I’ve made hundreds of “Hobo Nickel” engravings on a variety of out-of-circulation coins, and most of them are skulls, for one important reason — to remind everyone that even the king has an end of life.
Nobody escapes the Reaper, who isn’t actually grim. As a matter of fact, he’s downright jolly, but who would fear The Jolly Reaper?
Back in 1969, Jim Morrison, who used to come into the shop just about every day at that time — it was in a dark, black-painted and blacklight illuminated “Head Shop” called “Psychedelic Supermarket”, and that’s exactly what it was, and I had a tiny 10’x10′ booth directly across from “Famous Gene” LP warehouse.
Today, you couldn’t run that shop, with swarms of teens swirling through it like a flowing mass of soap suds in a Jack Oakie comedy of the 1930’s.
So one day Jim comes in as usual, he’s in the middle of reading my hardbound copy of Siddhartha — he wouldn’t dream of buying a book, but he devoured Hesse like some kids go for ice cream and pizza.
Not a bad combo, I’ll consider making it in my virtual restaurant, the only kind of food service I’d run today, as you’ll note from my FULLY FUNCTIONING “Michele de Paris Pizza Parlor” just outside the Temple in our Prosperity Path Virtual Ashram currently housed in Second Life, an online experiential digital world.
So Jimmy leans against the wall, thus tippling over a line of paperbacks, and announces, “I been thinkin’ about it all night. A voice kept coming to me — “You’ll never get out of here alive!” so I got up and came over.
That was nothing new — he came over there almost every day, unless there was a new love in his life, which happened no more frequently than it did with any other teen or twenty-something I saw on a daily basis.
My shop had hundreds of visitors, sometimes more than hundreds, because it was on the path to the Concert Ticket Office in the back of the shop.
My first booth was all the way in the back, but I made too much money to survive there for very long — they replaced my shop with a leather shop, “Hell-Bent for Leather”, which made fringe leather clothing and cowboy style hats, and put me in front, but I instantly doubled my sales, so I said nothing and smiled all the way to the bank.
You can’t go to to the bank anymore, and you youngsters don’t even know what a bank was — well, back in the days before the Trump Flu, there were places you could drive your … oh, forget it, too complicated to explain.
“What’s a car?”
Well, you might just as well ask, “What’s a bus?” — there’s no way to explain it to someone who has never seen a gas or electric powered personal vehicle or public transport.
It suddenly occurs to me that there are going to be a LOT of hackers out there trying to take advantage of people who are victimized by this pandemic.
Those victims are nothing new, it’s just that the victimizers are now revealed.
We are in a time when you can trust NOBODY and NOTHING — even something that seems to come out of the mouth of someone on video can’t be believed.
With the right hardware and softward applications you can make anyone say or do anything on video, and that includes public announcements and official interviews — they can be faked … ANYTHING can!
But that wasn’t why I mentioned my little secret.
What about actually making a living from intelligence? What I have in mind is to either become a well-known online gamer, meaning you grab the Intelligence and get it back to your base, or you manage to lay waste to an entire kingdom or alien world, or you design a game that does those things.
You can be a player or a game designer, but the same rule obtains — “How many of these donuts can you sell a day?”
If the answer is” in the hundreds”, you can’t make a living from it. Every business has to earn more than it costs to run, but that can’t always happen. Sometimes, it’s just about cash-flow, with a negative balance at the end of the year.
Before the Alien Virus Invasion of 2020, a gallery was a GREAT idea, and we did a lot with it, including free jazz concerts with famous jazz musicians, parties galore and of course lots of art showings and “Meet the Artist” gatherings.
Of course, that’s OUT now, and fortunately we got out of the gallery business when it was easy to leave. Today, we’d have default on our lease and run into legal trouble as a result.
Remember that I advocated dumping all public service stocks some three months ago — I didn’t know the exactly timing of the plague, although I expected it for some time now, and the timing is now revealed to be NOW, NOW, NOW, and it’s “All hands on deck”, meaning that we’re all in this together.
That means nobody profits.
You gotta make a living, but don’t get greedy — just earn what you need to survive, but HOW???
In a world where nobody has any money and breadlines are just around the corner, what can you do to stem the rising tide of poverty and displacement?
“American Refugees Stopped at Canadian Border” — that’s the headline of a newspaper, one of the last that was ever printed, that resides in the Slime Mold Museum in my actual time, the 37th century.
It’s not a time machine — this is a SIM. To enter, merely press the “space bar” and wait twenty seconds.
Controls? Sure there are, but you aren’t born knowing how to use them. You need to wake up and learn how to make things happen, take responsibility for some part of the Creation, like the All-Quarters Maintainer that you are — how quickly we forget when we immerse ourselves in the Human World, only one step better than the Brute World and only two steps above the Hell World.
Rebirthing in the Human World is nothing to brag about. Bingeing Rebirth isn’t exactly a noble occupation, either.
Waking up is not a knee-jerk reaction to organic life, which offers so many distractions that it’s almost impossible to wake up under the circumstances.
The Call comes, and you start to rummage around, looking for something that will make the spiritual ache go away, but nothing works, like hearing a the “hook” from a pop song in your head, over and over again.
How to get rid of that nagging hook?
I have a way to get rid of any musical hook, but you have to pay me a few pennies to learn the secret.
I don’t actually have a way to destroy a pop song hook, but you get the idea — something that someone needs, offered for just pennies but again, you have to make the calculation — is there enough traffic to justify giving up the day job?
What if, as a result of the shutdowns, you have no day job?
Ah, then you operate under a whole new set of values, and at that point, it doesn’t matter how much you can make, it’s SOMETHING you can do to bring food to the table, at least a little food.
Okay, so how to fill in the gap?
Easy, just have dozens of jobs, do hundreds of small things to make enough to add up to the rent and food and whatever else you can manage.
This poster, “Liberty Weeping”, is available in digital form, and you can get one for your Second Life home as well.
It can be printed into a poster. It comes in square format and vertical format, and I’ll be happy to have it printed and shipped to you if you want one just for decor, no autographed signature.
Oh, you want one SIGNED and NUMBERED? In that case, go to the website and find it there — I also do framing and have a wide variety of framing stuff left from the gallery.
This is my pencil portrait of General Nunan, chief of the Bacterial Forces of America, which is the force that has been fighting the Barbie Flu Zombies that invaded Earth a few months back.
General Nunan is recognized as the lead tactician of the Anti-Viral Bacterian Forces and he leads the struggle against badness and the forces of evil in my latest videogame, “Kill Everything!” — just joking, the actual title is, “I Flu the Ocean!”
No, just kidding. I really titled it, “Destroy All Aliens” — no, that’s not it … come to think of it, I don’t think I actually decided on a title yet.
All this by way of saying that YOU could design a game and sell the heck out of it, if only you knew how to design a game, and if only you knew how to reach people and if only you knew how to market to those people.
It takes a lot just to stay alive in this Brave New World.
This is me at the age of a few months — remember, it’s always better to come into rebirth awake — blacking out at birth is a bad idea, and can lead to lower rebirths.
If you remember nothing else, remember this.
Okay, so now that you have that handled, let’s look at marketing again:
Here I am, on the right of this photo, with my friends “Dunne” and “Felix”, who are also sergeants giving instruction to new troops at “Trainfire”, Fort Ord, California in 1962.
We were Cadre, meaning instructors, and in order to hang out in that position, we had to literally run circles around the troops when we were on a forced run with full field packs and rifles.
Watching those recruits crumple under the weight of that field pack and that belt gear and that 9 1/2 pound rifle made me aware of the suffering it takes to dig yourself out of a hole.
One thing you learn when you start at the bottom and work your way up the ranks, is how to give an order, knowing how it feels on the other end.
I used to sit in the snow, but now, with that horrible flu going around, I don’t sit in anything cold, including the barn, and that’s why I’m converting over to ZOOM.
Oh, it’s not the only reason. With ZOOM, I can see you and see what you’re doing or not doing, and that makes it possible to conduct guitar classes, movement classes, and almost every kind of art and craft class.
In short, I’m advocating that you become an INSTRUCTOR.
Find something that you can do, really do well, and teach that skill set to others for a fee — the value of the skill can be determined by how much someone can make from using it, plus the scarcity of the knowledge.
Look, you should be teaching people how to make a living in a world without money, how to make a living while living in a box, how to make food appear on the table by magic.
It’s almost impossible, but with luck and skill, you might survive the winter of ’20 — of course, if you don’t, you can apply those skills to a Bardo situation.
This simple lump of pottery clay demonstrates how easy it is to create an abstract sculpture just by wedging the clay on a plaster bat, as you see here.
You’d then resolve all the undercuts or make a latex mold to accommodate the undercuts, and charge the mold with Hydrocal, and make a mother mold from the result, no problem, easy as pie.
You’d then cast up maybe four samples, each with a different surface treatment to simulate a variety of bronze patinas, and they’d sell typically for around $450 apiece.
Note that this is a full brick, and it dries unevenly, so make sure that if you want to keep it fresh, you cover it with cloth, spray it with water very often, and cover the whole thing with a plastic drop to keep the moisture in.
If you were firing it into ceramic pottery, you’d of course want to “reduce” it, meaning take the water out of the clay.
Clay is just pulverized rock with a little added water. Clay is dirt. Pottery is dirt. If you make pottery, you won’t get much for it, because the attitude is that it’s just clay.
Remember when people came to the door, you opened it and said “Hello!”??? Well, those days are over, at least for the duration, so get used to it.
I’ve posted this photo on my front door, but you get to the door past the sign that reads, “If you can read this, you’re in range”.
Our neighbors posted a sign that reads, “Trespassers will be shot — survivors will be shot again”.
Okay, perhaps it’s not the welcome sign, but this is war. Frankly, they’ve had that sign up for years, and they are in fact very friendly neighbors.
We live in a “Mr. Rogers” neighborhood, where the folks all help each other, where barn-raisings were common, and block parties abounded.
Now, of course, that’s all gone, and the cold wind whistles past the old haunted gardens of the past.
These metal embossings can be used to create rings, talismans, charms, lockets, pins, brooches and more, much more.
They actually look a lot like gold coins, and can be used in much the same way, on the tops of boxes, in jewelry and as fashion design addons.
Learning how to emboss is the point here.
Embossing people’s faces, names, special symbols, is easy and fun and you can do it, but the secret is that you can no longer do this at a fair — you need to find a way to offer and sell your creations strictly online, and that means SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING.
I wrote dozens of blogs on the subject of social media marketing (smm) and you are more than welcome to read them and use the information to your advantage, that’s what it’s there for.
I offer hundreds of designs for you to copy and learn from, and these are all available at my EMBOSSING WORKSHOPS, which we’ll be scheduling for the summer, unless everything’s down.
As you can see from the scan, not all skulls are the same — as a matter of fact, no two are exactly alike, and in some cases, the variant is far and wide.
In short, you never know what’s gonna happen when you make an embossing, and that’s what makes it so much fun!
This is a very uplifting project, and will make you feel a whole lot better.
You need disks, tools and some time and skills, and that’s all. This stuff is cheap to make and easy to sell and everybody likes their own name or initials or face, so that’s all you need to learn to turn this skill set into money!
Hey, meet me in the next chapter to find out more!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby