Housework is a Waste of Time When You're Starting a Business

How did Jo Rowling, as she was known then, write a book and take care of a baby while living as a single mom "on the dole?"  You can find her answer at 16:30 in the program above. 

"I didn't do housework for four years, I'm not Superwoman.  Living in squalor, that was the answer." - J.K. Rowling


I just finished doing dishes.  But I don't live alone.  I live with my mom right now.  She really likes to cook.  In fact, she often spends hours a day in the kitchen.  Which is fine.  Except that I'm trying to spend as much time as I can on activities necessary to build my little business.  In her mind, I'm just playing around on the computer or "coloring," as she often refers to the artwork I do (and sell).  But since she spends so much time cooking, the kitchen usually looks like the Tasmanian Devil just passed through.  I have to spend a good ten or fifteen minutes moving stuff around just so I can get to actually washing the dishes.  As a lifelong bachelor, I like to dirty as little as possible in the kitchen so I don't waste much time cleaning up.  My mom has a very different take on things.  So I wind up really frustrated when I'm doing dishes, because I'd rather be spending that time building my business. 

I also don't like to vacuum, dust, tidy things up, and all those other things that a person can literally spend hours a day doing.  I have better things to do.  If you aren't a maid, or you don't own a bed and breakfast, then you're not getting paid to clean house.  I love the quote by J.K. Rowling above, because here's a person who's a success by any measure, who shared that attitude while working on her passion. 

Let me be clear.  I'm not saying you have to live in a hoarder house or a cabin in the woods, or never clean at all.  I'm just saying that you can save a lot of time by cleaning house as little as possible.  Yes, I'm a slob, and quite happy with that.  I realize I can live in a dirtier environment than many people.  But if you're are creating your own side gig or small business, cut house work to the necessary minimum to give yourself more time to work on pressing work.  This is one of many ways to create more time in the day for your business/passion/creative project. 

Ways to Get Free Stuff to Sell

Here's a picker video I just found on You Tube, doing a little Curb Scouting for free stuff.  This is just one of the many ways you can get stuff for free (with a vehicle and a bit of gas) that you can resell to make money.

Here's a few of my personal stories of money made off of free stuff:

- I got the bug to buy and sell stuff from my dad.  Both of my parents loved checking out garage sales, and my dad was really into shooting when I was little, so he was always going to gun shows.  I learned how to haggle over prices from watching him.  He was always buying and selling guns and gun parts to make a few extra bucks here and there.  One of my favorites was when he bought a whole case of 10,000 pro-gun bumper stickers off a guy for $30.  The classic "I'll give up my gun when they pry my cold, dead fingers from around it," was one of the six different stickers.  Within a month, my dad had sold enough stickers to pay for the whole case.  At that point, the rest of the stickers were free.  I watched him use those stickers to sell, trade, and to sweeten deals for the NEXT TEN YEARS.  He ended up getting hundreds of dollars of stuff from that case of stickers.

-Working as a furniture mover for years, people were always offering us movers stuff just to get rid of it.  I got a free refrigerator, a washer and dryer, and lots of odds and ends.  I actually turned down most of the stuff offered because I didn't have a place to put it.  My biggest score as a mover was in Newport Beach, California when a guy offered me a custom made leather couch and love seat.  They were awesome, except for being a weird peach color.  "The wife says they just don't match the new house," the owner said, "Can you guys get rid of them."  I said, "We sure can," in a flash.  After checking a few consignment shops, I figured they were worth about $6,000 new.  But I just needed some extra cash, so I sold them in the Recycler (SoCal classified newspaper that pre-dated Craigslist) for $300 in a couple of days.

-In an earlier post I wrote about how I saw an old dining table in two pieces by the dumpster at my storage unit.  I hauled it to my unit, took a few photos, and sold it to an antique shop about four days later for $150.  I don't go to great lengths to find free stuff, these deals just came my way.

If you're looking to find free stuff to start selling, here are some places to start:

-Cruise your city, like the guy above, and look for decent stuff sitting on the curb for free.
-Dumpster diving.  OK, there are a lot of crazy dumpster diving videos on You Tube.  Don't pull medicine or other potentially dangerous stuff from the trash.  Also, it's illegal to dumpster dive in many places, there's no need for you to get busted.  But if you cruise the dumpster areas in apartment complexes, you'll often find pieces of furniture and other items sitting outside that you can grab for free without getting in any trouble.
-Craigslist.  Scan your local Craigslist "Free" section regularly for things you can pick up and resell.  I saw a piano for free here in my area once.
-Facebook groups.  I've never done this one, but I just saw a video about it on You Tube.  Join a bunch of groups and look for free stuff.
-Garage, moving, and estate sales.  Here's another one I just saw on You Tube.  There's a picker who emails all the people advertising garage sales every week in his area, and says he'll haul off anything left over for free.  He owns a for-profit thrift shop, and says he gets two or three calls a week to come pick up a van full of stuff each week.
-Clean out houses for real estate investors.  Another idea I just saw on You Tube.  If you have a truck and can find some help, you can offer to clean all the junk out of houses for investors who are flipping houses in your area.  You can actually get paid to clean out a "hoarder house" and then sell anything that's worth money.  Obviously this is a lot of work, but it's another way to get free stuff.

OK, there's a few ideas to get you going in the picker world for no money.  Have fun.

What does a Trump presidency mean for jobs?

This isn't me talking, this is self-made billionaire, entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban talking about what effect Donald Trump will have on the economy as a president.  Bottom line, Trump will, without a doubt, say or tweet things that will have huge consequences both on international relations and the stock markets.  If there's one thing we can all agree on with Donald Trump, it's that he doesn't know when to shut up.  Yes, some people like that about him.  But as a president, there's a time to keep your thoughts to yourself.  Actually, that's necessary much of the time for the leader of the free world. 

Now, I know this clip of Mark Cuban was shot a week before the election.  When news first broke of Trump's electoral college win, the Dow futures dropped the equivalent of 800 points.  That was a huge negative reaction to the surprise of him winning.  Yes, since that time, there's been a big rally in the stock markets here in the U.S., with the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaking the 19,000 mark for the first time ever.  So isn't this a good thing? 

If you're a big time investor who owned Goldman Sachs stock three weeks ago, yeah, it's a good thing.  But for the average person, it doesn't make much difference.  In fact, the stock markets have risen COMPLETELY on the hopes of WHAT MIGHT happen in a Trump presidency.  The stock markets routinely over-react to news.  In this particular case, president-elect Trump has yet to take office, he hasn't made a single policy, and no one knows exactly what WILL happen as he takes office.  The stock markets have risen because they're betting on everything good THAT MIGHT happen, and completely ignoring what could possibly go wrong.  Hey, the stock markets really get stupid sometimes.  This is one of those times. 

Like Mark Cuban said in the clip above, Trump can't keep his mouth shut when something makes him happy or pisses him off.  It's a 100% sure thing that Trump will say something that will have major political, social and financial repercussions at some point.  In fact, just by taking a phone call from the head of Taiwan a couple days ago, Trump managed to piss off China, the largest nation by population, and one of the biggest economies, on Earth.  Instead of apologizing for making a rookie mistake as a politician, he doubled down on stupidity and went on a Twitter tirade about China.  Yes, he made some valid points, but he did so in a totally stupid way.  If Trump's comments cause a war, a trade war, or continue to ignore the United States' longstanding foreign policy, we will see a big stock market downturn, companies downsizing because of hostility in countries they do business in, more terrorist attacks, and most likely a serious recession here.  None of those things are good for jobs here.

Yes, I know Trump said he'd bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.  Yes, I saw that he bribed the air conditioning company Carrier $7 million to keep 800 jobs in the U.S.  But they're still sending 1300 jobs to Mexico.  And now EVERY big company will want bribes to keep jobs here.  Trump has never created high paying manufacturing jobs in any large amount.  He doesn't have a background in technology, where most of today's good paying jobs are created. 

So here's how I see it.  There are at least 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S., although these people don't show up in the unemployment report.  No one has real plans to create jobs for these people, and I'm included in that bunch.  We need to start creating our own jobs if we can't find good paying employment.  While the Trump administration may take actions to help the highest paid people in our society, there is no real plan for average folks.  People talk about the dwindling middle class during elections, but then little action follows.  Here we go again... same ol', smae ol'.

Getting Deals at Thrift Stores

This is one of the many videos on You Tube of people who find deals at Goodwill and other thrift stores and resell the items.  These videos will give you some hints on the deals you can find at thrift stores.

 Like all bargain hunting, remember, just because you can buy it cheap doesn't mean it's a good deal.  Buy stuff you know has value, or look it up on your phone before you buy.

A few years ago, while out of work, I discovered the Goodwill "Outlet" store in Winston'Salem, North Carolina, about ten miles from me.  Located on Peter's Creek Parkway, it's actually a big Goodwill complex.  There's a large, standard Goodwill store, a job training office, and the "outlet" store.  As I quickly learned, it's not what you think of as a typical outlet store.  The Goodwill outlet is where stuff goes first.  They literally dump hundreds of similar items in huge, rolling bins that are about ten feet long, five feet wide, and a foot deep.  As soon as they roll a new one out, local buyers descend on it like vultures, looking for good stuff.  Here's the crazy part, you buy stuff by the pound.  Nothing has a price.

I was new to the scene a few years ago, so I avoided the feeding frenzy bins and poked around in the bins that had been out awhile.  There were tons of bookbag type backpacks, and lots of women's purses.  So I bought a whole bunch of both for about $40.  It worked out to about $2 each for the purses, and less for the backpacks.  I wasn't even on Craigslist or Ebay then, I just shopped the stuff around to local boutique shops and women in my apartment complex.  This was just a side thing.  But I ultimately made about $120 off the purses and backpacks, and donated the leftovers to another thrift shop.

Two days ago, I was browsing Goodwill, and found a Green Day (the band) coffee table book, in pretty good condition for $2.  I had a Goodwill gift card I was given (yeah, they actually have those), so it didn't cost me anything.  I'll probably keep the book, but I could make a few bucks off it on Craigslist, I bet.

Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other thrift stores are one good way to find items to resell on Craigslist, Ebay, through consignment shops, or at flea markets and swap meets.

As I'm typing this, I'm wearing a pair of New Balance shoes that I bought at the Goodwill outlet over two years ago for about $2.75.  You never know what you'll find.

Buy Low Sell High: A Place to Start

Here's a random video about flipping stuff for some profit.  If you don't have a specialized skill to create your own job, or if you're starting on a real tight budget, buying and selling is a good way to make some cash fairly quick.

As I've written in earlier posts, there are at least 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S. right now.  There are tens of millions more who could use some extra cash.  Buying and selling stuff is a great place to start.  I've done it at various levels before. 

In fact my first business, in second grade, was selling pieces of Magic Rub erasers.  These gray erasers worked much better than the red ones, and we all wanted them.  Then I found out my dad was a draftsman, and used Magic Rub erasers at work.  He gave me a couple.  I used an thin piece of metal called an eraser shield to cut each eraser into about 8 pieces, and I sold each piece for 10 cents to my classmates.  Hey, we all start somewhere.

In today's highly connected, internet and mobile phone enabled world, there are all kinds of places to buy stuff cheap and many great ways to resell it for a profit.  There's one key to this, you have to have an idea what each item will actually sell for.  You may have personal experience with certain items, like antiques or vintage video games or whatever.  Or you can just use your phone to look up items on Ebay or Amazon to get an idea.  Whatever works.

Then you have to have a way to sell the items.  You can sell to collectors.  You can sell at flea markets or swap meets.  You can sell on Ebay or Amazon.  You can sell on Craigslist or one of the local sales apps.  You can sell at garage or yard sales.  You can sell at consignment shops.  My advice is to keep all options open for selling items.  Sell the better items for higher dollar amounts to collectors or on Ebay or to consignment shops.  You'll wind up with leftover stuff.  That's what you sell on Craigslist, at the swap meet, or at a garage sale. 

I'm going to get this blog going with several posts about many different ways and places to find bargains.  After all those posts, I'll bookend this section with more ideas about how to sell different items.  Good luck on your own efforts to Buy Low and Sell High.

How am I trying to start a business with literally no money?

For a variety of reasons, I can't get hired for even a lame job here in North Carolina.  Most people here give me the standard advice: "Tweak your resume' and keep trying."  But the longtime Californian in me says, "Screw that, I'll create my own job."

Right now I'm writing and self-publishing a book about my adventures in the early days of BMX freestyle in the 80's and 90's.  I stumbled into the industry, and saw a lot of really cool things happen firsthand.  After some trial and error, I decided to publish my "book" myself, laid out like a big zine.  It's just going to be a D-ring binder with pages I write and layout myself, and copy and put together myself.  Zines (pronounced zeens) were small, photo copied, self-published booklets we made to write about our friends and ideas in the 80's and 90's.  Basically, it's what bloggers did before blogs.  So I had the idea to do that, just on a bigger scale.  I'm writing 20 pages at a time, and using the orders I get on my Go Fund Me crowdfunding page to actually fund it.  Using advance orders to fund a business is an idea I got from a book called No Cash, No Fear, which it a good read for entrepreneurs.  Basically, today's crowdfunding sites are a high tech way to do that much easier.

Another way to start a business with no money at all is to provide a service and charge for that.  So how am I doing?  I'm finishing the first 20 page section of the book today, and I have 2 orders so far.  OK, a few more orders would be better, but it's a start.  I'm adding lots of goodies and giving the book a real hand-made feel, so hopefully it will do better once a few copies are out there and words gets around.  I'm also promoting it with my blog on the same subject.

Here's my BMX blog, Freestyle BMX Tales, with a link to the Go Fund Me Page at the bottom.

Taking Stock Of What You Have To Work With

This clip is from some footage I shot at the 2-Hip Mission Trails King of Dirt contest, outside San Diego, California in 1991.  The sport of BMX was "dead" at the time, the big bike companies were focusing their efforts on mountain bikes.  We were in the grips of the long, "double dip" recession of the early 1990's.  Yet this contest, the first true Huckfest in my opinion, changed the way we looked at bike riding.  History was made while most of the world was looking elsewhere. I edited this clip with my camera and a VCR for the S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.

Like tens of millions of other people in the U.S. right now, I don't have a "real" job.  I'm fifty years old and living with my mom.  Yes, I know how pathetic that is.  My last (of many) career was as a taxi driver.  I just can't make money doing that, the industry went downhill because of computer dispatching in the early 2000's, and then The Great Recession, and then because of services like Uber and Lyft. 

After several years of taxi driving, I wound up homeless in Southern California in 2007, and, after a year on the streets, I called my family, and they flew me to North Carolina.  I got here in November 2008, as the global economy was crashing.  I'd never lived here before.  My parents and sister's family just wound up here.  I haven't had a real job since.  I drove a taxi for a year, and quit when my dad had a massive stroke because I wasn't making any money at it and I wanted to spend more time with him those last few months.

So, here I am in late 2016, taking stock of my options.  I can't get hired for an entry level job, probably because of my age, weight (about 350), or sketchy work history.  I'm not sure.  I've written for magazines, worked on the crews of TV shows, and self-produced videos.  But none of that will get me a good paying job here.  The job market is terrible here in Central North Carolina.  A couple of weeks ago a Cheesecake Factory restaurant opened in nearby Greensboro, and 7500 people applied for the 255 jobs.  That's insane.

Now, most of those 7500 people probably went home, spruced up their resume' yet again, and kept looking through the job websites.  Hey, if you have skills that are in demand, that's great.  But the reality is, tens of millions of people in the U.S. can't find a good paying job.  I'm one of them.  But no one is really creating millions of good paying jobs.  The more I look into the job issue right now, the more I think millions of us will have to create our own jobs.  So that's what I'm doing.

The first step is taking stock of my current resources.  Despite my weight, I'm reasonably healthy, but in no shape to do physical labor.  So that's out.  I'm living for free, though I help my elderly mom out with some day to day tasks.  But she's paying the bills, which is something I hear about over and over every day.  But I have a roof over my head, and a really old and really slow, but functional, laptop.  In my crazy life, I've discovered that I'm a writer and creative guy at heart.  That doesn't sound like much, but lots of people haven't found their true place in the world.  I know that writing is what I am here on Earth to do.  So that's good.

But writing as an industry has changed dramatically since I got my first magazine job 30 years ago.  I've been blogging and self-educating myself for the past several years, but not making any money.  In today's tech heavy world, writers need to create their own following and then build a business around that following.  My following at this point is about 250 old school BMX riders who are my Facebook friends. 

So far I have a computer, experience as a writer, and a small following of guys (and a few gals) who were into BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 90's.  The thing that really tips the scale for me is that I have literally hundreds of stories from that era, because I managed to break into the industry, and be in the midst of it all. 

Now, here's the conflict.  I'm really into working on, and writing about, the current jobs issue and where our society is going.  That's what this blog is all about.  But I don't have a following in this area yet.  The thing about writing today is that it's easy to put work out for the world to see it on the internet.  But making money is a whole different game.  Most of the 200 million or so blogs out there do not make money.  Newspapers and magazines have drastically cut back their staffs over the last 20 years.  So how do I make money?

I've been struggling with this for a long time.  It finally dawned on me last week that I really need to put everything I remember from those early BMX days into a book.  And self-publish it.  And I have to do it starting with literally not a dime to my name.  We all have our challenges, these are mine.

So I started a Go Fund Me page as a way to pre-order the book.  I've decided to go with my DIY roots and make it a weird, but hopefully cool, kind of book.  I'm writing stories and thoughts, laying them out, old school zine style, on 8 1/2" X 11" sheets of paper, and putting them into a simple D-ring binder with a home made insert for the cover.  It sounds cheesy.  But it's something I know I can do as soon as I start getting orders and get it written.  And I can do any kind of black & white layout I want, which I can't do if I use a self-publishing service.  So that's where I'm at right now.  Here's the link to my Go Fund Me page, if you want to check it out. 

So... what resources do you have that you could use to start creating your job? 

How Sam and Mattie Made A Movie

Watch the clip, this is awesome.  I heard about Sam and Mattie on the CBS news last night.

Many years ago, Sam and Mattie, who both have Downs Syndrome, met at the Special Olympics.  They became best friends, hanging out with each other continually over the years.  A while back, one of their brothers saw them acting out mock fight scenes in the backyard.  He figured it was a phase the guys were going through.  But after a while, he noticed they kept acting out the same scenes over and over.  He asked them about it.  It turned out that they had written and entire script for a zombie movie, and were acting it out. 

So, with a little help, Sam and Mattie did a Kickstarter campaign, raised $70,000 and actually made their zombie movie, called Spring Break Zombie Massacre.  It'll be coming out soon. 

So... after seeing Sam and Mattie on Conan, tell me again what your excuse is for not trying to do something awesome.

Are 20 Million Americans Just Lazy?

This clip gives a short, concise, but well informed look at youth unemployment around the world. 

When your college offers a "paper or plastic?" seminar, you know the job market is looking bad.

OK, it's not quite that bad yet, but it's getting close.  The over-educated, over-qualified low wage employee has become an archetype in our society.  We've all seen them.  The barrista with a master's degree.  The senior citizen wiping tables at McDonald's after a 40 year career of skilled labor.  The grad student stocking grocery shelves.  For a year or so I've heard people throw out an estimate that there are 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S..  About a month ago, I actually looked up the best recent numbers I could find.  I came up with a number of at least 20.3 million un and under-employed people in the U.S., and that's a minimum number.  Nobody knows the real number.

So what's going on?  Are 20 million Americans just lazy?  The clip above talks about young people unemployment.  Man, I got EVERY job I ever applied for from age 17 to 28.  I was completely unqualified for most of them.  Hell, I managed a small amusement park at age 18.  Really.  That was starting in the 80's, in a city, Boise, Idaho, that actually had a pretty tight labor market for that time.  What has happened since then that got us in this mess now?  Here are some of the major factors:

Outsourcing- Millions of manufacturing, and some service jobs (like call centers for example) have been moved to other, much cheaper, countries, Mexico and China in particular.  This is the big culprit for the loss of good paying jobs in most people's minds, but it's far form the only one.

Taken by technology- This is the thing that most people gloss over.  Millions of jobs have also been lost or taken over by various forms of technology.  When I was a kid, and my parents drove into a gas station, a grown man would come out, pump the gas, and wash the windows and check the oil while we waited.  Those thousands of jobs were replaced by self-service gas pumps.  I read once that ATM machines now do the work that 800,000 bank tellers used to do.  I don't know if that number is accurate, but it gives us a sense of how those jobs were lost.  

Concentration of wealth- In the 1980's, the now legendary president Ronald Reagan helped push through tax cuts to wealthy Americans and corporations.  The idea was called "trickle down economics," or "Reaganomics" for short.  The idea was that by giving rich people and corporations tax breaks and loopholes, they would build or grow huge businesses that would employ lots of people.  A quick look around will show you that not a whole actually lot trickled down.  What did happen was that many wealthy people became super rich, and now control an incredible share of our nation's wealth.  That small number of people can't possibly spend as much as tens of millions of average Americans could.  In an really simple analogy, much of the U.S. wealth is in huge resevoirs owned by super rich people, but the rivers feeding everyone else have nearly dried up.  Money flows like water in a healthy economy.

Trillions of dollars held offshore- I've heard estimates that 1 to 3 TRILLION dollars are being held in other countries to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes.  Even with all the loopholes in the tax laws, many major corporations are holding tens of millions of dollars or more in other countries.  No one has figured out a way to get this money back into the U.S..  Keep in mind, a trillion is a thousand billion.  

The Big Transition- This is my name for the period of society we're in right now.  We've left the Industrial Age, where factories in nearly every town and city employed most people.  We're heading towards a new age, called The Information Age, The Digital Age, The Creative Age and similar names, depending who you listen to.  But we're not in that new age yet.  We're in a decades long transition between the two ages, where one revolution after another in technology, communication, and business is surging through society.  Right now there are high paying jobs requiring tech skills and creativity.  Then there are a much larger number of low skill service jobs.  The huge number of good paying mid skilled jobs have disappeared.  The more I look into future trends by the people who study those things, the worse the future job situation looks.

So... again... are 20 million Americans just lazy?  Some are, of course.  But there a many, huge macro forces depleting the job market right now.  Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide, are caught in really crazy circumstances.

So who's going to create the millions of jobs we need?  Senator Bernie Sanders, in his presidential bid, pushed the issue of putting millions of Americans to work repairing and building infrastructure, like roads and bridges, in the U.S.  This would be great... if the politicians could work together and make it happen.  I'm not holding my breath on that one.  

Professor Richard Florida, economic development specialist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, says we need to make service jobs higher paying and better jobs.  That would help, too.  But, again, I'm not holding my breath. 

So... who's left to create millions of jobs?  We are.  You and me.  I keep coming back to the same conclusion.  Millions of Americans (and people in other countries) are going to have to create our own jobs.  We just can't wait for other people to do it.  So, no... you're not necessarily lazy because you  don't have a great job.  But you might be fighting a losing battle in a job market with millions of similarly skilled people.  This blog is about finding our best options.   

How I Made $150 Trash Picking

The table in the clip above is similar to the one I'm talking about in this post, except the one I found had much more intricate carving. 

Back in 2006, I could tell that taxi driving was going to keep going downhill as a business, so I tried to escape it.  I had discovered storage unit auctions by accident a couple years before.  This was a while before the TV shows about storage auctions came out.  Oddly, I started in Huntington Beach, California, and I think Daryl who now stars in Storage Wars, was at the first auction I went to.

In any case, I was living in my taxi, and had my own stuff in a storage unit.  I started going to storage auctions and buying the cheaper units, and reselling things, making a bit of money.  One day, driving into my own unit, I passed the dumpster, and there was a big, round table top, and a huge table base nearby.  I didn't think much of it.  The next day, I went to my unit again, and I could tell the table was old, so I checked it out.  It was solid oak, definitely antique, with lots of hand carved details.  But there was some damage to it.  I threw the table top in the back seat, lugged the insanely heavy base into the trunk, and took it from the dumpster to my unit.  I happened to have a disposable camera so I took a few photos and got them developed.

Over the next few days, in the course of driving around in my taxi, I stopped at several antique shops to see what they thought.  The crazy heavy table I found in the trash was solid oak, made in France, and probably made around 1870-1880.  after about three days, a store owner said he'd give me $300 for it.  So I went to my storage unit, loaded it up, and took it to his huge antique shop.  when he saw it, he said, "That's a lot smaller than I thought it was, I'll give you $150."  A lot of people may have been  pissed off.  But I pulled it out of the trash three days earlier, I took the $150 cash and headed back out on the road as a taxi driver.

How did I spot it?  I worked for years as a furniture mover, and I got to know good furniture from bad, so it caught my eye sitting there by the dumpster.  You never know where a good piece will be found.  A lot of people put old furniture out by the dumpster or on the curb.  Like the old saying goes, one person's trash is another person's cash.  Keep an eye out.

Music in the Morning

I doubt most of you have heard of this song.  It's "Sound System" by Operation Ivy, an early ska band.  For those who don't know, ska is a form of music combining punk and reggae that originated in the late 1980's.  This is a song that gets your blood pumping, and it's about listening to music to get you in a better mood.

In late 1991 and early '92, I lived on the living room floor of a tiny apartment on Alabama Street in Huntington Beach, California.  On the couch, a few feet away, slept Bill Grad, BMX racer and industry guy.  In the single bedroom slept one Chris Moeller, a young BMX racer and crazy jumper who ran a small company, called S&M Bikes, out of the garage.  The whole apartment was eight feet wide, long and skinny, which is why we called it the "Winnebago."  Every morning, Chris' girlfriend at the time would step over me on her way out to go to work.  About the same time, Bill would get up and get off to his job.  A couple hours later, Chris would wake up, take a leak, and then crank up the stereo.  That was the official start of the business day for S&M Bikes.  It was music to wake up to, get the blood pumping, shake off a mild hangover, and get ready for another day of selling bikes.  He had a limited selection of music, cassettes (remember those?) of Green Day's "Kerplunk,"  Pegboy's "Strong Reaction," or a compilation tape called "The Big One" which included tracks by Green Day, The Offspring, Clawhammer, Pop Defect, and some other little known bands of the day.

When you're unemployed, or struggling with a job far below your skill level, mornings can be really depressing.  You wake up and think, "Nooooooo! Not the same ol' shit AGAIN!"  Right then is the time to crank up some music to get you moving and into a better mood.  In addition to 90's power punk like Bad Relgion's "Punk Rock Song," and Face to Face's "Disconnected, Boston's "More Than a Feeling," Matisyahu's "King Without a Crown" (live at Stubb's version on You Tube), Amanda Palmer's "Ukulele Anthem," are some of my favorites.  It doesn't matter what you listen to, find that one or two songs that literally get you moving and change your mood.  Once your attitude is in a better place, start thinking of how you're going to improve your situation.  Take the words of this Operation Ivy song to heart:

"Sound system gonna pick me back up... (it's the) one thing I can depend on." 

You are now free to go on with your day.

Really Weird Jobs People Actually Make Money At

There are a lot of weird jobs out there, and quite a few online videos talking about them.  This clip from The Richest is the best one I've seen in a while.  I'll never look at pandas the same way again. 

The Story Of Our Lives

" I went down to look for a job, I had no training, no experience to speak of.  I looked down at the holes in my jeans... and I turned and headed back."
-Mike Ness/Social Distortion, "Story of My Life"

To give you an idea of what the job market is like where I currently live, here's a WFMY News 2 story about the new Cheesecake Factory that opened 8 days ago in Greensboro, North Carolina, about ten miles from me.  7500 people applied for the 255 jobs the restaurant brought.  Any time you have enough people to fill a small city applying for a restaurant job, you know there's a serious jobs issue in the region.  This is right now, October 2016, in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina, eight years after the start of The Great Recession.

A couple nights ago, I saw a national TV news story where a woman interviewed five former steel workers in Ohio.  The steel plant that once employed much of their town, was closed, shuttered, rusting, and decaying.  The once devout Democrats were either voting for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, hoping he would somehow bring their jobs back, or still undecided.  They weren't worried about ISIS, Iraq, or the environment.  They just wanted good jobs, like the ones they held in the steel factory years before.  Near the end of the segment, they showed one of the men at a job retraining class, with rows of computer monitors.  The man was confused by the lessons being taught.

There are a lot of serious issues in the United States right now.  But good jobs are an issue that tens of millions of people have right now.  I'm one of those people.  In my particular situation, it's become apparent that I need to create my own job.  With my age, weight, health issues, work history, and overall situation, there's almost no chance of me finding a good paying job in this area, of Central North Carolina. As I've read about, studied, and looked into the U.S. job market and, I've come to the conclusion that millions of Americans are going to have to create their own jobs to get this country going again.

That's what this blog is about.  What's happening now?  Where did the jobs go?  Why aren't they coming back? And who could possibly create enough jobs to rebuild the American middle class?  I'm going to look into the background of this whole issue.  But more than that, I'm going to look for viable alternatives for YOU and ME to start making a decent living again.  Buckle up, I'm pretty sure it'll be a bumpy ride.