Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2003 - 1:55 a.m.

Origin Story (Part 2 of 3)

The Making of a Financial Superhero

Part 2: The Quickening

(See Part 1 and Coming Out of the Closet.)

I didn’t want to be rich (as such). To me, money was just a means to an end. I was following the dictum of the Church of the SubGenius, that “to defeat the concept of money, it's going to take a lot of money." And I had a plan. I had joined Twin Oaks because I thought it looked pretty close to an anarcho-communist society. I thought it would give me experience in practicing what I preached, and also serve as a seed, or a base, for a global social evolution toward anarcho-communism. It turned out to be far less anarchist and far less communist than I had hoped for, and severely lacking in collectively held vision. To meet my own need for doing something meaningful with my life, I started puzzling out what it would take to start a better commune that actually would help change the world in some significant way.

The chief components would be land, people, and money. I decided that my move to Richmond, Virginia would take care of the money part. Instead of spending years raising funds for this thing, I could just work at a high-paying computer job, while living way below my means, and then I could just buy some land for my new commune out of my own pocket.

I couldn’t wait to get a job like My Very Busy Friend had in those days, where he got paid big bucks to resize images and make banner ads all day. But I did wait. I waited until the house was ready, and then I waited until I had worked myself out of labor debt with the commune. Then I took a week of free transition time the community gave me in which to pack and move. And on top of that, I thought that before getting entangled in my new life, I could use the move as an opportunity to go to the 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat in Massachusetts I had wanted to try for years.

But the last laugh would be on me. In the mediation hall, as I sat around as the world went by, the dot-com balloon began to deflate. Web designer/developer jobs did not all evaporate at once, but new hiring virtually stopped.

I didn’t know this yet. Though My Very Busy Friend offered to car pool with me to work in his car, my mother insisted that I had to have my own vehicle. She gave me her old car, a maroon 1990 Cadillac Eldorado, on the condition that I pay her $5000 for it when I could afford it. For other people, owning a Cadillac is a symbol of success, but with my politics, it was a real sore embarrassment. I put a sticker on the back, which read, “Practice organized resistance and conscious acts of solidarity,” and felt a little better. But as a means to an end, I thought it was necessary to have a car to commute to my high-paying computer job, which might be a long distance away, as My Very Busy Friend’s job was. A free car was the right price for me.

My whole “manhood” trip lost all its momentum during my mediation retreat. I had gone there with great gusto, expecting to struggle valiantly, and return victorious. Instead, my attachments were great, my concentration was paltry, and I returned feeling tired, beaten, weak, and resentful. I had devolved all the way back to meek again, and I had to rebuild my self-confidence from scratch.

I started out less-than-aggressively looking for employment as a designer/developer. I took some time out to sort through all the papers I had collected over the years. I looked a little more aggressively. I nearly singlehandedly insulated our garage with fiberglass, to help turn it into a recording studio and practice space for our anarchist industrial band. I got a few teases from companies that said they might want me, but no jobs materialized. I got a little ad hoc paid web design work from a kid who used to live at the commune and was by then a professional musician. No real job was on the horizon. My money was running out, and I was starting to get desperate.

I flipped open the want ads in the newspaper. “Who will pay me to do anything, anything at all?” was my question. I got hired at Pier 1 Imports, which I thought was pretty funny since I used to be in charge of shipping hammocks to the Pier 1 chain when I lived at Twin Oaks, and they used to mail me checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which I’d go deposit in the community’s bank account. The job was to be in a new store that was opening, but they kept postponing the opening due to construction delays. I couldn’t wait, so I applied to and got hired at the Hollywood Video down the street.

Hollywood Video is a movie rental chain, second in size only to Blockbuster. I donned my new uniform of black pants and a blue denim shirt and went to work. My tasks were running the cash register and reshelving videocassettes, and strangely, I loved it. I felt shitty having a huge corporation as my employer, but I dug the simplicity of my job. I enjoyed helping people find stuff. I tried to get as fast as I could at the register, to meet my need for achievement, my need to contribute to the ease of the customers, and my need to get acceptance from my coworkers. I succeeded at getting fast at the register. I was able to do my job reasonably well. And when I wished customers a good evening, I really meant it, deeply, and that made me feel so warm inside.

In a grand stroke of irony, I drove to my minimum wage, zero-prestige job in a Cadillac.

This was the first time I ever supported myself. I suppose I had supported myself by working at the commune, but this was the first time I was my own sole provider, the regular way, through wages. I thought it strange how liberating it felt to me to be compensated for my labor, with monetary resources I could direct as I alone wished. At age 28, it was a novelty to be thus empowered.

I only meant the video store gag to be temporary. I intended to continue looking for high-paying computer work during my off-hours, but I was too distracted and disorganized to be effective at that. I thought I’d be able to focus better on my job search if I were doing it full time, so I switched to full time at the video store and saved up money, and then I took a couple of months off. I resolved to improve my employability by learning Java, Flash, and XML. But during that time, I still did very little actual job searching, and I only made it halfway through my book on XML.

What was I doing wrong? I was making time for my friends and my band and political stuff, but that still should have left plenty of time to learn job skills and look for jobs. After all, I was making a point not to goof off. I had given up internet chat, I passed up most opportunities to watch movies, and I didn’t do any reading for pleasure. Still, the days went by in the blink of an eye.

Much later, a friend suggested that my single-minded self-denial was causing the part of me that I was denying to sabotage my other efforts. She advised I take some time each day to do some pleasure reading, or something else nonproductive I enjoy. This was one of the best tips I ever received. I started just living my life more, instead of constantly evaluating my progress. My knots began to untie themselves.

My Very Busy Friend talked me into moving thousands of miles to Eugene, Oregon. He enticed me with a package deal: we keep doing our band, we move into the co-op house where his girlfriend lives, and we earn our living by starting a business making diesel fuel out of used vegetable oil. I went hog wild with this idea, dubbing our future company Vegaco, and imagining it could be one branch of an enormous multifaceted worker-owned nonprofit organization that would bring society closer to my cooperative, sustainable, anarchist ideal.

With these collective ventures in mind, My Very Busy Friend and I merged our finances to make our bookkeeping and planning simpler. We worked together to sell his house. I went back to work full time at the video store. By the time I left Richmond, I had worked at the video store for 11 months.

Once in Eugene, I didn’t like the co-op, so I moved out after 3 weeks. Our band broke up. My Very Busy Friend and I decided that we were both too flaky to effectively pull off being industrial entrepreneurs, especially given that there were already 3 companies in the area making biodiesel, so we scrapped that idea and stopped sharing money. As a severance package, My Very Busy Friend gave me a sum of money larger than I had ever had in my name previously.

In Eugene, I canvassed for the Sierra Club for as long as I could stand it. Hydrogen Man hired me for a few odd jobs. I applied at a Hollywood Video down the street, and they hired me, only to rescind the offer later due to a change in management. When they told me this, they happened to be playing a video of Tom Petty singing, “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. I took it as a sign. I was glad. The video store gag would have been too pleasant, too easy to stay in a rut that never challenged the range of my capabilities. I would have stagnated there, as I did in Richmond, too lazy to seek something better.

I took a trip with Ishtar to the national Rainbow Gathering, because I heard it was the largest de facto anarcho-communist group in the industrialized world, albeit a temporary festival. I brought with me a book called Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. Jist of book: get a job that pays you the highest possible dollar-per-hour, taking into account all the time and money it takes you to maintain that job. Then, reduce your cost of living by paring down to the essentials that bring you the most satisfaction. Save as much as you can, and use those savings to buy United States Treasury Bonds. Buy more and more T-Bills until the interest is enough to entirely support your cost of living. When you reach that point, retire, and spend the rest of your life doing what you really want.

All would have been fine if I had just stopped there, but I was simultaneously reading a very different book, Evasion, published by CrimethInc. Jist of book: set yourself free here and now by dumpster-diving for food, squatting for shelter, freight-train-hopping for transportation, and shoplifting and store-scamming for food and money. Never work, because life is too precious to waste it that way. We live in an incredibly overabundant society, so if you can but open your eyes to the opportunities right under your nose (instead of mindlessly acting according to what your socialization has trained you to assume), the world will be your oyster.

Returning to Oregon, my mind was in upheaval. I wanted to break out of the fetid system of wage slavery right away if possible, but I wasn’t willing to live a life of duplicity, dodging store security, wondering if my home would be reclaimed by its absentee owner, and hoping my food wasn’t contaminated. I really enjoy having my own computer with an internet connection, and being the legal resident of a home is the most convenient way I know of to make that happen.

At the same time, the thought of completely passive residual income really appealed to me, but I wasn’t about to take Vicki’s advice and loan my money to the Federal Government to fund their Wars of Petroleum Conquest. I’d also feel pretty ignoble owning a piece of the National Debt. Plus, the years I’d have to spend working for wages sounded simply dreadful. The capital necessary to sustain a lifestyle under the poverty line would be between 100,000 and 200,000 dollars. At minimum wage, it would take me 8-16 years to save that up. If I had no expenses. That was too much of my life to spend making profit for someone else. I was not confident I could get hired at something that paid better or was more meaningful, based on my track record so far.

I wanted something where my money could make money for me without much work involved, something where the turnaround was much faster than bonds. I remembered a year back when I had consigned some books to an anarchist bookstore. I never made money with that because the store went out of business and never paid me, but at least they had the consideration to ship my remaining books back to me. The point was, I could have made a profit that way. And now I happened to live in what I half-jokingly referred to as, “The Anarchist Capitol of the World”. The wheels in my mind started turning.

Wondering what to do with my life, I spent a lot of time that June and July out on my front porch reading. I happened to live in a neighborhood that was zoned for both residential and commercial purposes. I put two and two together. I could start my own anarchist bookstore right there on the front porch, and make money while sitting there and reading. Although by that time I was pretty disgusted with the shortcomings of the anarchist milieu (I wanted to go in more promising directions, such as integrating anarchism with Nonviolent Communication), I still knew a bunch about it, and thought maybe I could cash in on my expertise. I knew my Emma Goldman from my Mikhail Bakunin, and my anarcho-syndicalism from my anarcho-primitivism. I understood this market, and I could sell them what they wanted to buy. I felt a little guilty for feeling so cynical about the project, and feeling so above my clientele, but I wasn’t above making a buck.

This also gave me the opportunity to unload the large number of anarchist books and zines I had in my possession. As I realized how irrelevant anarchists were to the world, I concluded it was irrelevant to continue owning these anarchist books. I ordered a few hundred dollars of new books to round out my collection.

Knowing ahead of time that any new business venture is risky, I decided to simultaneously start a vastly different venture: canvassing to raise funds for the A*merican Hy*drogen A*ssociation’s N*orthwest C*hapter. I put together a whole canvassing program from scratch, and even trained a few others to do it with me. It was a cause I believed in a lot more than the Sierra Club, and I took a smaller percentage for myself, to also meet my need for integrity.

I figured I had all my bases covered. One job where I would go to the people and beg for money, and another where the people would come to me and beg me to let them have their money. At least one of these had to work, right?

Both did bring in money, but not nearly enough to live on. Running the bookstore took nearly all the fun out of sitting on the porch and reading. I grew expectant every time people walked by on the sidewalk, hoping they were customers. This became very distracting. And I tried not to go inside for any reason, lest someone steal my unguarded wares. The canvassing felt good (when I could ignore the rejection) but it took more willpower than I usually had to get out of the house and go beat the streets in the heat. Also, by closing the store at 3pm with the intention of canvassing from 4-9pm, I was probably missing prime shopping hours.

Money was running low, so I chose to shut down the bookstore, stop canvassing, and start looking for a real job. I would have had to close the bookstore anyway, since Hydrogen Man had decided to renovate the house I was living in, and evict me and his other tenants so he could do so. I needed to find a new home by September 1st.

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