Up at 3 in the afternoon. I didn't practice last night because the new "neighbor", a large (not fat just tall etc.) lady had moved one of her junk cars right across from here and worked on it all night, in the rain. Meth or crack heads will do things like that.
Instead I took a couple of things apart and listed the parts on Ebay.
I'm listening to "How I Built This" on NPR and they're featuring Michael Dell, and I'm interested as I'm a bit of a Dell loyalist. The guy started as a kid selling stamps and coins and stuff, then sold newspaper subscriptions and figured out that (a) people getting married really liked to get newspaper subscriptions and (b) in the state of Texas where he was, couples getting married had to put all their personal information into the public register. He used this to set up a large direct-mail campaign. The addresses were typed out on Apple II's, and then the IBM PC came out so he started a business installing hard drives, which they didn't come with, into them and it just built from there.
But the pattern was set when he was 10 or 12 years old and messing around with stamps and coins.
So I wonder about myself and what this tells me. I was essentially raised to be an artist. My parents had no idea of how to actually raise a kid to be an artist, but I always had however many crappy "Academe" drawing pads and horrible sets of oil pastels I wanted. When I got older it was oil paints, an airbrush, and I always had Rapidograph pens. The airbrush was the kind used for putting very basic coloring on cakes, not find work. And as for the Rapidograph, they're horrible pens for anything but what they're intended for, drafting, and mine always leaked. I'd be drawing along and "BLOP" it'd belch ink all over my drawing.
But in spite of all that, I really did make progress toward becoming "an artist". It surprised the hell out of everyone when instead of going on to be "an artist" I got regular type jobs. I think I'd fallen hook line and sinker for Capitalism's usual line of bullshit: Go to college if you can, work hard, don't be a stand-out or an oddball, and you'll be rewarded with a split-level ranch house and a station wagon and a retirement plan. Going from middle-class to very poor made for a hell of a childhood, and maybe I thought if I was nice and "regular" I could obtain for myself, and maybe my siblings if they needed a hand, the life we'd lost.
Instead even people who did everything by the book are ending up super poor, I've ended up pretty poor, everyone's ended up very poor except for a very few and they did it by never being poor in the first place. If your family didn't make it for you 50+ years ago, forget it.
It's become a "Versailles" culture with a few rich living in opulence, a shrinking middle class and craftsman class, and an increasing army of abjectly poor. As I've said to several people, ambition is a curse in a society with no social mobility. It just becomes a question of what you want to be poor doing. Think of the choices! I could work my ass off for a few years to buy a pedi-cab and be an aged pedi-cab pusher. I could go wash dishes somewhere. I could go back to panhandling. I could snag one of the three electronics tech jobs available here in Silicon Valley, and work for minimum wage, half-time. That's essentially what I do now in that I use my electronics knowledge a bit.
But getting back to Michael Dell, he established a pattern pretty early on and then just built on it.
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