As you all may have noticed I have recently applied for and acquired what some people would consider relatively humble jobs – in comparison to the professions I have claimed in the last few years. Oddly enough, I am thrilled to death.

This has something to do with the fact that the previous “professions’ earn me approximately $1500 a year (I’m being generous – and giving gross, not net). This is equal to approximately what we require to live on for six weeks. (I could go three months on it if we were not making car payments). This is not a living. It isn’t even my half of our living.

The really sad part of it is, that this is the all time high after approximately six years of concentrated effort on my part.

At minimum wage, the new jobs will bring in about $1200 a month gross, or $18,000 a year for swabbing out toilets, washing dishes, and shoveling manure. Perhaps a bit more or less, I really can’t tell yet. In actual fact, we can live on that. It is over ten times what I have been making.

All the personal issues aside, I have to wonder about a society in which even “lowlifes” such as housekeepers and dishwashers earn more than creative people who put heart and soul into their work. Not that dishwashers and housekeepers don’t. (And don’t get me started on the whole thing about rankism here – I’m going there – don’t rush me)

Another thing that has had my mental gears spinning for several days is that I am deep down relieved and happy to be employed as a “bottom feeder” again, as opposed to having spent the last few years doing things I love – art, writing, and playing with web pages. Sure, part of that is because I will have a nice, steady income (and at the same time, my web income will continue to trickle in, too), and jobs that I perceive to be work that I will enjoy. I am also fond of eating regularly and knowing I will have a roof over my head. I do not like being dependant on someone else’s income to live. And ranching is also a long treasured dream.

It is a transition. And like all transitions – it has its difficulties. Aside from money worries, I’ve always got to take time to play with and rearrange my mental blocks. I am having a problem assimilating the rise in spirits that has occurred with changing my “career path”, such as it is.

When I was a child one of my dreams was to write and illustrate my own books. In spite of some very intense discouragement from the people who (in normal families) would have been my support system, I persisted in writing and drawing and with the advent of James and actual encouragement – learning to create websites as well. I still did not ever kid myself that I could make a living on my art and writing, until I was forced to by oddities of the Tulsa job market that caused me to become unemployed for the first time since I was ten years old.

Being me, I decided to make an opportunity of it to explore and live my dreams. If I couldn’t work for someone else, then I would work for myself.

I just tripped over the concept I’ve been looking for (this is one reason I like to write and journal – I eventually figure out what I’m talking about – LOL).

Disillusionment.

I am very disillusioned with everything surrounding creative people in our current society. (For the purposes of simplicity – for the rest of the article I am going to use the word “artist” – please assume it includes not only visual artists, but musicians, singers, songwriters, authors, poets, and all other creative people)

While groping around in conversation earlier I likened it to the way I felt about white-collar society when my mother was so intent on forcing me into working as an office drone. I found her and her associates fake, full of rankism (although I did not have that word for it at the time), full of pretense, prejudiced and convinced of their moral and social superiority simply because of their job titles – when in fact, I could earn more as a baker than as a secretary, and spend less on “costumery” to do the job – and in general, work with much nicer, or at least more straightforward, people.

The last few months here in TorC, “an artists community” has intensified in me an uneasiness about “artists”. I have reluctantly concluded that many people who refer to themselves as “artists” are frequently posers, full of pretense, rankism, prejudice, superiority complexes, cut throat ruthlessness and in addition, a good many of them have a generous dollop of pure ego.

The nicest and friendliest among the artists seem to attract the most viciously defensive and aggressive “fandom” (for lack of a better word) – maybe because those “fans” perceive them as needing protection.

I find many of the “real” artists to be – in my personal opinion – no more talented than many “unknown” artists I have met in my life. The idea that one has a higher talent or some sort of holy cause because they have majored in art and have a degree, as opposed to someone equally (or even more) talented who may have put their own ambitions aside in order to provide for their family or for some other worthy reason, such as a lack of support (someone has to pay for college) is simply ridiculous, to me.

The result - “artists” are no longer a group that I wish to be identified with.

This is a fairly significant change for me. But I would rather you think of me as a dishwasher, or a shit shoveler, and sneer than an “artist” and roll your eyes.

Earlier I mentioned that I find myself disillusioned with the process surrounding creative people in our society. There are four layers to this.

First. Creative work is not valued highly in our society. Many people seem to believe that they should have use of your creative work either free, or at a very low cost, and are dismayed or angry when you expect to be paid for your work. On the Internet, people will steal your writing, your art, and even entire website designs, without a second thought If you protest – you’re a real bitch.

Yet – if a business or person were to engage a commercial promotional company to design their product – they would undoubtedly pay a huge sum of money for a group of people to use clipart (or maybe actually pay their artists a pittance) for the design and feel they were proper business costs. Maybe even brag about how much they spent.

Creative people and their products – be it art, song, or stories – are not highly valued in this society until and unless they are properly “packaged” by commercial interests.

Which brings us to the second layer. The artists who do become popular, who do “succeed” – are not necessarily the best. They are only the best packaged. Sometimes they are the ones who play the game best, most ruthlessly, and are willing to pay any price for fame. Sometimes, they just have made the right connections (sucked the right dicks in my lower class street parlance). Sometimes they are just the one who can convince the “in” clique they are “the latest thing”. More personality than talent.

I have seen work that would blow your mind – by artists who have never had a single exhibition, or sold a single piece of work. I know musicians who have so much talent I don’t even have words to describe it – who spend their lives working as a bartender or machinist, their dreams slowly being crushed to nothing. What do they lack? The right connections – the right amount of ego – the support (financial and emotional) to focus on their work – and one more thing that I don’t quite have a word for. They have to be “in fashion” – they have to be what the commercial entities that control our society have decided you want to see and hear and read. Not what you decided you want to see, hear, and read – and not necessarily what the artist wants to paint, play, or write - but what the publishing company, the recording company, the gallery, the critics have decided you want. After all, they are the experts – just let them decide what is best. What is “marketable”.

(Shaking my head) and I sure don’t know what criteria those folks are using. Sure, now and then someone who really is talented slips through the cracks and makes it big. Their first act is usually to declare their freedom and give the spin-doctors the finger! (Sometimes it is their last act, too – as far as the public ever seeing them again)

Rankism pops up in the strangest places – and it is the third layer. A good many of the people who go about saying “I am an artist” do it with their nose so far up in the air that I wonder how they avoid falling over cracks in the sidewalk. They’ve had an exhibit here or there, they sold this or that, they have a degree from here or there, won this or the other juried contest. Often they consider themselves superior because they went to a certain school – some consider themselves superior because they didn’t (see “suffering artists/martyrs/angst”).

Speaking of martyrdom, around here there is a group prone to the “I slaved in the commercial grind for twenty years so I could save enough to declare my freedom and buy my own gallery to show my art” – yet another form of martyrdom. You know, a lot of us simply cannot pervert and twist our selves into what the commercial grind wants – we are what we are – why does that put either of us on some higher spiritual plane than the other? To further undo that rankism – wouldn’t the higher plane be for those of us who have “suffered for our art” – refused to bend to commercialism just to make a living? Which brings us to “starving artists”. I’d rather shovel shit than starve, quite frankly. Whatever gratification they get from needless suffering, I don’t get it and I don’t think they’re special because of it.

This kind of rankism comes with all the same nastiness that characterizes office politics. “The artsy fartsy crowd” is only a crowd from the outside. The factions and cliques make jr. high look like the proving ground it was. Too bad we didn’t all grow out of it.

The fourth layer I have touched briefly on as I went along here. But they deserve a layer to themselves – the commercial middlemen – from the monster publishers to the little nightclubs.

Perhaps you like old music enough to be aware of things such as how Little Richard and other early (especially black) songwriters and performers got totally screwed while the record companies made millions on their work. You probably think that no longer happens. You’re wrong.

For every superstar like Madonna or Britney Spears making millions there are hundreds, probably thousands, muddling along doing State Fairs and nightclubs (and in some milieus being told “Don’t play your original stuff, we don’t want that, just play 70s and 80s covers”) and being paid a pittance – or even performing just for tips. For every artist with a gallery showing in New York City there are thousands of us out here selling our original paintings on eBay for a few bucks, and glad to get it because the galleries won’t show our work. For every Stephen King or Laurel K. Hamilton there are thousands writing short stories, poems, and novels and selling them for ten bucks to buyers (who resell them at a big profit), or magazines, or giving their work away, or even paying to be published. Often on the Internet the publisher puts the story up, surrounds it with ads and says “thank you very much” and pockets whatever commission they get – and/or charges customers to subscribe to read the work, making a hundred times what they paid the author and acting like they did the author a favor.

I think one thing that particularly annoys me with this fourth layer of commercial entities is they decide who succeeds – not the public. (Mind you – the public allows this) They pay the artist a pittance – and then charge the public a small fortune for the CD, tickets, art prints and posters, or the hardback and paperback editions.

The flip side of that is the customer. I am a customer, too. I can’t even afford art unless you count mass produced posters – or saving the pictures off wall calendars. I might be able to buy a few CDs, but concert tickets are well out of my grasp, and if it weren’t for libraries, book exchanges, used bookstores, I probably just wouldn’t have anything to read. I don’t really blame people who steal when the prices are jacked up beyond what the majority of people can reasonably afford. At some point in time it seems like this whole ridiculous structure has to fall.

Meanwhile, I’m going to just go all Zen about it. I’m going to be the best dishwasher and amateur rancher I can. I’m sure I will go on writing and doing artwork and designing webpages – in my spare time for my own pleasure. But with no pretenses and no ambitions other than enjoying myself and maybe making a little trickle of extra income so that maybe when I retire I’ll still be able to buy cat food for the inevitable hoard of felines. I will thank the Goddess that I don’t have to make a living on my creative endeavors any more. I will hand over most of my creative work for free and hope that now and then someone clicks on an ad and makes a purchase – or someone pays me to put up an ad (being full of real content, my websites rank high in search engine results and people actually do contact me wanting to purchase ad space – wow).

I haven’t really decided what to do about the novels, won’t have time to work on them anyway – and won’t get Moving On back off contract until July. Maybe I’ll be able to afford to buy Adobe by then so I can make them available for download. Maybe I’ll break them into webpages and surround them with ads. Maybe I’ll blow them off. Finish them when I’m old and decrepit and leave them to some animal care society to get published and make a dime off if they can – LOL. Novels are an awful lot of work, to me, for next to no return.

Eh. No biggie. Been there, done that, ended up wearing rags and tatters of my self esteem. Unlike so many hopeful artists, I have had the opportunity to try and prove myself – to succeed in creative endeavors. In a small way, I have. I do appreciate that.

But I’ve also concluded I’d really rather be washing dishes or shoveling shit. Do my job, collect my check, and when I have time, play with some art supplies, websites, or write a bit. I’ll never be famous, but then, I don’t want fame or fortune.

Hmm, maybe that is the difference. It isn’t talent, but desire. And not desire to do what one loves, but the desire to be famous/recognized and rich. Hmmm…(goes off thinking again)

Blessedbe