It was Mussolini, I believe, who said “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”   I could check this in two seconds on Google, but the point is, they hung the guy and his girlfriend upside down from meathooks in a public thoroughfare, this strong man.   Benito Mussolini, in his arrogance, did some bad things, I understand, in addition to making the trains run on time.  I don’t say he didn’t deserve the meathook, probably he did.  Other people deserve it too, probably.  I can think of several off hand, but none of the ones I’m thinking of will get it.  I can say that with the oracular assurance of a modern day Nostradamus.

What I am driving at is the challenge of making something good out of all this talking to myself.  If someone writes you a check at the end of the week, no matter how lousy the pay, you still get a check, money you can spend to sustain yourself, a bit of validation, no matter how unsatisfactory the amount of money or the actual work may feel to you.  If nobody writes you a check for your work, you may ask yourself questions, things like “what the fuck?” and “who in their right mind would work this hard for no pay?”  or  you might find yourself writing over and over “all work and no pay makes Jack a very exploited and bitter little bastard”.    

“No, no,” you will tell yourself, the very Voice of Reason.  “Nobody will pay unless you make them pay.  It’s the American way, baby.  You just make them pay.  Rugged individual, man.  Nobody wants to pay, they want everything for free.  You just say ‘pay me’ and you look at them very tough, without blinking, stone-faced, and then they swallow, and there’s a stare down, and then, if you’re really good, they pay you.  That’s all, man.  No need to get all philosophical about it.”

“Or,” another voice of reason will chime in, (though not mine), “you can do what most people do– figure out a good or service you can sell for money and sell it.  Use your credentials and work experience, your network of business contacts, for godsakes.  You can make a living most easily by working for an outfit that worries about raising the money to pay you.  Then it’s only a matter of abiding the politics of that particular workplace and you will get paid.”

“It’s called maturity.  You do something you might not necessarily love and you get paid.  That’s why they call it work. It’s what 99% of the world does.”  

I cannot tell you how many times this reasonable Alice Kramden-like lecture has been presented to me patiently by people close to me who have had it up to here with my dreaming and my judgmental complaining.   Look, we torture people and kill children with drones and in other ways, and, yes, we also maintain an apartheid school system virtually unchanged (except for the addition of guns) since Brown v. Board of Education almost sixty years ago, nobody said we were perfect, shut up about it already, we’re trying to enjoy our meal in this nice restaurant.  Go find a leper to kiss and let us eat and drink in peace.

Better, perhaps, if they just spit on me and spare me the lecture.  Then we could duke it out, they’d be surprised, I think, at how tough Ahimsa Man really is.  It hasn’t killed me, after all, it must have made me strong as a meathook.  I tell you what, I wouldn’t want to try me.

But let’s not, as they say, go there.  I was feeling overwhelmed last night and said to myself the exact words my father said to me right before he died.  “I don’t know how to do this…” I said to myself, echoing precisely what my dying father said to me as he tried to figure out how to stop breathing.  Then he did it like a champ, like Rembrandt painting one of those transcendent final self-portraits, like Martin Luther King Jr. giving that speech the last night of his life.  Just goes to show you.  

It’s sad, and it’s funny, that when I woke up seven hours after posting the piece about my father’s death I had a number of emails from WordPress.  When somebody “likes” a blog post an automated email is generated to the blogger telling her or him that somebody “thought your post was awesome”.  The email then suggests you might like to visit the blog of the person who thought your’s was awesome.  And these blogs I visit, every one of them is usually pretty awesome.  

But the funny thing I noticed today was the amazing coincidence that four of the people who thought my piece about the death of my father was awesome have the same great idea for me– become an affiliate marketer in your spare time to generate enough cash to be a globe trotting bon vivant living off your laptop and the constant stream of commissions that will come your way.  It’s awesome, man, seriously.  

I can still write whatever I want, dream whatever I want, be as judgmental and complaining as always, I just have to set up squeeze pages and so forth and drive imaginary traffic to affiliate sites where the affiliates will sell things and send me my commissions.  So easy, I hear, that virtually anyone can do it, and with even a 2% conversion rate you can do this from the beach in Bali or from a sweaty hovel anywhere you choose.    

Although, who am I kidding?  More to the point, who the hell am I writing this to?  And would you get a load of this rogue’s gallery under the Google search for Nostradamus (and who knew he had a brother named Jean?)– what the hell is Psy doing between Hitler and Bonaparte?  “People also search for”?  What?   Really?  People also search for their ass with both hands and wind up scratching  a hole in the ground.