A Fool & his Accordeon are Soon Joined

Poor and confused make a good description of us and most of our friends. Not just the artists anymore. Been helping homeowners in their mid-forties apply for food stamps. Margo’s friend is getting ready to turn off all her utilities and move into Margo’s ‘cause she can barely make the mortgage. Just had a family staying with us for a week - Honey’s friend from Argentina and her first generation Serbian husband and their two kids. Parked their motor home in the driveway before moving on toward Miami. He said half the people he met in the RV parks are out of work contractors who consolidated into their motor homes. None of us are really worried. Maybe a little. Should we be? Frustrated. Is this how most of the First World feels? The Third World are probably too long poor to even be confused. They know the drill. For a struggling artist it’s business as usual.

None of your time is your own. You have to steal it from your art. Or maybe you steal creative time from your life. It seems like twenty percent of the houses in this neighborhood are abandoned, or at least empty. Maybe fifty percent owner occupied, which means sixty percent of the residents could give a fuck. The Asians and old people are planting, or taking sprouts from their greenhouses. Today’ll be a good day to put some seeds in the ground. Push yourself. Make it happen. Picking a salad is the shit! You don’t even need to rinse ‘cause you know where it’s been. Little dirt’s good for you. Minerals. Seriously.

Got on the phone a few weeks ago and cold-called the first hundred people in the yellow pages to drum up some website work. Two or three leads coming along slowly, nothing to fruition yet though. Got a new credit card just before Christmas when the septic system gave out and we needed to dig a new drain field. Eighteen months interest-free. Transferred the balance off one of the other cards in the process, but we’re taking advances every month to pay the bills. Living on borrowed time again. Health is wealth. Canceled the Spring tour plans for Mad haPPy so we can focus on making some loot, as well as musical development and grant writing for the musical. Joys of Armageddon. Found like twenty potential sources, but the thing is it’s time consuming, really competitive, and may all come to nothing. But that’s negative thinking, isn’t it? Without Faith this hopelessly ambitious endeavor would’ve died out years ago. Hope - the mixed blessing.

So after ten-years of touring with Mad haPPy, being forty-one and thirty-two years old with a child, on welfare and with no likely career prospects we realized we need to make a change. So we bought an accordeon.

30/01/2011