The Means of Production

I appreciate your patronage here, I really do, especially knowing that the audience amounts to I think three actual humans and anywhere from four to 14 either Russian or Indian adver-bots. If I were getting thousands of page views a day, this would be a far less intensely personal experience. It wouldn't be in the sense that I currently tailor any of this content to your or your tastes, but more like I'd spend way more time preparing and thinking about what I'm going to write to appeal to a generalized audience instead of how I do it now: sitting down with a blank screen on my ancient MacBook Pro, working through my panic in pretty much a real-time first draft struggle-post, ultimately for your amusement. If you want a thoughtful piece of self-satisfied "professional" and "competently written" and "copyedited" content, well, that's what Substack is for apparently. This is Blogger, and I trust you understand what that means when you show up here: sentence fragments, more colon abuse than Crohn's Disease and RAW HUMAN EMOTION. Sometimes the only way to get to the core of lived experience is unfiltered and ugly, dangling participles exposed to the world.

I've of course seen plenty of people turn their online amusements into viable businesses, and I've been thinking about that a bit lately. It turns out this inflation shit is no joke, especially out here in Southern California where the cost of literally everything has shot straight past "alarming" to "prohibitive" to "oranges are how much? Is there a fucking diamond in the middle?" It's a sign of a struggling economy when you seriously have to contemplate whether or not, in the zero-sum high-stakes game of Grocery Shopping, to opt in to scurvy.

So another line of income would be nice. I work in contracting, meaning it's not really a corporate structure where you get things like "raises" or "promotions." The personnel structure is by definition limited to the scope of the work for a fixed period (subject to renewal of course, for another limited scope and another fixed period). There isn't really an option to get promoted to Senior Vice President of the Shit I Already Do in a closed system. The curses are a) I really like my job and b) it's close-ish to my house. So leaving it to find a better one* is a cool idea, but in order to not take a net loss in pay due to the fact that automobile fuel currently costs more per liter than plutonium-239, it either can have zero commute or pay about 50% more than what I currently make.

But even though, fucking hell, opting in to a freeway-type stereotype of a SoCal commute when I've avoided it for so long feels like turning myself in for a murder I got away with in 2007.

"Hey man, what about all the remote jobs out there now, post-pandemic?" Well, I've been on ZipRecruiter and get job opening notifications from LinkedIn. It turns out the revolution toward telework kept on revolut-ing all the way around until we ended up right back into regular-ass rush-hour traffic cycles. It turns out businesses, for some reason, are addicted to a specific type of unnecessary overhead that includes leasing space and buying office furniture. The people in charge are still a whole generation of dipshits who can only feel alive if they can walk past 8 to 10 people looking miserable under yellow fluorescent light in a break room at any given point in a day. What was the point of reading Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and watching American Psycho like it's a fucking instructional documentary on your way to an MBA if there are no underlings around to overling?

So the ideal situation is to stay where I'm at, but maybe add something on the side. Copywriting or copyediting maybe, that's an idea. I'd set up a Patreon for this thing, like all the kids do these days, which wouldn't represent any more work (at this point, I've been doing it for free on a frighteningly regular basis for a long time, it's not like having paying customers would be a differential motivation greater or equal to my own shallow compulsions), but it definitely would change my relationship with the work I put out here. Also, I'm not kidding, right now my last post has eight (8) visits. My last (summertime!) electric bill in the Inland Empire was $412.83. I'm not great at either division or multiplication, but the math there doesn't really pencil out.

Right now my options are, as outlined:

1) New job that pays a lot more but does not annoy me. This probably somehow also has to mean no new people I have to get used to and nobody telling me what to do.

2) Side gigs that do not involve driving a car in any capacity. Not that I am above gig work, but I'm pretty sure I'd need to work about 80 hours a week just to make the gas worth it. Maybe turn one of my extra rooms into a handjob parlor I guess, always a growth industry.

3) Make this into a gig somehow, but without any increase in effort or focus or, let's be honest, quality. "This" means not just the vaunted brand Ochlocracy in Action, but any online creative thing.

4) Cut costs where I can maybe but keep things as they are and continue to spin out and/or complain.

Being completely honest, we're all thinking a heavy Option 4, I know, except the cost-cutting part maybe. There are lots of factors that make an economy perilous, but I don't have to be Cassandra to know already that it will be DoorDash-ing sandwiches from Panera I could make myself that ruins me.

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*I hear you out there, giving the excellent advice "have you tried not being poor?" I'm trying, Jared Kushners of the world, I'm trying!