Joining the Dark Side

Well, the Bank Doesn’t Care if Your House Is Haunted is available as a lovely little DIY storybook which is printed and assembled here at home and bought through my Etsy shop…

and now it’s also available on motherflipping Amazon as an e-book.

That’s right, I’m continuing to join the 1990s. One day I may even live in this decade.

I remember when Amazon (Jeff Bezos) was only a bookseller.

And then Amazon moved on to selling movies and then it moved on to selling everything you can think of and now it doesn’t pay taxes and is arguably in charge of the world as we know it.

But Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage like how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak allegedly started Apple in Steve Jobs’s garage.

What is it with garages? Did these people not have living rooms or offices? They needed the smell of oil and the somewhat high ceiling of a garage to inspire their creativity?

Maybe your garage doesn’t smell like oil the way the garage my childhood home did.

In any case, apparently Wozniak feels the whole garage conception story is overblown:

“The garage is a bit of a myth. It’s overblown,” Wozniak told Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Thursday. “The garage represents us better than anything else, but we did no designs there. We would drive the finished products to the garage, make them work and then we’d drive them down to the store that paid us cash.”

He added: “There were hardly ever more than two people in the garage and mostly they were sitting around kind of doing nothing productive.” They quickly outgrew it, Woz said.

Huh.

Yeah, clearly they didn’t want to be working in the garage.

PROBLEM I WILL NEVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH: If I ever was successful enough writing and illustrating that it enabled me to pay rent and cover my medical costs I’d also resent people saying that this shitty apartment in its questionable neighborhood was in any way relevant to my success.

“Ah, but the desperation! Feeling ankle-deep in the spilled blood of the American dream… what could be more inspirational to a writer?”

😑

But don’t mind me. I woke up in a bad physical space which pushed me into a bad head space this morning.

A couple weeks ago I was recruited to be a writer for a local corporation and that felt like joining the dark side.

Delicious, in other words.

But, for whatever reason (plague pandemic), that hiring process came to a grinding halt after my first interview with the recruiter.

The recruiter doesn’t know why (plague pandemic).

So I guess I’m a little bummed about not joining the corporate rat race, and not making money engaging in qualitative research and producing writing content like I used to and not moving out of this apartment and neighborhood.

Therefore, in the meantime, I’ll do the next best thing and join Amazon.

Half-heartedly.

Went to the doctor again yesterday and she feels my asthma treatment is not working so she’s prescribing other things and…

back to the whole “enjoy free” plan:

Today I’m going to the Racine Beach with my other half to just breathe in the beauty of the world that goes on with or without us.

No words, no networking, no promoting, no selling, no searching for purpose or stressing about health and money and the present and future…

no.

Rather, just water and waves and sky and sand and the wind and homicidal Milwaukee area seagulls.

A nice change of pace.

Just what the doctor I haven’t recently seen ordered.

🖤