech companies make a ton of money, they don't hire large numbers of people.  We've got to figure this out for ourselves.  Let's get to it.

For those of you old school BMXers checking this out, when I checked how many people looked at that first post, the answer was 43.  Good sign. 

Eat the Donuts

I woke up this morning in a sketchy motel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  It's definitely shady, but I think only one person has been murdered here in the last year, so it's not too bad as cheap motels go.  I wake up slowly, and usually lay in bed for a while, picking my nose and thinking.  As I transitioned from the dream world (which sent me a really weird dream last night), to the waking world, my mind drifted to the Johnny Cash drawing I started a couple of days ago, the Kelly Slater surfing drawing I wanted to start, and then crept back to the same problem that has haunted me since I first came to North Carolina in late 2008.  "How do I make a living here?" 

It's a problem that I struggle with daily.  Technically, I'm homeless right now, since I moved out of the apartment I shared with my mom 3 1/2 weeks ago.  A friend hooked me up with the money for this room for a week.  It came out of nowhere, while I was talking about the tent I've been living in this month.  Generally speaking, I like camping.  But homelessness, or "urban camping," is not the ideal way to live.  I have tons of stuff I want to write about.  I have a lot of drawings I want to do.  When I make enough to get a decent video camera, there are video projects I'd like to do, as well 

Mostly right now, I want to start talking to people about building creative scenes.  Art scenes, music scenes, BMX scenes, skate scenes, entrepreneurial scenes, whatever.  On one hand I'm a creative guy who's mostly a writer/blogger.  But I also have a totally unique way of drawing with Sharpie markers that I do.  I'm also into watching the economic world and the dynamics of human society.  I'm an amateur futurist, reading boring books and looking at the Big Picture of where our society is heading.

That's where the creative scenes thing comes in.  The United States, and much of the developed world, is barreling towards a high tech future where tens of millions of human jobs will be replaced by some form of technology.  A handful of really smart people are worried about this.  But very few other people are paying attention.  Our official unemployment rate is low, just 4.3% right now.  But that doesn't tell the real story.  Large numbers of people have simply given up on finding work.  Tens of millions more people consider themselves underemployed, not able to really use their talents and skills in the jobs they hold to survive.  A quick look into the future shows this is going to get worse.  Much worse.

Some people, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg included, think that everyone should get a check each month just for being a human.  Universal Basic Income, they call it.  Professor and economic development expert, Richard Florida, says we need to make the tens of millions of service jobs into good paying, living wage jobs.  Both of those ideas have some merit.  But both would take serious, collaborative, bi-partisan action from business leaders, unions, and politicians.  I don't see that happening anytime soon. 

That leaves one viable option as I see it.  Millions of us will need to create our own jobs.  That's what I've been working on doing for the last year and a half.  Living in a highly toxic environment that was always in financial crisis made it nearly impossible.  I had to head back out onto the streets to really work to make it happen.  Obviously, starting a small business from a position of homelessness isn't easy either.  But that's where I'm at. 

So I crawled out of bed today.  The low budget motel bed seems incredibly luxurious after weeks of sleeping on a damp tent floor... or worse.  I started working on the Kelly Slater drawing.  I've been wanting to try my Sharpie "scribble style" on a really good surf photo for a while.  I did a drawing of a duck dive by surfer Karina Petroni, and it tuned out pretty well.  As I started drawing, I wanted to listen to something inspirational.  This "Authors at Google" talk by Amanda Palmer, about her book, The Art of Asking, is a favorite of mine.  At 20:16 in the clip she reads the story in her book about a young Australian musician using the platform Patreon to support her work.  Amanda tells the woman how Henry David Thoreau, while living at Walden Pond, got home made donuts from his mom and sister every Sunday.  He didn't survive quite as self-sufficiently as his book, Walden, let on.  But it doesn't really matter.  His experience in the woods by the pond turned into an epic American book.  Even with the Sunday donuts.  People helped him in his quest to "suck the marrow out of life," and he was still able to write a book that enlightened and inspired millions.  Amanda tells the musician, and the workers at Google, "Eat the donuts.  Eat the fucking donuts."  With this room paid for (quite surprisingly) by a friend, I'm "eating the donuts" right now.

As I listened today, I realized that I don't need to finish the Johnny Cash drawing and sell it to pay for another week in the motel.  I don't need to write and sell the zine I was working on last night to pay for another week.  More than anything these days, I'm a blogger.  I realized what I need to do is bring my different blogs into one, and write all the dozens of things on my mind in the blog,  and share it with all of you in real time.  I, too, have a Patreon page where people can support my work.  What I need to do is just put all my good ideas in one place, and let you see my creative process.  You don't have to pay a dime to read my stuff.  Except the few ideas I will write on my Patreon blog before anywhere else.  I'll keep drawing and progressing in my artwork.  And I'll sell the drawings and zines I can. 

But I'm going to take Amanda Palmer's advice, and I'm going to ask you, the readers, to help keep me writing.  Help me share my thoughts and stories about creative scenes to all the people out there looking for a way to create their own jobs, their own businesses, and to revive the small towns, small cities, and rural areas that are struggling across this country.  I want to keep doing this work.  You can go to my Patreon page now, and sign up to help me out, starting aa low as $1 a month.  Here's my Patreon page.

As for me, I'm out of food money right now.  So I'm going to go do a little offline "micro job" I do to come up with money to eat.  When I've done that, I'll come back to working on the Kelly Slater surfing drawing as I think about my next blog post here.  Welcome to my weird world.