OK, now I have to talk specifically a little more about my own circumstances and how I fund, produce and support my work over these years.
I’ll restart this narrative with my “cardiac arrest” layoff from ING-ReliaStar which I learned of at 9 AM CST on Thursday, 12/13/2001 when I got a message on my workstation netware that my account had been disabled, even as I was talking on the phone to an internal client. I’ve never held a similar position since (almost 21 years ago).
I did start my pension (It is fair) and had a reasonable 401K stache, and salary continued 8 months (with health insurance), after which unemployment was allowed and retiree health insurance would have to kick in, until I became eligible for Medicare (as of 9/1/2005).
My job had lasted 93 days after 9/11. In the final exit interview on 12/31/2001 I got the distinct impression that the job would have lasted quite a bit longer had 9/11 been prevented, as it hit the company’s reinsurance hard.
I did wait two months before starting the outplacement benefit. In early April, I learned of a “telefunding” job calling donors for the Minnesota Orchestra from an ad in a gay bar. Actually, it was a sort of match to my background with piano and composing, so I started it. It was hourly ($6) with commissions, and pretty generous with taking time off (as I went to the east coast in May 2002 to meet with someone about my book, movie talk). I wound up working there 14 months. In June and July 2003 I worked two months as a debt collector. That was interesting.
I wound up having three significant interviews for IT jobs while still in Minneapolis (until 2003/8). All three sounded possibly promising, and two required moving back to the east coast. I went 0 for 3, with specific problems in each case.
In the spring of 2002 I did have a gig at home, making up a certification test for Brainbench on business ethics. That was interesting.
Back “home” I took another “telemarketing” job, this time selling subscriptions for the National Symphony, through a Canadian company called Arts Marketing. Retirees did work there, but also so did people who had been laid off from much more lucrative conventional jobs. I stopped after two months because they were doing some things illegally (calling past the curfew).
Yes, I lived with Mother, dependent somewhat. Not something to be proud of.
I looked at a number of “proletariat” things, including delivering newspapers at night, and another debt collectors job (an inconvenient distance away) with a more complicated setup than the one in Minneapolis. . I found out from television in March 2004 that in Virginia you could substitute teach without a license. I started subbing on April 30. I’ll refer to a reference for details (there are three other similar files on this directory). But my own childlessness (and lack of previous siblings) made contemplation of manipulation of immature students to discipline impossible to contemplate.
I applied to be a gate agent at Dulles for the new Independence Air. You had to give a public speech for the interview. I didn’t get hired but I got two free roundtrip tickets as a reward for trying. I made quick weekend trips to Atlanta and Tampa in late 2004. Actually, in Minnesota I had visited a job fair to become a TSA screening officer, but there was some confusion as to what pay grade I could enter if I were to do it. It also appeared to me that (in comparison to the military) there might be an issue with sexual orientation (and doing pat-downs) although I can’t verify this was really true.
I applied to become a letter carrier, and that was a near miss (Nov. 2004). The main hangup was my accidental hip fracture in Minneapolis in 1998 and the inability to get my medical records.
I did have a few telephone interviews for mainframe programming jobs in various cities. I do wonder now if my leaky “online reputation” was becoming a factor.
In 2005, two life insurance companies contacted me about becoming an agent. (Could I sell what I had once earned a living off of with programming? It sounds like karma.) I actually followed through with New York Life (in Tyson’s Corner) to the third interview. I had also looked at one job in Minneapolis (in 2003) selling specifically selling the conversion of whole life policies to term. Now really, can I imagine the idea of cold-calling and pestering people to sell them things? Yet, that’s how you “play ball” with the system.
I would get unsolicited calls for cheesy jobs. In 2009 (shortly before Mother started getting much worse) there was a call for a job supervising youths you would roam a shopping mall trying to raise money for charity. I got calls for jobs that sounded like selling subprime mortgages. We know where that wound up (in 2008).
There was the possibility of jobs doing customer service at home on your home computer. I really wonder about how the security could work well enough (I had an XP desktop downstairs).
In the summer of 2009 we had a lawyer draw up a trust for mother. She did have more assets that I knew about when I moved back. The total of all her caregiving costs in the final 18 months of her life came to about $84000 as I recall.
We all know that new kinds of self-employment, mainly becoming an Uber or Lyft driver with one’s own car. (I had actually looked at what driving a taxi could be like in Minneapolis – you lease the taxi.) This started coming into notice in 2009. Could I be aggressive enough in traffic as a driver, often in dangerous DC areas?
Probably the most suitable job I was solicited for was becoming a tax preparer at HR Block locally, starting at something like $9 an hour.
In 2010 (the last year of mother’s life at home, with caregivers now) I took a more regular job, doing the diennial Census, mainly getting interviews for people who had not mailed or answered the census online. That was interesting. I did two rounds of that. I got invited to work for the Current Population Survey of Census in late 2010, but mother’s situation was so critical that it was put on hold. After her passing, I went to training in Charlotte the first week of January 2011. In December, a lot happened in my life, including the passing of the repeal of DADT (I skipped into town for the ceremony when I got the cell call from a caregiver that she was suddenly failing fast.) Mother lived just long enough to see my “accomplishment” which she barely understood but hung on barely long enough to see happen.
The second Census job literally started “on the road” with travel for training, but it was remarkable to me how quickly my life had changed and I seemed to have my own personal agency back.
The job involved pretty intense work from home visiting and interviewing people for about 10 days every month. The rest of my time was pretty free. I kept the job through August 2011.
The trust allowed me to distribute 25% of the liquid assets to myself after nine months (to allow settling of lingering bills). The remaining 75% remained in her trust, which we rewrote in Feb. 2012 to make it a grantor trust, to make it easier to do the taxes. But it makes my own Social Security income taxable at a higher rate. We also places some of the assets only in my own name into another trust.
In 2016, while still in the Trust house, I did consider offering hosting to (GLBT) asylum seekers, an issie that was getting a lot of attention before the election. It did not quite work out, as far as hammering out the responsibilities and risks with other organizations. I did not consider the idea of renting to Airbnb or using it (I don’t like records kept on me as a consumer). At the end of 2011 I had volunteered once to deliver food for Food and Friends in northern VA (Alexandria) during Christmas and it went well (it had been rather like a census assignment!). For Thanksgiving 2016 I signed up, but learned I might have to drive in SE DC. I backed out, could not take the risk given the reputation of the neighborhood. Is this about cowardice in the face of having to share other people’s risks? (Look at what would happen in a few years with Covid). Well, I didn’t have the social inclination to expect attention (or beg) if something bad did happen. It was a disturbing little incident.
In 2017 I sold the family house to a developer for neo and moved into a smaller condo in nearby Falls Church. Some of the increased liquidity was deposited into my own account.
Mother’s trust can cover supplemental medical expenses (like my implants in 2013), a longterm care policy, as well as the condo dues, repairs or appliances. It does not cover my car (as this was always personal).
My own account includes an annuity which makes a payment. That payment is fed back to the MDB trust as a kind of “rent”, from which distributions are made to a number of non-profits. Some of these were recipients of contributions from Mother when she was alive, and a few are beneficiaries Outside of this arrangement, further contributions are not to be made to beneficiaries while I am alive.
So that’s the financial environment behind the books and web presence.
It would seem that I have indeed been “privileged”.
Inheritances often come with “strings”. Usually estates are designed around preserving family lines and taking care of those with special needs within the family. We don’t have that situation directly now. It is usually possible to do early distributions (like up to 1% a year of the liquid value of a trust) for special needs within a family. Normally that can’t be requested by a beneficiary that is an organization. But conceivably I could sponsor an individual (child) with a non profit and a 1% draw could be done for “them”. The early benefit is supposed to go to an individual that I (or the estate executor) have a personal connection to, not just to an organization. This idea has been vetted with one beneficiary without a conclusive response.
You see what’s shaping up. Because of inherited wealth (as well as accumulated from other sources during working career), I am able to put my own ideas out without asking consumers to pay for them Without having to pester them with ads or email lists or mandatory subscriptions. Of course, all of these have bad reputations. Yes, I don’t want to make people worry about spam from me, or viruses, or being interrupted or pestered to buy things. That’s why passive advertising (through search engines) in the early days of Web 1.0 worked so well for me, relatively speaking. But that’s the way the game is played. That’s what you have to do to play ball. And I “get out of it”.
I could have retooled differently, learning to do content through video, like around 2013 or so. (That’s when I wrote DADT III book). Actually, I have intended to do that with my music (but entering large volumes of music into Avid Sibelius has turned out to be more challenging than I had expected.) But video works best with consumerist, non-political content. I have been preoccupied with getting content out quickly, so blogs were much simpler.
The far Left has pounced on inequity (and perhaps the white nationalist threat from Trumpism) with its own forms of identarianism, preaching that oppression is always about one group dominating another. Hence we see critical theory, leading some to call for group reparations.
Yet in earlier times, the focus was more on how individuals should be expected to behave, not just what groups they belong to and share karma of. There used to be more focus on the privilege that comes from “inherited wealth” (as I recall from one cold evening in a Newark NJ tenement spying on the People’s Party of New Jersey in December 1972). That could lead to a focus on social credit, China style, where an individual’s social credit score is even put on the block chain, as if it were some kind of digital currency!
It would seem to me, for example, that someone with inherited wealth should not be allowed to ask for donations on line, as from Patreon (although I don’t see any such rule in their TOS – I did look out of curiosity after their cancellations starting in 2018).
I can see we could be faced with a situation where someone with too much “privilege” could be denied the right to be heard online (outside actual legitimate commerce) unless “they” are first willing to join with others in some sort of approved collective reparative effort. Yes, this does sound very Marxist. The ideas that “silence is violence” and that affirmative anti-racism (and some sort of public “purification” or “bending the knee”) is to be demanded of (white?) people sounds like a variation of this idea. “Privilege” can be cast as a personal moral stain, where the individual is looked at as a thief of another person’s labor and risk taking. This used to be part of the (vengeful) moral philosophy of communism, most of all Maoism during the 60s Cultural Revolution in China. But oddly if also fits into some of the ideas of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2018 book “Skin in the Game”.
Yet you can turn this around. Follow the reasoning. If you are able to influence policy from a distance ( (a sort of “light year” shield) with self-publication, in theory you should care about what people do with the results. That means you should care about the people personally, even though you did not bring them into the world or directly cause their problems (you could have exploited their labor). That means, individually, “losers” (who were not part of your own family or personal orbit) need to mean something personally to you, even though they may have individually done badly. They will often maintain they have failed because they are attacked by others (like police) for perceived membership in a marginalized group, and sometimes this will be the case. You can’t let them be beneath you. You have to be prepared to join them and fight for them at some point if true enemies threaten them, even if your own individual soapbox has been taken away from you. That means “solidarity” with those whom you have felt moral opprobrium about before. You may need to be prepared to let them into your life. This can get to be a particularly dangerous situation if authoritarianism (especially from the right) actually threatens. Other societies throughout history have faced this all the time. We, in the US, had not since WWII until recently.
jboushka 