It’s Not Like I am Asking for Money

By David Glenn Cox

This is a confession of sorts. Well, not so much a confession as an explanation. First and most importantly, I want to thank the nearly 40,000 of you who have read my blog in the last fourteen months. I am truly humbled, and so, I want to let you in on my little mercenary plan. Due to the yearlong quarantine, I have been watching a lot of reaction sailing videos. They run the full gamut from sincere to ridiculous. “My stripper girlfriend and I bought this sailing vessel. I’m going to repair the boat and make videos of my girlfriend walking around the boat in her string bikini and bending over a lot.”

One couple bought a boat needing massive repairs and after months of fiberglass up their nose have a boat worth twice the price of what they paid for it. But I would wager, if offered a chance to do it again on another boat would tell you to fuck off in a double-quick hurry. I’ve done that endless Bataan death march of eternal sanding where you don’t just wear out sandpaper as much you wear out sanders. You turn off the damn sander, and the noise is still running in your head.

I watch one couple because they bought this old wooden motor sailor rotted in every conceivable place there is to rot. Their first episode said, if I had any suggestions to leave them in the comments. I could not bring myself to mention “Insurance fire.” My biggest fear is that they will someday untie this boat and leave the safety of the harbor to become a full-blown menace to navigation. The gentleman involved seems to be the only man I have run across who knows less about sailboats than I do. He calls the “stern” the back of the boat, and it’s been removed. The keel has been removed along with the planking on the hull and the steery thing. Leaving the bulk of this rotting hulk suspended in mid-air while they build a new boat underneath. Since the engine compartment is exposed, they have decided to dismantle the engine room and paint the engine. After all, a forty-year-old boat rotting to pieces, what else could the engine require besides a couple of cans of spray paint?

My point is we all have dreams and mine is no crazier than most. Warn your children, writing is like heroin, but you don’t get high you just get hooked. I began this insanity more than twelve years ago. It was exciting and fun and lucrative. I could make money just by putting words on a page. I look back at it now like a flashback scene from an old black & white movie. The naive kid come to town chewed up by the big city and the big city ways. Every morning I get up at two or three o’clock in the morning and write. Yes, I do know how crazy that sounds, but I can’t stop. I gave up baseball to chase girls. I took up the guitar to assist in chasing of girls. Now, I’ve caught my quota, and I write.

But all these reaction channels seem to have one thing in common. They all want me to send them money. “Help me raise the $250,000 needed to rebuild my $50,000 sailboat.” Me? I don’t want your money, and I would feel guilty even asking for it. I was homeless for four years and never begged once, I’m not about to start now. My plan was inspired by the comedian Chris Rock. He was talking about how Shaquille O’Neil wasn’t rich. The guy that paid Shaq all those millions, he was rich. Can you see Shaq making You Tube videos? “Send me a dollar, and I’ll play basketball for you.” My plan devious as it is, is rather than finding a million people to send me a dollar to find one unsuspecting Billionaire to send me a million dollars. Some billionaire bastard fleecing the proletariat, who wouldn’t miss the money anyway. A Robinhood’s revenge scenario where the billionaire hates every word I write, but so fears my audience that he would give me a raise before he’d ever let me leave.

There are only two ways to get ahead in this business, years of study and long hours of hard work or be a celebrity. You could try your hand at rewriting Ulysses. But you would probably have more success with, “Donald’s Trump’s 100 favorite crayon drawings” or “My Dog Pooped on the Rug and 99 other meaningful life lessons.”

You have to have an audience, now what the big boys and girls do is they buy their audience. The Daily Caller had a two-million-dollar budget. They hire companies to promote their blog and use bots to manipulate the figures. They buy the first hundred thousand copies of their own book and use it to get on the best seller list. All it takes is money, or you can do what you do organically and hope for the best. Friends don’t ask friends for money. And I’m your friend and I don’t want your money. I want that rich fucker’s money, because we will all just feel better about it that way! I know I’ll feel better about it, and I’m sure you would too. None of those uncomfortable feelings, “The dude just hit me up for a buck, did he ask you for a buck too?”

Facebook has offered me a $10 credit to advertise my blog all the way to the edge of town, but it exceeds my advertising budget by ten dollars. You know, if my father had been John McCain or John Holmes this would all be a lot easier for all of us. However, if you like what I do, as a friend do me a solid. Hit the Like and Share button, if there is no Share button copy and paste the web address into your browser. Come on, do me a favor! It is not like I am asking for money!

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”
― Woody Guthrie