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Yesterday I received a paid subscription notice in my Substack notifications. Huzzah! Rare like truffles in Ohio, beagles on Mount Everest, magnanimity bred into a U.S. Senator—bringing a feeling of uncommon financial success. Payment for labor! Chopping wood for dinner. Coin for sustenance. Another day! It was a $50/year subscription, a $.98/week promise, a 14 cent-a-day sponsorship… And I’ve received three subscriptions in the past month.
“Ship, meet Mr. Come In.”
I do not jest. It is an incredible boost to my pride as an artist. I am not a monk, though I often use monkish means to make ends meet. In honor of my recent benefactors’ generosities (and several others who donate to the cause), I will share a piece of writing from my favorite tall-tale book, On Rainy Days the Monk Ryokan Feels Sorry for Himself, published in 2002 using a similar theme under parallel circumstances. How little of my perspective has changed in 23 years!
Also, any paid subscriber who wants a painting, just ask. You’ll have to cover shipping and handling, and handling ain’t no walk in the park. It’s a miserable chore, especially without the right packing materials. So I will charge what the market pays cashiers and dishwashers for their time. But the painting? Free as wind my fellows! Free as wind!
Please read on about making a nickel a day from creative effort.
“If one quarter of the American people are today living on a level of subsistence far below the norm, there remain nevertheless a hundred million who enjoy comforts and advantages unknown to men in any period of the past. What is to hinder them from revealing their talents? Or is it that our talents lie in other directions? Is it that the great goal of American manhood is to become the successful businessman? Or just a “success”, regardless of what form or shape, what purpose or significance, success manifests itself in and through? There’s no doubt in my mind that art comes last in the things in life which preoccupy us. The young man who shows signs of becoming an artist is looked upon as a crackpot, or else is a lazy, worthless encumbrance.”
—Henry Miller
I am excited that it’s Sunday. Rachelle comes today. School will start up again. We will bake sweet treats, and I can go back to normal thinking.
Yesterday lost in the dreamy haze of newborn glee, Marie, my mother and I talked about my idea to beg a simple living. First, let it be known, we are very happy people. The cold February, the unemployment, the very simple mornings and even simpler gray afternoons, have made baby Jane’s first week of life a post-womb bliss. This is happiness. It’s also very rare, and confounds my mother often to the point of distraction because she’s never known a couple to be so cheerful while in the wake of financial ruin.
Anyway, I feel good enough this week to talk to her about begging. Why not? Sponsorship has always been the artist’s plight. Why should I be ashamed to ask my fellow man for five cents a day? It’s the 21st century and the economy has never been so fat. Just a nickel a day. Five pennies. A dime to secure me for two days. If I could acquire say, forty donors spread out across the United States, perhaps other rich countries of the world... Forty people each sending me a nickel a day—then that would be enough incentive to quit the spam mail I send out to the non-existent addresses of disinterested Americans.
For two dollars a day I might even concentrate on creating something beautiful. Practically fourteen dollars a week will be enough to silence my criticism of everything that cost more than fourteen dollars a week. I could concentrate on beautiful writing, like something straight from Jean Giono’s mind, although not nearly as well-written (I know my limitations). Detailed descriptions of the countryside, brilliant colors of the sky, animals with strong limbs, a kind gesture from a human being. The money would help pay for two simple meals a day, arrangedby my own two hands of course, and an hour or two to walk about the town meditating on my next book. This I would do for five cents a day. It used to be two hundred a week. Now it is five cents a day. Of course I would gladly accept more. Generosity would not go unappreciated. I would dedicate the rest of my books written before death to the forty original sponsors of my plight.
A nickel a day. Thirty-five cents a week. What, do you expect me to live on less than that? After our afternoon inspirational, my mother sent me to the store for steaks. “Nice big juicy sirloins for Marie and me,” she said. Fine. And I didn’t even consider the cost, at least not until this morning, after the buerre rouge, the sauteéd mushrooms and pearl onions. The spicy black beans simmered in garlic and olive oil.Then I wondered about money. Why should it bother me that each steak costs five dollars and I’ve been planning the last few meals out of a pot of black beans? It’s her money. She earned it. Why does it matter that her son just spent an hour giving her a lecture on the virtues of begging, and that even the paltry sum of a nickel a day, thirty-five cents a week, $18.20 a year would keep the budding American artist not only humble to the very core, but deliriously happy because out there somewhere, is another contemporary as foolhardy as he. Why is it that she can give Price Chopper Supermarket a two dollar profit on the purchase of a steak, simply because they supplied the cut piece of cow, but that it breaks her heart to know her son seeks a five cent profit for his artistic endeavors? How can an artist’s own mother not sense his reoccurring frustration and outrage?
Because Ron Throop, you sniffling idiot! She can eat the bloody steak!
What are these illusions that in the morning are virtually non-existent, but by early evening drown one in violent whirlpools of confusion?
Where do I begin? You see, this morning I feel happy and free. The world is an infinite exploration. I awake with a blast of anticipation, excitement, belief, wonder, hope, joy, real strength of character. I can even have positive thoughts about begging. And unlike the evening, the thought stays true, and keeps itself clear without the illusion of other people’s feelings getting in the way. A current reality I am dreaming up is to attach a wooden box to the side of the house and cut a slit into the top. A collection box wanting for nickels. I imagine donors walking to the artist’s home, not for the artist’s sake necessarily, but to knock themselves out of agonizing routines. This morning I am certain that joy will come to the man delivering a nickel, whether it be to God, the hungry old woman, the Children’s Aid Society, or to yours truly.In bad weather the nickel donor can take up a staff and obtain an old sock to stuff his nickels in. Already his life has improved significantly. A walk across town on a nickel delivery might turn enough envious heads from inside their cars to really make a difference. “Hey, isn’t that Mr. Howard, the shop teacher? What is he doing walking through the snow? Why isn’t he in his car? Where can he be going?”
Mr. Howard finally came to his senses, picked up his dinner plate, and threw it against the wall. “Freida, where’s the coin jar?” he asked, and then wondered why he didn’t know where the coin jar was kept. From that realization he moved on to the next obvious one. He was near invisible to the people in his life. His loved ones saw right through him. Sure he kept his toothbrush in the holder beside the others, but the big question now was: Would they stop brushing their teeth if his toothbrush was gone? Sure, being a shop teacher earned him a mountain of nickels, but even that couldn’t keep Freida from thinking about her gorgeous foot doctor—the blonde, blue-eyed Adonis with the incredible hands. Son and daughter were touched by Dad once long ago, when he played football with them and Buster in the yard. They pitied him for putting on a show. Suzy was five, Tommy was six and Buster was the puppy Mr. Howard bought with a bag full of dirty nickels.
Now he takes another look at the home which he hath provided. “Why aren’t we begging for nickels?” he wonders. “Man, we all got it too easy. How is it possible to appreciate anything? And thoughts...! My God, what do they matter? Thoughts, dreams, they are nothing in a home overflowing with nickels. Why did I not see this before? I guess it’s okay to teach other people’s brats how to cut factory wood and tighten bolts, as long as my own brats say, ‘Thank you father,’ and ‘I love you father’. But they never do. And Freida puts that god-damned plate of food on the table every night. I don’t know, but she might have spread ten toxins on her body today to give it that shine. I wouldn’t stop to count because the days and nights are streaking by and I have nothing to show for life but a house stuffed chock full of nickels. When Suzy and Tommy open their mouths to speak, nickels pour out in a stream. Freida’s a walking sheet of noisy nickels. I got nickels falling out of drawers. Buster won’t take another treat for going outside. Now he hoards nickels in a pile by the garbage. This morning I was late for work. It took twenty minutes to clear the nickels off the driver’s seat. Since I heard about the man in town with a begging box, every turn I make confronts me with a wall of nickels. I never knew I had so much until the other guy made a complete ass of himself. Now I cannot will the nickels out of my mind. I have to rid my thoughts of every last nickel!”
So Mr. Howard takes up a staff. Yesterday it was a broken branch fallen after a west wind. Today it is a staff. He stops at his car to pick nickels out of the ashtray, and drops them in a tube sock. He ties a knot in the top and walks out into the street swinging his sock.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” yells Freida standing in the doorway.
“I am going to the artist’s house to drop these nickels into his begging box.”
“You are like hell!” Freida screams. She’s in a rage. Her eyes are hot. She feels the heat behind her eyes getting hotter. She shakes her body and waves her fists at her husband. She curses. She stamps and screams. Mr. Howard returns her fit with a look of cheerful indifference. This gesture makes her livid, beside herself with a red hot hated for her husband. Her temples are flaming. The heat starts to melt her eyes and suddenly her head explodes. A blast of lava-hot nickels erupts out the top of her head. They land whoosh-whoosh onto the frozen blacktop, shooting bullets of steam into the cold sky.
Mr. Howard walks up to his wife lying in the doorway, steps one leg over her prone body, pokes his head through the door, and yells up to the kids to bring him down another sock full of nickels.
“And clean up your mother,” he says. “I’ll be back in a few years.”
I have to stop reading so much at once. This story packs a wallop that I missed by going on to the next.