EXAMPLE!

A while back I was reading something online about how it costs more than a penny to mint a penny. Of course everybody thinks, “WELL WHY DO THEY KEEP MAKING THEM?!” but the article went on to explain that the value of a penny to the government is not one cent, but rather its ability to participate in bazillions of transactions over its lifetime. I read a detailed explanation of how exactly a penny generates wealth several times the value of the penny itself, and was satisfied that clearly this means something to somebody somewhere and therefore it makes sense to continue making pennies. Then my brain does an amazing thing. It throws out all that useless shit, and I’m left with a simple distilled fact in my head: It costs more than a penny to make a penny, but don’t worry about it; it’s totally cool for some reason.

Tonight, just before I was meaning to go to bed, I saw this same discussion crop up elsewhere on the internet. My brain kicked in and, so that I might contribute to the discussion, tried to retrieve the information it once held for a few minutes about how a penny generates wealth. This process takes only a split second, and my brain returns the “don’t give a shit” function.

The benefits are many: I have more space in my brain for useful things like Mortal Kombat II moves I can’t seem to forget, the lyrics to the commercial for Skip-It/the opening theme of Duck Tales, and the first two numbers of my bank account, as well as the last three. It also saved me from engaging in a conversation about the minting of pennies so that I could more quickly move onto the next interesting thing online, which was probably a picture of a cat, or a video of somebody getting really hurt.

I’m tired as hell after Adam’s birthday BBQ, Kyle invites me out to the bar. Fuck it. I’ll go have some drinks.

I’m a little tipsy and browsing WordPress themes for whatever reason and find one I like. Fuck it. Let’s install it.

It’ll probably break some formatting and functionality on my blog? Fuck it. I like it.

I took some pictures tonight and I’m actually happy with them for the first time in a long time, when I’m normally EXTREMELY critical of everything I shoot? Fuck it. I was shooting high ISO and they’re noisy? Fuck it. Let’s put em online.

So far I like where this is going.

This has been sitting in my “drafts” folder since November of last year. It’s complete, so I don’t know why I never published it. Here ya go.

Nina and I made a rare appearance outside the apartment this evening on a trek to go buy a baguette, some cheese, and a six pack of beer. Because we’re aristocrats. While waiting at the Eternal Don’t Crosswalk, we were approached by two homeless guys, which surprised me, because over seven seconds had passed since we left the door. The guy slapped me on the shoulder and said “Hey brotha! Where do you get a pretty girl like that?” I laughed, and he provided me with a punchline: “A Lamborghini? A Ferrari?” “Yeah,” I said, “a Lamborghini.”

“Awww, I knew it! A Lam! What color’s your Lam?”
“Yellow. A yellow Lamborghini gets you girls like this.”
“Hahahaha, alright man, that’s the color I’ma get next time! Hey, hey, I gotta question for ya.”
“Sure.”
“Seven pigeons sittin on a fence. Three of em fly away. How many left?”
“Uhhh four?”
“Naw naw naw. I’ll ask ya again. Seven pigeons sittin on a fence. Three fly away. How many left?”
“…what? Four?”
“Okay okay okay, one more time. Seven pigeons sittin on a fence. Three fly away. How many LEFT?”
“Ohhhhh okay okay, haha. ‘Three left.’ Three left!” (Get it? I’m a shit because I assume black guys don’t use third person verbs!)
“I knew you’d get me, brotha, we on the same channel. Hey listen, me and my buddy here are down on our luck…”

So this is how these things always start. I’ve had some seriously funny conversations with homeless folk out here, whether or not it’s actual personality or just a perfectly polished “charm a buck out of em” script, and I always feel like an ass not coughing up some change for the effort. I mean, the guy had me laughing, right? Do I really need whatever change is in my pocket? The problem, of course, is you have this same interaction 15 times if you walk three blocks in this town, so you learn to just ignore them and/or not carry change. This guy clearly knows to hang out at the Eternal Don’t Crosswalk, however, because A: people are trapped and B: the liquor store’s just up the hill.

I honestly felt bad. If I had a little change, I’d have given it to him. So here’s what I normally do when I really want to show a guy we’re in the same boat: I’ll pull out my wallet and laugh about it and say something like “Man, I carry less cash than you!” It gets a laugh, you’ll get a “Take it easy, brother.” or a “God bless ya.” and you part ways. I really wanted to show this guy I wasn’t an ass, so I whipped my wallet out, and started to fire out a line. “Man, if I carried cash, I’d really help ya out, but I don’t have a…” I cut myself off right when I saw it. There was a bill in my wallet.

I HATE cash. HATE. Cash. I never carry cash. Ever. I don’t like the stuff. It’s annoying, if you carry more than a little it’s cumbersome, it gets broken into useless denominations and ends up on the car floor or in the couch, and it’s covered in coke and feces. I NEVER carry cash. And there was a goddamn bill in my wallet. I called my own bluff, so I have to follow through at this point. I grab it, thinking it’s a single, and, with genuine surprise, hand it to him like “Well whaddya know?”

It’s a GODDAMN FIVE. Seriously, no idea how a five got in my wallet. It’s probably been in there for six months. I don’t even use that pocket on my wallet. Sometimes receipts get stuffed in there, but never cash. I DON’T CARRY CASH. Fuck. So my dilemma is growing more and more dilemmated; he’s seen I have a bill when I’ve just said I didn’t have bills, I’ve already conceded and pulled the bill out to give it to him, and finally, realized it’s a five when it’s about halfway to his hand. That’s the point of no return. I can’t go “Oooh, you know? Nevermind.” or “Can you break this?” Fuck.

I handed him the five (though there was juuuust a slight moment of hesitation in which both of us had pinched a corner of the bill and I wasn’t quite prepared to release it), he said “Hey, thanks a lot.” and left. I just gave him a five for a couple shitty jokes! It’d be one thing if the gratitude was genuine, but he was like a salesman that’s penned the deal and turns off the schmooze. He had my money, turned for the liquor store, and I sat dumbfounded for a second. Nina, of course, didn’t really know the whole thought process I’ve detailed here, and just saw me hand a dude a five when just last week we got slapped with $3000 in hospital bills. This guy’s headed up the street for a pint with MY down payment on my Lamborghini, and I’m the schmuck that has to get up tomorrow to earn that five bucks back, most likely so it can get put on my credit card, since that five bucks was actually spent a year and a half ago. I spent the next couple minutes trying to convince myself that I felt good about helping the guy out, but I mean I watched him turn and beeline for the liquor store. The warm, fuzzy feeling wasn’t really coming, but I bought his for him. Whatever!

So the moral of the story is never leave the apartment. And if you do, don’t have a girlfriend.

Special Edition Bonus Material: I was thinking of this today because I was woken this morning by a man screaming at a “fucking hooker” for “stealing [his] identity!!!” While I imagine she snagged his credit card after a blowjob, it sure would be a lot more interesting if he had just gotten out of prison after serving the 15 years for the crime for which she had framed him, before assuming his name and living his life in order to escape her abusive pimp. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a screenplay to write.

As for my 365 project, I really wanted to stick with it, I really did, but I’d been doing a lot of thinking about photography and creativity and blah blah, and decided that the project wasn’t really having its intended effect. First of all, the number one rule in photography (for me, anyway, but something that would help a lot of photographers) is shoot more, show less. I was shooting every day with the 365 project, sure, and that’s great for my photography, but UPLOADING something every day — whether or not it’s worth looking at — breaks my only rule. If I don’t think a photograph is good, I don’t fucking show it to people, it’s that simple. I shot around 170 photos for it but I like only a handful. The world’s best photographers shoot thousands of duds, they just know better than to show the world. I didn’t feel like shooting a couple days ago, I knew that if I forced myself AGAIN I would only produce a shitty photo, and I decided right then “Alright, this is clearly not a healthy exercise.” I actually left my camera in its bag for three or four days, something I haven’t done for as long as I can remember.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety lately, and creating an environment in which I’m feeling anxious or apprehensive about one of the few things I still enjoy doing can’t be good. I want to carry my camera with me because I like taking photos, not because I need to get a photo I’m not embarrassed of every single day. Overall, the last several months of daily shooting has probably made me a better photographer, but the consistency of the output definitely made me feel like a shittier photographer. It’d have been better, I think, to shoot every day, but only upload if I thought the picture was worth showing. I don’t know why I feel the need to put things inside a framework of rules. What I should be doing is shooting as much as I possibly can and posting when I think I’ve shot a zinger. Simple as that. Christ. It feels good to pick up my camera again without that pressure to necessarily produce something to put online.

On the blog blog, I’ve been doing some house cleaning lately. As I go through my old posts, I’ve noticed they fall into basically four camps:
Blogging for the sake of blogging, or shit nobody cares about – Early on, this comprised a lot of my posting. “Today I installed ____ on my computer.” There’s a lot of that shit.
Intimately personal stuff that most likely doesn’t need to be public – I’m not a private guy, or I’d probably just stay off the internet completely, but I’ve documented a lot of stuff that didn’t need to be publicly documented, particularly when other parties are involved. How I dealt with the car wreck that left my best friend a vegetable, how I dealt with the dissolution of my first real relationship, that brief but dark period after that dissolution, lengthy diatribes about my complete inability to cope with basically anything, it’s all here, and while I’m glad I had the outlet, I’d rather keep a lot of that to myself.
Attitudes from which I would like to divorce myself – I am an atheist. I have been for most of my life, and, as I cannot possibly imagine what it would take to change my mind, I will be until the day I die. But I started this blog at the very beginning of my militant atheist phase, a phase that lasted several years, and of which I am now deeply embarrassed. It’s easy to pervert something like an atheistic worldview into a quick, cheap way to feel superior to 90% of the people around you. Secondly, I’ve always considered myself pretty progressive, but having moved nearly three years ago from a blood red state to a bastion of progressivism, I can honestly say I cannot fucking stand progressives. I moved from an area full of undereducated conservative blowhards to an area full of overeducated tools. You can’t win with this shit! I’ve realized it’s so much easier to just laugh all this stuff off; it’s all a fucking joke anyway. As a result, the “religion/politics” category on my blog holds nothing of value to me anymore. If most of my older posts are “shit nobody cares about”, religion/politics could be “shit I don’t care about.” On a lesser note, there is also a lot of my early photography from which I’d like to distance myself. Holy shit some of that stuff is god-awful.
Genuinely funny or interesting stuff – Unfortunately, these posts are few and far inbetween, but by privatizing all the bullshit, I think I’m condensing the blog into something much more entertaining to read. For example, I don’t know how many posts I had in 2005, but less than 20 are now available to the public. It’s the same as my photography concept; fewer, but better posts. In a couple weeks, I’ll probably be setting this one to private.

I’ve been doing a lot of streamlining in my life lately. It’s a slow process, but liberating. I don’t care much for computers anymore, and I’ve sold off all my bullshit (vintage computers, extra parts, yadda yadda). I don’t care much for video games anymore, and I’m selling off my entire collection. I’m keeping a couple systems for the occasions on which I do feel like gaming, but I have them modded, so I can download a game, play until I lose interest (normally an hour or so), and forget about it, with zero impact on my wallet. I’ve sold off most of my music equipment. Eventually, I hope my blog will reflect that simplicity. I’ve even considered migrating from WordPress to something more geared toward simplicity, like Posterous or Tumblr. Unfortunately, like my shooting, I also haven’t felt like writing much lately, so it’s not high on the list of priorities. But I did renew my domain, so I’m not giving up just yet.

As a result, I grow attached to certain pieces of clothing not because I particularly like them, or (god forbid) that I spent a fair amount of money on them, but because they’ve been with me for SO FUCKING LONG that getting rid of them is like parting with a good friend. But I have to be realistic here: my clothes are getting pretty gnarly, and some of them just need to be retired. And so, like the death of any good friend, I thought I’d say a few words here.

The Rise Against Shirt: My ex-girlfriend bought me this shirt in 2003 when Rise Against was touring in support of their second album (a show I had to miss because of work). I don’t really hold major label animosity toward Rise Against, although their last release definitely lost me. It was kinda cool having a relic from their Fat Wreck Chords days, but as I pointed out to Joel the last time we went skateboarding, this shirt is older than most of Rise Against’s fans.

The Weezer Shirt: This is the classic Slayer-style “Geektanic Weezmacht” shirt from 2003 or 2004. Weezer has had a few decent songs since, oh I dunno, NINETEEN NINETY SEVEN, but just because their first two albums are two of the greatest albums ever written doesn’t mean they get a free pass all the way into old age. I’ve decided I’m getting rid of this shirt specifically in response to Raditude, their latest album, which was so fucking monumentally awful I couldn’t even listen to it all the way through.

The Two Bad Religion Shirts: My classic “crossbuster” and “Suffer” shirts are also from around 2002 or 2003. Whereas I used to enjoy wearing the crossbuster just to get a rise out of people, I’ve since mellowed and no longer feel the need to be constantly engaged in endless debate over a fucking t-shirt. I love my Suffer shirt, but Nina sewed the armpits back together about 18 months ago, and now that they’ve re-opened, there just isn’t any armpit left to sew.

The Primus Shirt: I bought this shirt in 8th grade, I’m not kidding you. I’ll spare you the math: that was 15 years ago; the shirt is officially older than I was when I bought it. For years I’ve been thinking “Wow, I can’t believe this shirt is still holding up” but I’ve recently realized this is just denial, out of my desire to never have to go shopping for clothes. On the back, all the words to Pork Soda are written, and where the silkscreen meets the fabric has just completely dissolved. If it weren’t for a few key threads, the entire back of the shirt would be a perfect “all the words to Pork Soda” stencil. This shirt has survived high school, every relationship I’ve ever had, and every move I’ve ever made, which is something that cannot be said for any of my other physical possessions. It’s actually a little sad to see it go, but I can’t hold onto everything forever.

Rest in Peace, guys!

The Future: I finally bought a new hoodie a couple months back, because my Plan B hoodie, which for four years was my “new hoodie,” was completely falling apart. My real new hoodie is the only coat/jacket I own, and I like it that way. I bought two skateboarding shirts when I moved out to Portland, a Consolidated and a Thrasher shirt. They continue to be my “new” shirts, even though they’re approaching three years old, and the armpits are already starting to rip. I also bought a Beatles shirt around the same time, and it seems to be holding up fine. Those, along with a handful of “old” shirts, three pairs of jeans, and some socks and boxers, will now make up the entirety of my wardrobe. The simplicity of being poor is liberating, you should try it.