Saturday, Nov. 08, 2003 - 1:54 a.m.

Origin Story (Part 1 of 3)

The Making of a Financial Superhero

(This post is background info for my Coming Out of the Closet post from yesterday. Please read it first.)

How did I become so fabulous?

It all started in March, 2003. No, wait, it really started a year ago, in November or December 2002. Then again, it never would have happened if it weren’t for what went down in the summer of 2002. Then again…

...i'll take you back to '73, before I ever had a multi-platinum sellin' Cd, I was a baby, maybe I was just a couple of months...

I grew up upper-middle class. My family had a big antique house on an acre of land, and a sailing yacht. Somehow, perhaps by virtue of always having everything I needed (plus a hell of a lot I didn’t need), I tended to gravitate toward the simple and the frugal (with some notable exceptions). But as a teenager, I dreamed of surpassing my parents’ mundane aspirations, and achieving true greatness for myself, part of which would involve making at least 50 million dollars, and using that money to build a magnificent castle, prettier than Mad King Ludwig’s castle in Bavaria, and fully defensible. I wanted to do something intensely meaningful with my life, and creating an edifice of inspiring beauty was the best I could think of at the time.

A little later, after seeing my parents get divorced due to disputes over money, the American dream of amassing astounding wealth grew more distasteful for me. My mother told me, during my second year of college, that I was “going to have to” somehow wrangle a business degree out of a school which had no business department, and then get the highest-paying job I was able to, immediately upon graduation, in order to pay for my sister’s college education (which my parents had previously told me had already been saved for.) Although I loved my sister, and wanted to help her out if she needed help, I couldn’t imagine what having a real job would be like. My employment experience had thus far included two tedious library jobs, and a summer doing groundskeeping at a golf course. My future as an adult with a career filled me with dread. It looked so monotonous and stifling. I had been hoping to spice it up by getting a job in art, perhaps as an animator. But now I was expected to major in business and do whatever would pay the most, all in self-sacrifice to the good of the family.

Adulthood was looking less and less appealing. The very thought of “being a man” was utterly revolting to me, because, aside from sexist gender roles, it connoted becoming a soulless drone in a necktie, another automaton pieced together on society’s assembly line, dedicating the majority of my waking life to meaningless tasks, coming home and collapsing, rotting away in old age, and getting buried having already lived for many decades as a ghost.

I freaked out. There was no way I was going to spend my life doing the opposite of what I wanted to just so my sister could have access to a life of the same lucrative alienation. My mother’s words were not the sole cause my writer’s block, but surely contributed to it. Slowly, my academic gears ground to a halt. I had lost all motivation to write papers. My intention to graduate had not changed however, and I forced myself to sit down in front of computers to write my papers, but no words were forthcoming. This stunned me, as I was used to being a good student, and my homework used to essentially do itself. This was a great lesson about how intention without motivation cannot produce action. But I was still attached to getting my diploma and starting a career of mental work, which I had been told was the only viable option for someone of my background. This caused me immense anxiety and despair.

Amidst my emotional turmoil, I came upon the notion that a class-based society was neither justifiable nor inevitable. Now I detested my family’s, and society’s, expectations of me all the more. With my nascent class analysis, I wanted no part in a system that perpetuates exploitation and needless suffering. I proclaimed that money must be abolished. I quickly adopted anarchism as a framework through which I could oppose capitalism without supporting the kind of tyranny found in the Soviet Union and China. My dream of building a beautiful castle morphed into the more powerful dream of building a beautiful life for each and every human being.

Before the year was out, I was failing most of my classes, and Brown University told me I was kicked out for at least a year. I had had enough, and had no wish to return. I moved home to live with my family with a mixture of shame and relief.

As an Ivy League dropout (cue music from Grease), I presumed all doors to the good life had slammed shut, and I was doomed to the life of a common laborer. I put some effort into resigning myself to that fate. After all, I didn’t really mind working with my hands, and the prospect of doing something I could do, even if it was boring, sounded a lot more appealing than trying to write papers with no results, which I knew was boring, and stressful, and depressing as well. I figured I could eat nothing but oatmeal if necessary, and I’d find some dignity in that.

During this time, I got fired from both a job recycling pager casings and a job painting houses, for working too slow, despite giving what I thought was my best effort. I did not get fired from a convenience store stocking job, though I got frequent complaints about my work speed. As an anarchist, I was disgusted with nearly all of my surroundings. I was disgusted with the world of money, property, and commodities. I was mentally above it, and more than ready to transcend it bodily as well. With glee, I kissed it all goodbye and joined a commune as soon as I could.

Twin Oaks Community, my dream commune, was a centrally-planned socialist enclave with around 100 people who never use money. Well, Twin Oaks exists in the “real world”, so the community constructed a capitalist shell in which to nurture its communist society. Its community-owned businesses bring home the bacon. As a community member, I was given a tiny piece of that bacon to play with; I received 60 bucks a month, a payment patronizingly called “allowance”, with which I was allowed to do as I pleased, as long as I was only buying goods and services off the premises, in order to preserve the purity of our moneyless communism within our borders.

So for 7 years, I was immersed in a world that in many ways was America, yet in many ways was like an isolated island nation with vastly different customs, assumptions, and practices. The outsiders we interacted with were usually people from other communities with similar values (the intentional communities movement is sort of a cultural archipelago), or visitors eager to adopt that lifestyle. I grew accustomed to having an income of two dollars a day, which wasn’t much lower than the part-time minimum-wage work I had done previously. And I didn’t even spend it; I got real good at saving hundreds of dollars at a time.

This was my reality for so long, it became deeply ingrained: working for no pay, eating free food, having a small bedroom as my only private space, and spending almost no money. Along with this came presumptions about the “outside world”: that it’s heartless and shallow, and that it’s really tough to make it out there. I was lacking confidence that I could survive outside the protective womb of the community. In retrospect, it would have been relatively easy to move to Charlottesville and get an apartment and a job, and would have felt much more liberating than the cynical, dismissive last three years in which I lingered there.

My Very Busy Friend tempted me to leave and go join him in Richmond. He offered to rent me a room in his house for the ridiculously low price of $175 a month, and start a band with me. It was the peak of the dot.com boom, and he assured me that even people who only knew how to use Dreamweaver were raking in big bucks, so with my knowledge of HTML, I should have no difficulty getting a $20/hour job.

For a week that Fall, the sky was blue and utterly cloudless, which was very rare in that part of the country. The clarity of the sky was mirrored in a new clarity of consciousness I was experiencing. I realized that all my life (with exceptions), I had been mousy and submissive, not believing I was fully capable, presuming I wouldn’t be accepted by others unless I was careful, and presuming others weren’t interested in hearing me express myself. Like the unmitigated insolation shining through the clear blue, I knew I could, I should, I must turn that attitude around, if I were ever to get the most out of life. When I read Alexander Berkman’s The ABC of Anarchism earlier that year, I had laughed when he said that Anarchism was the surest path for the working class to regain their lost “manhood”. God, what a sexist choice of words. But now I wasn’t laughing. Besides the sexism, the word, “manhood”, also seemed to connote being bold, assertive, and proactive. Those were qualities sorely lacking in my life. I resolved to embrace my “manhood” and swagger a bit, talk loudly, and take up more space. Most other guys would benefit from tuning down those qualities, but I was different. I needed to amp them up. Of course, there’s nothing peculiarly male about being bold, assertive, and proactive. I just liked using the “manhood” word because it conveniently already carried those connotations for me, plus it was an exercise in boldness to use such a politically incorrect word. And I was confident that after all my years trying to be a model feminist, I was at little risk of taking things too far.

I left Twin Oaks with these words from Judas Priest posted for the whole community to read: “If you think I’ll sit around, as the world goes by, you’re thinking like a fool, cause it’s a case of do-or-die. Out there is a fortune, waiting to be had. If you think I’ll let it go, you’re mad! You’ve got another thing coming.”

More to come in Part 2: The Quickening

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