Doing Time On Planet America – July 8, 2001
by Bing Futch
Work’s not easy to get, not for a freak like me: living the Bohemian lifestyle since 1997. Life is a collection of freelance jobs and scattered pockets of stupid luck for this former professional couch surfer.
It took something like thirty years to realize that the seed had gone bad, something fell into the mix and ruined it. I sought order, calm and resolve. Then I plucked myself out of that mixture of goop that was this modern life, this merry-go-round from hell that we’re all born to ride, and I went underground.
It was a delicious adventure.
So, you’re born, but you’re not asked. Isn’t that a cosmic bummer? I mean, seriously – I don’t pretend to turn this into a Choice Vs. Life issue, but I would hazard a guess that if a good number of approaching kids got a sneak preview of life on earth, they’d hit “reverse” quicker than a two dollar fuck. Hell, I would’ve preferred life as an unborn innocent so as not to have tasted the seed of Eve’s fruit, sharing in her (and our) eternal damnation: doomed to knowledge. Everyone acquires knowledge, varying degrees of intensity, to be sure. It all adds up. Steadily, over the years. And even if we seem to have forgotten it, there’s glimmers and ghosts in the jelly of your head, once you learn it – it sticks. Like a fly on paper, impressionable us. Feigned ignorance be not proud, it sticks. You live, you learn, it sticks. No reverse. No erase. It sticks. And it sticks you in your beloved eye and suddenly, they’re calling you “Dr. Cyclops” and you wonder why it hurts so much. You’ve just lost an eye for Christ’s sake, of course it hurts.
I told myself I was going to quit smoking. Then myself told me “fuck you!” and I lit up another cigarette.
Edgar Allan Poe often spoke of “The Spirit Of Perversion”, some inate desire for self-punishment in the souls of men. Masochistic from birth, prone to fits and tantrums that involve beating of the self with ones own limbs, incurring black eyes in the night.
So you’re born and given a number that will track you for the rest of your life on Planet America. It’s your duty then to learn to adjust to the move, speak the local language, adhere to their customs and endure 12 years of gruelingly underfunded public schooling before getting your first job and then you start paying taxes, your rent for taking up space in the system. There in the workplace you’ll stay until enough blood to oil the machinery has been wrung from your overworked and underappreciated back until you’re allowed to do, at 65 or thereabouts, what much more devious personalities like myself have been doing for years.
Doesn’t that piss you off?
Well, it pisses me off, if it makes you feel any better. And if it makes you feel any better as well, I’m still riding the same damn merry-go-round. Only you’ve got a horse. I’m playing stowaway in the upper workings, trying my damndest not to get gored by one of those shiny poles. I get a lot of resentment from some folks who discredit my job description as an “artist.” One guy, a high-powered lawyer, replied with “Artist? You mean ‘unemployed’.” That’s an age-old joke, and since comedy is usually just the truth illuminated, then Steve Martin had it nailed. Comedy is not pretty. Neither is my financial situation these days. Dear reader, I will tell you something what; this whole multimedia tsunami, I was on the first wave.
Back when America Online was just beginning to threaten the long-standing Prodigy Service, I was a producer for the little online company that could. For years, Prodigy had been the nation’s leading online service, introducing the concept of bulletin boards and e-mail to millions of unsuspecting users. On July 22nd, 1994 – I purchased a PC, signed up to Prodigy and immediately began looking for a way to make money. My job at the Dulcimer shop at Disney’s Village Marketplace was an alright enough way to make a living, but I knew this cool new form of telecommunication would somehow be an indispensable aid in the grabbing of coin.
I was not mistaken.
It didn’t take long to get official status with Prodigy, serving as moderator for the Starving Artist Cafe – part of the glitzy, splashy roll-out of the services new “Special Interest Groups” web pages. The World Wide Web was in its infancy as was HTML back in 1994 but in two years time, the web made a quantum leap forward. Right place, right time, Bing. $500 a month to maintain the site, nurture members into community, post in the newsgroups, seek out new links. At one point, the company invited all of the moderators (I also moderated the Disney Fans BB for a brief time) out to their headquarters in White Plains, New York. They put us up at an elegant converted tobacco plantation in Tarrytown, conducted seminars on building communities and the latest cutting-edge web tools, then threw a huge, balls–out multimedia party at the Dot.com Gallery in SoHo on Academy Awards night. Lots of money spent. Walking around the Prodigy offices, I was impressed by the sheer amount of manpower that was involved.
Employees bustled about, crammed into cubicles, studying ideas behind huge, glassed-in, centrally located conference rooms. Pretty damned impressive, if you ask me, and you weren’t there so you’ll have to take my word for it. Not long after that, the company announced the creation of a new platform and brand, Prodigy Internet, and slowly began phasing out their old stand-by, re-named Prodigy Classic. It was a huge move, projected to be a direct threat to the AOL giant and the moderators were paid handsomely for their involvement. Between the new Starving Artist Cafe and the one still active on Prodigy Classic, I was clearing $2,000 a month.
I had a three bedroom house (with a basement!) on Mills Avenue near downtown Orlando, insurance and upkeep on my ‘91 Geo Metro convertible, two credit cards, major utility bills, big-ass child support payment and the usual food and fun expenses. To make extra money, I was throwing pot parties at the house once a month for a friend. One day he told me that at one of the other houses he worked through, while all the others were asleep, he was robbed at gunpoint by someone who had bought from him at a previous party. I believe there were no further gatherings at the Mills house.
Somewhere down the road, Prodigy switched CEO’s in a violent move that saw major headline-grabbing job cuts across the board. Moderators were given the chance to continue on a volunteer basis, compensated only in a free account. Perhaps thinking that it was too much work for free, many moderators simply pulled the plug and bowed out. For me, it was a time issue. I had discovered and enjoyed the liberty of working from home: telecommuting. This internet thing had really opened up some doors for my particular profession and there was a market for lazy, attention-deficient, Peter Pan syndrome types like myself in this brave new world of fiber optics. I got rid of the house, parked the car, moved in with a girlfriend and started working on my masterpiece. See ya world! It was fun, but I’m taking a completely different path, a bold, strange path. Only the wierd are truly remembered, only the truly insane can know.
Like plowing against a surging, pulsing field of lemmings, my social walkabout led me here. Here, back where I started. Back on the merry-go-round from hell, but leering at the spinning ground in total denial. I love my kids, I wish I were a better dad, I love my wife, we fight a lot, I love my band, we play once a month. I love my friends, they do too much. I love my jobs, when I can get them, I love my art, it is my Salvation. I love my self, I am not a waste of DNA, I love my God, He is my Hope. I am not a slave to the system, I am not a cog in the wheel, I am a piece of the puzzle, I am not a slave to the system. Go ahead and say it, those of ye with numbers stamped on your heels. Born American, Naturalized American, got a green card? Does The Man know where you live, where you work, who you fuck? You see that man on the street, in the gutter, with his dirty face and greasy clothes, drinking something in a grimy brown bag and muttering to himself. You know what he’s not saying? “I wonder if that check cleared.” Sittin’ on the cold, hard ground, lighting up a cigarette and looking at you driving by. A level gaze, meets yours, tears into your soul, doesn’t look away, makes you crane your head and get a crick to see him. Goes back to drinking like, “what?” What’s so odd about that? The guys out there on Orange Avenue who do everything from magic tricks to softshoe for some liquor money, or maybe crack. Victims of a poor education? I think not – there are some people out there who used to be somebody else. At some point, they took a completely different road.
If you wanted to. If you decided that life wasn’t Middle Ages enough for you, you couldn’t attempt a simpler, quieter life unless you went Nature Boy and macked on locusts and wild honey in some natural park. The days of claim-staking and share-cropping are sadly over. They have faded from the soil of our society except for a handful of purists, maybe a few Luddites, who saw the taking of the American dream and decided to hold onto their pure slice. As for the rest of us; we’re born, we’re enslaved to the machinery that makes Planet America vibrate and hum, and then we’re allowed to coast and rest our weary bones with no real secure promises about our so-called “social security.”
The word “expatriate” springs to mind.
