I have a bunch of gigs that I do to get money, but it’s all intermittent and slow in coming. Also never very much when it does come, which can get annoying. I mean it’s like a dollar from this gig every 3 weeks, 5 from this gig every 4 months, a hundred from this other gig every 18 months… And to make matters worse most of the money is not fungible, I can only spend it in certain places but not others. F’rinstance one gig only lets me spend online through their “mall” with inflated prices. Another pays me in gift cards to certain stores. Another only pays me in Amazon money. Sure I can get almost anything except meat and fresh produce from Amazon, but that’s not the point. The point is I need to make more money I can spend in any place I feel like spending it.
The other point is I need a job, but there are not many jobs I can do these days with what’s left of my body and brain. Most of the jobs I can do have been outsourced overseas, or automated out of existence. And it’s only going to get worse as my body ages and automation spreads, leaving me with fewer jobs I can physically do and fewer jobs that aren’t done by robots or some kind of autonomous machine. Add a little age discrimination in there, and I get sitting in a coldhot room typing nonsense on an ancient laptop as the sum total of my existence. Which is a gig that hasn’t made me any money in a couple of years at least.
I used to make relatively good money doing this, between ad sales and donations, but ad sales died about 3 years ago, and donations tapered off about a year after that. Most of my readers aren’t any better off financially than I am, and the concept of “disposable income” has become a fantasy for me. Mrs. the Poet harbors the fantasy of going to the grocery and buying all the food she wants of whatever brand she wants, without any thoughts of how much it will cost. Talk about a poor person’s fantasy… And my dreams and financial fantasies are a constant fodder for creating posts in my post murder-report blog. By some standards I’m a rich person, I have a house to live in, and a few gadgets to entertain myself, and I’m relatively food secure. It hasn’t always been this way, there were periods of my life where we were not food secure, when making rent was a constant worry. Those days are gone now, but their scars still remain.
So objectively I’m in decent shape as far as survival is concerned, but what I’m looking for exceeds mere survival. I want to live rather than survive. I know that sounds selfish and I guess it is to an extent. But that is the nature of the beast, moving on to improve things once survival has been ensured. And if you’re feeling in a donating mood the link to my PayPal account is over by the bottom right corner of the page. Look for “Send Me Money”.
Witch on a Bicycle 