Old School BMX freestyle, art and creative stuff, the future and economics, and anything else I find interesting...
Friday, July 6, 2018
One Year ago today... 7/6/2017
One year ago today, I woke up in my big tent, where I was living as a homeless guy, in a patch of woods in Winston-Salem. I'd been living there for just over a month, because moving out of my mom's apartment and into the woods was the only way I could focus entirely on building my artwork into a small business and actually be able to reinvest what I earned from drawing. In ten years of living in North Carolina, I haven't been able to get hired at a "real job." But I'm a Californian at heart. If I can't find a job, I'll create my own.
As I got ready to grab my art supplies and head down to the local McDonald's that morning, I heard something scurry into a little flap of loose tent fabric. There were spiders and bugs all over the place, but this was bigger. I thought a mouse had chewed its way into my tent.
I cautiously lifted up the tent wall to expose the area under the flap of fabric, and I found a small snake. I'm not sure which of us was more startled. It freaked out and coiled into attack mode, and I screamed. It was tan, about as big around as a pencil, and 8 to 10 inches long, a little smaller than the snakes in the video above. It was also moving and thrashing fast as hell, in a little coil. I had no idea how to get it out of there.
I remembered I had a 3X5 card box with my soap in it, the kind of plastic box used for old school recipe cards. The snake was tan, with a little brown bar above its eyes. I know fairly well what the four kinds of poisonous snakes in the U.S. look like. Those are rattlesnakes, water moccasins (aka cottonmouths), coral snakes, and copperheads. What I didn't know is what those snakes looked like as babies. So I thought my little tentmate was probably not poisonous, but I wasn't sure. So I very cautiously caught it in the box, and released it next to a fallen log, which it immediately squirmed under. We were both relieved at that point.
I don't know how the little snake got into my tent. But a full week before that, some kids had found my tent, ruffled through everything, and left the tent door unzipped and wide open. So I probably had a baby snake in the sleeping area of my tent for a full week without realizing it.
Now, a year later, I'm making about $500 or so a month selling my Sharpie drawings, and I'm sleeping on a futon in a living room that a new friend offered to me, to help me get back on my feet. Today my focus is on selling more artwork this weekend than I usually do in a month, so I can pay my $630+/- court fine by Monday. If I do that, I can avoid 30 days in jail. All of that stems from me getting arrested for buying a pack of donuts at Aldi's on Peter's Creek last fall. It's along story...
Alright, the Heavy Rebel Weekender event starts today, let's have some fun. Back to work.
How did a snake find its
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