The Last Child Soul of Gaza to Value Your Opinion 2023. Oil on canvas, 24 x 21"
Hi Ecency and the Hive Machine,
I am 13 weeks into a year long project where I keep my income and expenses below the poverty line. I am back into crypto-social media because it is crazy that I ever disregarded it:) Over the next several days I will get readers up to speed on how it’s been going since I began accounting for every penny, and staying low so I don’t vicariously murder earthling flora and fauna with U.S. explosives. I wrote the following back in December:
We are disenfranchised. Voting at the federal level must cease because it does not matter, and we have to stop being idiots. I have faith that poverty will reign once again, like serfdom in the sixties. Just not with the present adults collecting pensions, or making enough hush money at their jobs to support a trillion dollar budget slated for bomb factories and military fascism. 61% of deaths from Israel’s cowardly aerial bombardment of Gaza are civilian. Deaths proportionately higher than all wars of the 20th century. Yup, including the World Wars. If you still feel the need (force) to pay taxes to a rogue government (U.S.) supporting a rogue government (Israel), then that is your/my problem because we refuse to become impoverished.
That is fear and quite understandable. We’re not heroes. Many of us can’t even bake a decent loaf of bread, let alone search and occupy free wifi hotspots. Furthermore, our ideas of poverty are often formed by what we see in depressed sections of cities where imagination has died from legislated annihilation—your tax dollars denying preventative health wisdom, guaranteed housing, employment and joy avenues, while covering the full retirement pension and prostate surgery for a three-star general killer of innocents.
Poverty can be very creative. In fact, it needs to be in order to thrive. One must become a full-time accountant, handy-person, butler, maid, beggar, dreamer, aristocrat of the spirit… It takes a lot of awake-time hours to avoid vicariously murdering children half a world away. Though it can be done. We were twenty- somethings not so long ago. Have we forgotten that a hand-to-mouth existence was doable? We were more open to love, more tolerant, more just. And poor! No insurance, no car payment, no mort(death)gage(pledge), no prospects actually, until they came under official contracts with endless caveats to obey.
One big contractual double-bind: We must work to eat and afford shelter, however our labor is pick-pocketed every payday by federal and state governments. A 1.5 trillion dollar portion of the people’s earnings are set aside for the federal government to, among other grotesquesly violent maintenances, allocate bunker-busting (school and hospital annihilating) bombs for Apartheid regimes, and corrupt state treasuries to fund governor junkets to racism.
I don’t like it one bit. I don’t want to be responsible for ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The only non-violent way I can think of, in order to free me of the burden of contributing to the massacre of Palestinians, is to get poor, and quickly. Israel is killing 160 kids a day, and they’re using U.S. shrapnel weaponry gifted from the White House and Congress to achieve their satanic goal.
So I’ve opted to figuratively divorce my wife until a ceasefire is intiated and the majority of Israeli, Hamas and U.S. governments stand in world judgement like Goebbels at the Hague. Rose (my wife) isn’t ready to live with a joint income under $19,000, which is the poverty line for couples not wanting to buy in the double-bind of taxes to support foreign ethnic-cleansings. However, I can begin to scrub my conscience clean while managing a single life earning under $15,000/year.
Here is where the creative living ideas need to come alive and thrive. Fortunately, I am a competent cook, so I won’t starve. Brown rice is a nutritious and affordable base for meals. Divorcée Rose has offered me a room in the garret and 20 square feet of studio space for $150 a month. But I’ll still need an income, and painting isn’t cutting it. Today I offer my services as handyman, landscaper, cake baker—whatever chore I am capable of, I will do for you for minimum wage, transportation time included (it might take a while to walk to your house). Under-the-table pay of course. Under the killing table. If I can live like a cheap monk, while simultaneously loving Rose to live how she feels she wants to, then I can at least pretend the killers aren’t extorting a dime from me. I’ll live below the poverty line, a $15,000 and under lifestyle. That’s $1,250 monthly. I won’t partake in the same benefits of money that Rose gets into. I’ll bring a flask to bars and fill up on dry cereal before sittng down with her at restaurants. I’ll make birthday gifts like I used to when nobody expected me to receive more than I could consume. I shall walk more than drive, yet account for every penny when I perform the latter. While figuratively divorced, I can charge Rose for certain tasks that lie outside normal nuptial responsibilities (such as replacing a furnace filter outside of the garret), or foregoing rice and lentil dinner to prepare Chateaubriand and capers in the salad at her (paid for) request.
How I will proceed:
• I have $1,000 saved from painting sales to use as start-up money for the single income.
• Get some under-the-table work.
• Continue to hawk paintings.
• Account for every penny earned and spent, a veritable Poor Ronnie’s Anti-Ethnic Cleansing Almanac.
• Ask Santa for a stainless steel flask.
It might be nigh impossible, but I’ll try with might and main. I just met with my pretend lawyer. Rose needs to sign some papers…
To All the Little Things Suffering the Sociopaths 2023. Acrylic on loose canvas, 21 x 26"