There’s something about the shortening of days, persistence of cold, and wetness of earth and everything else that forces me to retreat this time of year. This which once struck out and made an imprint on the world transfers to nervous energy, toxic if ignored and let to fester. I am effectively unemployed at the moment as well, which does not help matters. In desperate need of money I could fetch a stranger’s snacks on my bicycle. But it is so cold and wet and the pay is abysmal, not worth it on so many levels.

And besides, I’ve convinced myself I’m completing a book, a work over two years in the making, about unemployment, individuality, capitalism, and the parks in the city I live. I’m making a delusional investment in myself and my work by not paying off my credit cards for a month or so. These difficult choices give our actions import and to our voice gravitas. Can you feel it? I’m going bankrupt communicating this to you.

I walked to the public discussion about the parks budget this past Tuesday, 50 blocks away, and smoked a spliff while listening to the State of the Union address, got sucked up into discussion of the city’s budget, and then walked home smoking another spliff. Oh budgets, the dread weighing on me, why must your opinion on things cease to dominate?

The Blue Dream in the spliff attacked the fear building in me. The city will figure it out. The parks will remain. It continued now slower, and you, you will find the money, and you will complete your book about the parks of this city.

Of course. It’s 2016. I could just ask the internet to give me money so I could focus on this. What glorious happy times you, Blue Dream, and I live in. What times indeed.

The next day I awoke and this Blue Dream-induced crowd-funding mania no longer captivated my imagination. How am I not just back to sincerely asking friends and family to buy my book on facebook, except that the internet takes 5-10% of their money? Yet I still earnestly did some research, but found it increasingly depressing.

I encountered one, later in the day, I believe with the return of this post’s protagonist, Blue Dream, that seemed interesting, and seemed to believing it was returning artistic creation to the pre-capitalist days of patronage. I read their about page and learned that crowdfunding is great for yuppie DC bureaucrats that decide they want to write internet-age self help drivel, or for well-established mainstream musicians with painted on eyebrows. This exciting news was accompanied by prose that did not successfully induce me to vomit:

Alright — it’s called Funemployment because it’s fun, but without a steady paycheck every two weeks, you’re going to need to find some way to make enough money to cover the expense of living.

I immediately copy and pasted this nonsense that was essentially selling its ability to sell an unsellable lifestyle into the working document for the master narrative of the book about the parks in the city I live in. Blue Dream was apparently taking me on a heady journey through the black hole where truth meets untruth. It involved watching a ted talk on the internet, an immediate red flag for my emotional health, but a sign that I obviously had no ability to look away.

You’ve dreamed of this day your entire life and have worked so hard to get to this point. Your 9-5 colleagues have wished you good luck and your boss has promised you an opportunity “if things don’t work out.” You have a small cushion in your bank account to hold you over for a little while, but not long enough to get too comfortable.

No one is less qualified than me to assess the relationship between money and the valuation of a piece of media. Money upsets me and I try to avoid it as best I can, which both means that I don’t spend any money on media (that isn’t second hand or the weekly hobo rag), and am shocked at the idea that anyone would want to spend money on something I’ve made. I get the argument of these things, that breaking past that credulity (you wanna buy my book?!) is the only thing stopping me, but I really don’t think that anyone wants to pay to read, for example, this absurdist review of a sativa-dominant weed strain, and that’s fine. If I wanted to do something that I knew I would get paid for I would be doing something else right now. And I’m not. Instead I’m still going with the theory that spending and making no money and following my own sensibilities is better than a double compromise with capitalism.

Thanks, Blue Dream, for showing me the way.

Writing about Blue Dream in the basement from which the book shall emerge, against all odds and all good sense.