full bellies

You wouldn't guess that a week like the one I just spent at a cabin on an island by the sea would have me thinking sell-out thoughts, but it has. I have decided, at the tail end of a bunch of navel-gazing, to get some of those little advertising banners put on this website as a way of making money. Why, you might ask, would I give in in this (whorish) manner? I mean - advertising?!?

Granted, something like Google's Adsense is going to try to be target(that's you) specific - so they'll advertise stuff that's in some way related to the content of this site (like art supplies or enviro-friendly-biodegradable-edible-victoria's-secret-panties) - but the fact remains that I'd be giving the Evil Marketers direct access to you, the nice people I've come to know and trust and name my child after (Seriously! It's due in November! Make me an offer! Quick, before the wife reads this!). I really don't want you to buy stuff you don't need, and one of the most insidious ways THEY get you to do just that is to embed their products in stuff you're going to be looking at anyway, like movies and the chests of sexy people. So again, why would I even consider letting them get their fistulous little fisties on this website?

Well, I'll tell ya. The first thing you've got to do when you're planning on selling out is to "justify" convincingly enough that it will get you over the first conscience-bump until the habit/ambivalence factor kicks in. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that I like to eat. Say I'm married to a woman with a belly full of baby, and that they both like to eat as well - as do the black dog and cat demons currently haunting our pad. Let's also say that I have decided to drop out of my Master's program before I've even started, because my reason for going to school was to coast the yellow brick road of Teacherism instead of stumbling the stony, pot-holed path of Artisting - that for which I am, theoretically at least, best equipped. Lets say that because of this, I find myself at a crossroads feeling I can do either the smart thing or the right thing - and that the right thing seems to be to follow my gifts, work hard, and become a professional artist (that is, one who gets paid enough for making art that he doesn't have to do something stupid, like planting trees, to be able to continue to eat).

For the writing part of this "being an artist" thing, I could start sending letters hither and thither to this and that newspaper (dead medium) or magazine (shiny medium) and let them do the morally questionable work of finding the questionable marketing people who would, let's face it, be questionably paying my wage. I could do this, yes, but the fact is that I like being able to write whatever, whenever, and don't want to exist at the whims of some tyrannical editor who makes me re-write eighteen times for being "too inflammatory" or "too religious" or "not religious or inflammatory enough". I don't want to spend all my time running around trying to scare up writing work and worrying because the toilet's sprung a leak and we can't afford a plumber and the kid keeps crawling into the bathroom and splashing around in his fun little brownish wading pool. To top it all off, these clowns would be printing whatever I wrote on real live paper (soooo last century) - shiny, glossy bleached stuff that for the most part would end up in landfills because, let's face it, people are idiots.

Instead, I could cut out the middle man and let the advertisers drop their blood money right into my pockets. I'd save trees, time and stress, and I could stop actually paying money to be able to write on this site. Also, the reciprocal attention people like Google (because Google's a person, too) lavish on you when folks look at your site could mean a snowballing of attention towards the "peripheral" stuff I'd be trying to sell - my paintings.

Then I could pay Jon to spit-and-polish me some kind of "store" whereby I could regularly sell paintings, prints, t-shirts - whatever, which I could therefore feel justified in regularly producing. The upshot of this, in happy Joshland FantasyWorld, is that I could make enough money off creative work that all the people I work to feed could continue to eat and I could, conceivably, save up enough money that we could go back to Peru and volunteer at the orphanage and teach art clinics to poor kids who otherwise would probably be in the street, throwing rocks at people.

The bottom line is this: if Josh sells out just an eensy-weensy bit (and not even to some corporate-run magazine or some fifty-percent-grifting gallery owner), his family doesn't die and the poor kids and orphans get a chance. It seems so pure, and good, and logical.

So why do I still feel dirty?