Somewhere On The Cardboard Route
The 1990s
It is weird being retired; it has only been two
weeks now. If you count being in school,
that works out to be about 46 years of society to educate and regiment. The math on that works out to nineteen years
that I have lived a life outside of society’s hands. Authors, poets, artists, sorcerers are a dime
a dozen in this world. I have been
called those things and more. It was not
me who called me these things, although I went out to try those names on and a
whole lot more. Everybody needs a job
when you are just one of that dime. You
need to get money into those accounts somehow or cannot write the checks, pay
the credit card bill, or scrape up the cash for the next beer listening in to
the gossip circuit of some establishment or another.
Now
that I am retired, I am a hobbyist.
Sorcery, poems, commentary, and art are my hobbies. Whatever I do on the side is just a
hobby. If I cannot earn the pittance I
need to pay the rent now then I am no good at my hobbies.
I
have never been good at the sales, agenting, or publishing parts of my
hobbies. I was read a strange version of
Aesop’s grasshopper & ant fable. The
grasshopper was saved by the ants at the end.
The real world just does not seem to work like that. Not on command anyway. Usually when you command that kind of
behavior, it leads to the criminal.
I
have been learning about the magical box of digital enhancement ever since
libraries starting to develop online catalogs.
It has been interesting trying to keep my hand in after years of just
picking up the garbage.
Someday
I am going to be able to hire an I.T. person to manage the stabs in the dark of
staggering about as an aging infant.
The
lunge and riposte so far: Facebook JohnSmithiimxiii : johnsmithiimxiii.blogspot.com
: atotasolidwaste.wordpress. I think I even have a Twitter account under JohnSmithiimxiii. Maybe I will even figure out how to embed links soon.
My
next lunge will be Amazon self-publishing and getting poetry back into literary
magazines. I have not had anything in
print since 2000. Strange. Then I was kind of prideful about my name
being attached to the work. Now I just
want the work to stand up on its own.
That is why made an avatar.
The
great spider that is the universe needs to start knitting the structures
together. Retirement is weird.