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