How I’m learning to break the rules
This is a post I wrote for Freak Revolution, and it’s running there today in its entirety. I’m posting a teaser here because I’m absolutely in love with it and don’t want you to miss it.
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So I’ve finally realized why I like you freaks so much. It’s because you remind me in a very real way that a person can not toe the line, not follow the rules, not adhere to a dress code or a behavior code or whatever the fuck else… and still do just fine in this rather straightlaced society of ours.
Let me explain.
I’ve always been a pretty down-the-middle sort of a guy from all outside appearances. YES, I swear a lot and YES, I have some controversial perspectives on things and YES, I can be kind of “out there” in personality and sense of humor and whatnot.
But I have no tattoos. I have no body modifications. I’ve never dyed my hair an odd color, unless you count bleaching, once, in college, when I was “really crazy.”
Okay, so what? “Way to be surface level, Johnny,” you may be thinking.
But I’ve also never really bucked authority. I’ve never paid a bill late, or not paid it at all. I’ve never done something in a way that was patently WRONG according to every rule that our society has and then stood there and said, “Okay… so what are you going to do about it?”
>> Read the rest of this post on Freak Revolution
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Free Wordpress blogs until Thursday!
You know you want a blog. You know you need a site for your new business, or for writing about your cat, or for telling the latest dick jokes.
You know you can’t make any money online without a blog.
Well, luckily, I’m setting up self-hosted Wordpress blogs for free until the end of the month. Which is the same as the end of the year. Which is the same as “through Thursday.”
(This is a repeat of the very popular promotion that started the Johnny B. Truant biz back in April of this year, when I offered free blogs to IttyBiz.com readers. Why am I doing it again? Because I can still make money doing it, and you can get something for essentially nothing. I say “essentially” because you’ll still have to pay for website hosting, but you’re going to need that regardless.)
So yeah:
1. Get your free blog by Thursday by going to this page, reading through it, and “buying” a $0 blog.
2. Tell your friends to do the same.
3. Remember, if you would like to work with me in any other way (including tech coaching or small business consulting), my rates are going up for all of those services after Thursday, too — significantly, in many cases. So get your order in now, yo. (You’ll have two months to use any consulting you buy, so feel free to stock up now and use throughout January and February.)
Free blogs. Seriously.
But remember, THE FREE BLOGS PROMOTION ENDS ON THURSDAY. So go get one now before I have to start chasing you with a rake.
Christmas is gay
NOTE: I wrote this post last Christmas season. But since it’s funny and offensive and most of you have never seen it before, I’m running it again.
I was on a forum the other day when someone brought up the inconvenient hypothesis that saying, “That’s gay” might be offensive to gay people.
Typically, I’m a nonconfrontational offender. When I’m alone, I tend to think, “If someone is offended, that’s their problem.” It’s the same philosophy I use when eating meat. I love meat, but I have to pretend it wasn’t at one time frolicking in nature. I’ll let others kill for me, but if the apocalypse came tomorrow and I was suddenly required to kill my own food, I’d become a vegetarian. Same with offense. Once I can put a face together with someone being actually hurt, I often will pussy out and stop. Damn idiotic compassion. Knew I should stop following the Dalai Lama.
“There are worse things,” said my gay friend Nick when I asked his opinion, “but in a perfect world, I kind of wish that expression would just go away.”
Dammit. He was being cool about it, but the handwriting was on the wall. At heart, it bothered him.
He then added that his cousin keeps telling him how gay he is. She’s not doing it on purpose, either.
“She just can’t figure it out,” Nick told me. “Bless her poor, stupid heart.”
You’re probably wondering why I’m sweating any of this, but what you don’t know is that the gay arrow is among the largest and most powerful in my quiver. American Idol is gay, High School Musical is gay, Dancing with the Stars is gay, and the new Ronald McDonald is gay squared. There is no synonym to the way I use “gay.” “Lame” doesn’t cut it. “Dumb” doesn’t cut it. There is a certain particular species of lame/dumb to all of those things that implies that not only do they suck, but that they do so in a Bettie Boop wig, tap-dancing around with their penises tucked back between their legs.
“What if I’m not meaning for it to imply homosexuality in any way?” I begged. “What if it’s just a homonym that is actually an entirely different word, like ‘road’ and ‘rode?’ ”
“But it’s g-a-y, right?” Nick asked.
“A homonym that’s spelled the same way, then. Or maybe it could be g-h-e-y.”
“Look,” he told me, “use it if you want, seriously. Like I said, it’s not a big deal to me. But it will offend some gays, yes.”
Great. That’s like one of my black friends saying, “Well… I guess you could somehow justify referring to that hairstyle as ‘niggery.’ “
I sighed. “Times really do change. It’s funny – it was only 35 years ago that Carly Simon was able to score a major hit with, ‘You’re So Gay.’ “
“I don’t think that’s right,” he said.
“Well, between thirty and forty years, anyway,” I said.
Honestly, I think it’s all kind of unfair. Homosexuals annexed that word without notice. Overnight, it went from referring to a state of happiness and joy to one of wanting to have sex with dudes. Like, Liberace was always so bubbly and happy. In days past, you could have said he was gay. But then all of that changed.
And all of this at the gayest time of year. Revelers are gay. Tidings are gay. Hell, it’s December 6th, so thirty or forty years back, this was all one big gay season. “How are you today, Ted?” a man would ask his neighbor. “Very gay, thank you!” the other would reply. “I’ve never been so gay, in fact! And you, Roger – you’re also looking mightily gay. How’s the family? Gay, I imagine?”
As for us, we put up our Christmas tree today. While we were doing it, I made a point to think about how gay it was. I figured Nick wouldn’t mind. The true holiday spirit is one of universal gayness. This is the time of year that we can all be gay together as a people. We decorated; we hung tinsel; we listened to old music. If we wanted, we could even have roasted nuts over the fire.
I’m working on making peace with all of it. And Nick? He’s happy I’m trying.
“You should be my ambassador to the gay community,” I told him in the spirit of the gay holiday. “You know, help me sell some of my books across the rainbow border.”
“The cover art may need to change if you want me to do that,” he said, having seen the dog I placed on the cover of May Contain Nuts. “As it stands, your title implies an expectation that the book does not meet.”
I thought that was a funny thing to say, so I laughed and reveled in my holiday spirit of infinite gayness toward all mankind. I guess I can live without saying “that’s gay,” though I will indeed miss it. Perhaps I can find something less offensive, more universal.
But really, when you think about it, the whole situation is pretty retarded.
Cash is king
So I’ve decided that credit sucks really giant hairy balls and that I’m through with it.
See, I’m now in the trap that so many people end up getting into. And dammit, I tried to be so wary of that trap. Even though I thought I was a responsible spender and even though I played by the rules of consuming very carefully, I still got sucked right in and am now like every poor asshole I used to look down my nose at, paying a bunch of money each month toward interest payments on credit and loans.
I didn’t decide that I had to have a big screen TV when I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t really over-indulge. Not at the start.
I blame it on the real estate.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may know that I have some “really awesome” investment real estate — and I’m using “quotes” around that to indicate something that isn’t “true” at all, kind of like if I were to refer to political “integrity.” My real estate, in fact, is so awesome that it sucked a few thousand bucks out of my life each month.
And, well, you can’t just let that shit go. So you have to borrow from here and there to make up the difference, wherever you can. I borrowed from my checking account, which meant that I couldn’t pay off the credit card in full each month like I used to. I borrowed from credit lines until they were full. And then in a fit of consumerist brilliance, I decided that I had to have this fantastic new lawnmower that saves me like four hours each weekend in the summertime, and so I got it… on credit.
I’m not ordinarily this stupid. Honestly. I’m not “that guy” who needs the sound system and so buys it on the 30-days-same-as-cash plan. The lawnmower was a dumb purchase (although I’d do it again; I prefer spending my weekends with my kids to sitting on a mower), but other than that, almost all of my mess was thanks to those fucking investment properties. You know, the “investment” properties.
So as I’m beginning to dig myself out of the real estate hole, I’ve made myself a few promises:
As I get out of debt, I will do so entirely. As in: Not only will all of my revolving debts go, but so will my home mortgage.
I will not use credit again. Like, at all.
My dad lives in the Italian Market in Philadelphia. It’s a quirky place. He lives in an apartment above a warehouse, and the warehouse staff is like the cast of a cartoon. There’s one guy, Bob, who quits daily and who does each job that’s asked of him fully, but then will stand in one place with his arms crossed and not move until someone assigns him something else. Bob has run for mayor, been interviewed by the news as a government secret agent, and keeps applying for professorships at universities. Last week, Bob demanded double the salary of a woman with one arm because he has two arms. True stories, all.
But another quirk of the Market? Everything is done in cash. Everything.
Every worker is paid in cash at the end of each day.
When a truckload of merchandise arrives, the warehouse manager will pay for it in cold, hard cash.
These people are the reason for those stereotypes of people hiding money in mattresses and taping reserves up in their basement rafters. They don’t have bank accounts. They’re off the grid.
And I’m like, That’s fucking cool.
We’ve gotten really used to credit in our society. It’s easy to buy things without the need for cash — which is probably why we buy so damn much that we don’t need. Even if you pay off your credit card in full each month so that there are no finance charges, I still guarantee you’re buying a ton of stupid shit that you would never buy if you had to hand over bills to get it.
Cash makes you think about each purchase. It shows you in real bills that you keep in your pocket just how much you have left. It makes you say things like, “Meh, I won’t get a latte because if I do, I won’t be able to pick up dinner on the way home.”
I don’t care how disciplined you think you are. It’s psychologically far easier to hand over a card than an equivalent amount of dollars. You don’t have to think about it. Have you seen the credit terminals where you don’t even have to swipe your card, and where you only have to tap your card against the thing? Have you noticed that purchases under $20 no longer require a signature? That’s to make buying faster and easier. No time or need to think.
It’s only a matter of time before a store will be able to scan your card without you having to take it out of your wallet. You’ll take what you want and walk out the door, and a sensor at the exit will recognize you and debit your account. Just like EZ-Pass sensors at turnpike toll booths.
Not me. Not anymore. I’ve started doing what I NEVER used to do. I’m now carrying cash and using it to pay for everything. I never used to carry even a dollar. Multiple times, I’ve had to fill out a form after driving on the turnpike because I forgot to bring toll money, and I have to have them bill me.
Now it’s cash. Cash and cash equivalents.
- I’m paying for large purchases with checks.
- I have recurring bills for website hosting, e-junkie, etc. that used to go on a credit card. I switched them to draw from the cash balance in my PayPal account.
- Some of those companies don’t accept PayPal. So I got a PayPal debit card with that nifty Mastercard logo on it, and gave them that number. I’m paying for aWeber like this, and GoToMeeting. It’s not credit; that amount just comes out of my PayPal account once a month.
I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now. And you know what? It’s really damn cool. Each month, my credit card bill comes and there are no new charges on it. So I can actually pay down the balance I’ve accrued.
And there’s also two surprising, personal side bonuses.
- I feel very unique and awesome, because nobody does this. Nobody pays for things with cash. There’s a new, profound feeling of “I’m doing this right.”
- I feel rich.
Take a look at #2 again. I’m not rich. Not in any objective way. I’m doing well, but I’m still digging out of the real estate hole and repairing the collateral damage it caused. I have a negative net worth. It’s negative enough that I can’t bring myself to ballpark what it might be.
But shit, man. I feel like Donald Trump.
Nobody goes out to dinner and pays in cash anymore. Last weekend, our waitress didn’t even seem to know what to do with the bills I had put in the little folder thingy. I never used to carry even five dollars, and here I am pulling out fifty, in real bills.
And you get to say things like, “Keep the change.”
If you never carry cash, I want you to try something. Put your credit card away for a week. Go get two hundred dollars in cash. Throughout the week, pay for things with cash that you’d normally charge: meals, casual purchases, office supplies, whatever. And check out how it feels.
Two hundred bucks isn’t much today. It’s maybe one and a half times the size of our normal grocery bill. But try walking around with that much in dollars and notice how it feels.
You may feel rich, like I do.
You may feel nervous, like someone will take it. But why would you think that? Has anyone ever robbed you before? Are you advertising the fact that you’re walking around with bills?
Dude. Just try it. You may like it. You may ditch the cards altogether, as I’m in the process of doing. You may learn to hate credit and loans as much as I have.
You may decide to work on paying off your mortgage, no matter how loudly the investment guys yell at you that it’s a stupid thing to do, because if you’re like me, you may find the freedom that would come at the end of a fully paid-off mortgage intoxicating.
Think about it. No bills other than utilities and taxes. How much more relaxed would you be? How quickly could your savings pile up? How easy and cool would it be to buy even big purchases down the road (like your next car) with cash equivalents, right out of the checking account?
This is so awesome. Cash is king.
