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.