For the last 20 years, since I left my good paying job as a "Hollywood" lighting technician, because of an injury, my life has been this crazy struggle, skipping along the bottom of society, struggling in and out of homelessness. When I mention that, or people see me and realize I'm homeless, they jump to all sorts of conclusions, nearly all of which aren't true.
I've now spent about 10 years in some form of homelessness. About 7 1/2 of those years, I was working full time, way beyond full time (70-100 hours a week as a taxi driver), or near full time. Here's the kicker, I don't do drugs, legal or illegal. I don't drink at all anymore. I'm not an alcoholic who went through a program to quit, I pretty much stopped drinking (which I didn't do much, anyhow) while working as a taxi driver. After driving drunks home every night in my cab, I just stopped drinking, I just got sick of the world attached to beer and booze.
I did struggle with depression, in a serious way, after my dad's death in 2012. That got serious, but I went through group therapy, took meds, worked through all that. I weaned myself off the depression meds a couple years ago, while a friend from group kept an eye on me in case I got sketchy.
My main issue, the thing I've struggled with most, was simply not being able to find a good paying job after taxi driving went down the tubes in about 2003. I struggled in the taxi until 2007, then had to quit for both health and business reasons. Like millions of other people in other industries, the taxi industry got disrupted by new technology. First computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios in the cabs, which changed the game, and then Uber and Lyft popped up. Boom! Business over. Like millions of people who lost factory jobs in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, I had to find a new way to make a living. And I have struggled with that.
During that same time period, there has been a ridiculous amount of outside pressure and influence on my life, from a variety of sources. I can't really tell the story of this, though it's been the dominant theme of my life for 17-18 years now, because it's so ridiculous. Finally part of the story came out, and all this weird stuff happened, supposedly, because I scored absurdly high on an I.Q. test 34 years ago. Someone, somewhere, decided they needed to control my life because of that. Supposedly. So I've struggled through nearly two decades of crazy adventures, busting my ass to simply survive, and I can't explain this whole mess to anyone. The story is just too fucking crazy. It would be more believable to more people if I said I got abducted by aliens in 2001, brought back ten years later, then dropped in the woods of Oregon where I lived with a Sasquatch family for a few years... and now I have to start over. That kind of crazy tale is actually more believable than what's actually happened in my life.
So I have 20 years of craziness I can't really talk about. Now I'm 53, homeless, living in the Hollywood area, with a mouthful of broken teeth (20 years of no dental insurance after a life of too much sugar), and working to rebuild my life and start a viable business around my Sharpie art and my writing.
What I do have in common with many of you reading this (hopefully), is that I'm working to build a creative/artistic based business, and make a living from that. What I don't have in common with most of you is my starting point. I started actually selling my Sharpie art, 4 years ago, while living with my mom, in a small North Carolina town, literally without a dime to my name. After applying for about 140 jobs over a year or so, and not getting called back, it became obvious a traditional job wasn't going to happen. So I decided to focus on my Sharpie art, which made me a few buck now and then.
I've sold over 80 major pieces of art in four years, nearly of all which took 35 to 45 hours to draw. So while most people look at me and see only a complete failure, I've actually sold more pieces of art than most of the best known masters of painting in their lifetimes. My drawings may suck, in your opinion, compared to the great artists, but 80+ people thought they were worth paying for. That's something. No I'm not making a "good living," at this, even after four years, but I have survived through some tough times, by selling artwork. However lame my life may seem, there are thousands of people out there who wish they had sold 80 pieces of original art. That's something. Yes, I have a long way to go, but I have made quite a bit of progress in some areas.
So now I'm dealing with a weird paradox, as I work to build my art/writing business in a new area, in the cliche' of all cliche's, Hollywood, California. On one hand, as a homeless man, struggling for food money, bus fare, and basic need money, day to day, my main focus is simply keeping my spirits up, and not getting deeply depressed. The struggle of homelessness is a struggle not to succumb to depression and give up. The hardcore street people you see in large cities have mostly given up. I've found the way to keep my spirits up while homeless is to give myself little "gifts." In my case, it's mostly food, I'll spend a little money on a caramel sundae at McDonald's, or buy a $6 pepperoni pizza at Little Caesar's. Little gifts to myself help me keep feeling like an actual human being, a person who will do cool stuff again, some day, not the "homeless person," most people see me as.
But as an entrepreneur, trying to start a small business, I need to spend as little money as possible, to put every dime I can into my little business, buy more art supplies, or copies of drawings to sell, or money to promote somehow. So my biggest struggle right now, is making small amounts of cash day to day, and to try not to eat too much, but to eat enough to keep my attitude positive, because I get really grumpy when I don't eat much.
We all have our struggles, the things we battling and struggling with right now. That's mine. What's yours? What's keeping you from the small business, or small creative business, you really want to have?
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