Assorted Notes

THURSDAY, 7 JULY 2011

The last time I was in South Africa, my mother told me my father was afraid that I was making the same mistakes as he did. I found it very interesting. Naturally I agreed with my mother, although my understanding of the issue was quite different.

If writing is the path I should take, the way of life I have to follow, then it can be said that I had lost my way during the last five years (and a few months). It can then be said that I have indeed made the same mistake as my father, by doing what I thought was “right” according to the standards of other people – or maybe my own standards were somewhat compromised, but that’s a story for another piece.

Does that mean the pursuit of profit over the past half-decade in more ways than I care to count has been a waste of time? I think not. Here are the reasons:

Reason one. I have learned how to publish my own writing. This includes everything from domain name registration to HTML and setting up WordPress sites, to preparing manuscripts for print-on-demand services like CreateSpace, CafePress and Lulu. There have also been lessons in marketing and experience with social media. I now feel comfortable introducing myself and exhibiting my work to an audience anywhere in the world.

In short, I learned a lot about things I knew next to nothing about before I started learning about them as part of the process of making money on the internet.

Reason two. A few years ago I wrote about how out of place I felt in the so-called World of Money. I looked at people who had money, and I envied them for the apparent ease with which they moved around in this mysterious world. It was clear that they had mastered the right vocabulary, they knew the right actions to take to make money, and they knew enough other people who possessed similar talents.

In this World of Money, I felt like the flustered, overwhelmed small town child who visits his cousins in the Big City.

Now, more than five years after starting my pursuit of profit and financial well-being, after reading (or at least downloading and sorting) hundreds of e-books on marketing and ways to make money, watching dozens of video tutorials, even serious investigations into the possibilities of online poker and Forex trading, I can say with a substantial degree of confidence that I no longer feel uncomfortable in the World of Money. More than that, I now see that what many of the people who had previously so impressed me with their supposed knowledge and money-making skills actually do every day is to just shut their eyes, throw the dice, and hope for the best.

Reason three. By the end of 2005, my inspiration for producing new material had begun to dry up. There was not much more I could or wanted to say about the many issues I had touched upon in my Personal Agenda project, and in the six months of writing that had followed its completion. Of course there were other topics I could have written about, but there was none that inspired me sufficiently, or about which I had enough confidence to write about.

Looking back, the many failures of the past five years, and the few – but significant – successes, as well as the wide range of subjects on which I have educated myself, and even people whom I have met through online forums and about whom I read, were exactly what I needed as a producer of literature.

Should I therefore have looked the other way in January 2006 when I caught a glimpse of that first of many ads that had wanted to sell me some instant wealth product? I sometimes wish I did. I sometimes wish I didn’t waste so much time on so much research and on so many projects that ultimately rendered absolutely no dividend – except for a cryptic side note that simply said, “This doesn’t work – or I can’t make it work.”

Before January 2006, I used to be confident about my choices. I regretted very few things I had done or did not do. It is now clear that the last five years were a good education: By making mistakes similar to mistakes my father had made thirty or forty years ago, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons.

I’m even tempted to say I’m a better person because of it.

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WEDNESDAY, 6 JULY 2011

South Africa is one of those countries which can be classified as a MAJOR FUCK-UP, despite remarkable human potential, natural beauty and mineral wealth.

South Africa was not a MAJOR FUCK-UP 350 years ago. Nguni-speaking tribes had started migrating down the coast of East Africa more than a thousand years earlier, with some heading south, and communities like the San and the Khoi did their thing on the West Coast and in the interior of Southern Africa. Then, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch arrived, and a while later the French and the Germans and some other lost European souls.

Now, despite what some historians and political orators would want you to believe, the mere arrival of the pale skins was not the cause of the MAJOR FUCK-UP. If they had simply told the San and the Khoi, “Listen, there’s a new game in town, and the game’s name is the-place-now-belongs-to-us. We know your language may not even contain the correct words to express private ownership and the company is the boss, but that’s how we do things where we come from. Plus, we have pipes that blow out lead balls in a flash that can floor any of you on the spot if you don’t want to co-operate,” one could argue that the Khoi and the San would have said, “Whatever, we’ve seen what the pipes and the balls can do, and these people look serious. Let’s go look for a better campsite.”

Problem was, the pale ones needed people to dig trenches, cut rocks, build walls, keep cattle, plant trees, and harvest fruit and vegetables. And the sailors and soldiers who had been recruited in the town and city squares of Holland and neighbouring countries could either not do all the work themselves, or they weren’t that keen on all the manual labour in the African sun.

Now, the market for manual labour could have worked out okay for all concerned if decent compensation had been offered. This, however, was where things started going horribly wrong. A most barbaric custom had seen a sharp upsurge in the century or so before the Western Europeans disembarked at Table Bay: the grabbing of free people, the slapping of chains on their hands and legs, and the violence with which they were forced to work against their will. This was where the MAJOR FUCK-UP entered the story.

People were captured in Angola, Madagascar, and elsewhere in Africa, forced onto ships, and given a simple choice: work for free in the sun and wind, in the heat of summer and the bitter months of winters, or die hungry and alone. The same choice was given to political prisoners of what is today Malaysia and Indonesia, and to other people who were brought to do work which the Dutch and the other Europeans were either too lazy to do, or which they simply didn’t want to do.

This thing of one group of people exploiting another group of people and robbing them of their freedom is, as any reasonable person could expect, not something that is quickly forgiven or forgotten.

Two hundred or so years later, the descendants of the European sailors and soldiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use oppressive measures to force brown and black men and women, and even children to work on farms and in other industries.

Closer to our own era, starting from the late nineteenth century, those pompous masters of white supremacy, the inhabitants of the British Isles, also lent a hand to ensure that South Africa ends up in the MAJOR FUCK-UP category. Using a variety of policies and regulations, they compelled thousands of black men to sell their labour on the mines, without allowing their families to settle down with them on the outskirts of the new industrial towns. These black workers, mostly unskilled according to Western standards, were paid a pittance for hours of hard labour digging wealth from the South African soil, all so that the masters of white rule could become ever more powerful and live in ever more grandiose and luxurious homes.

In short, injustice, cruelty and short-sightedness are not committed against one generation, and by the next generation everything is all right again and everyone sings songs and tell stories around the campfire. One group of individuals who squeeze life out of other groups of individuals leads in the best of cases to a FUCK-UP. Throw in racist social policy, lack of political representation, and an approach to education that makes it clear that the group who has the most power sees themselves as the masters of other groups, and you will thank your stars if you do not end up with a situation that is still a MAJOR FUCK-UP centuries later.

You can call it economic inequality; you can call it racism. In the end it comes down to a simple question: Who works for whom, and how much of a say do the ones who do the hard labour have in the whole business?

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WEDNESDAY, 6 JULY 2011

Why am I not making money with my writing? Why do I hardly ever think about it? And why is it that it can almost be considered a “stupid” question?

One of the main lessons I have learned about marketing and entrepreneurial ventures is the following: to be successful, the entrepreneur identifies a group of people who are either keen to move away from something (like being overweight), or eager to move to a certain point (for example, to improve a golf handicap). A further requirement is that this group of people should be willing to pay to get what they want, or to go where they want to be. The idea is for the entrepreneur to think of a way to assist these people to get away from the bad, or to feed their need; or for the marketer to identify a product that will make it possible, and to then convince the right people to purchase this product.

How do my writing projects fit into this understanding? Who would be my market? What demographic target group will I set my sights on? How aggressive should I market my “product” as the “solution” to their problems or aspirations?

The fact of the matter is that I am uncomfortable thinking of my notes on identity, on the struggle to find sense and possibly meaning in life, and on finding my place in the world as a product. I am okay with ultimately publishing selections of my material in print or electronic form and slapping a price on it. I am not okay with thinking of it as a product, similar to a guide that teaches you how to improve your tennis serve, or how to lose weight (important as these things may be).

But I still need to answer the question. Is there any way I can produce material that has commercial value? Are there topics I can write about that will draw the attention of a larger market? Is it possible that I can write for a market willing to pay for what I produce?

At one point I had the idea of doing something that has nothing to do with literature that will give me rent and food money, and then to spend the rest of my time on the free expression of my experience of reality, free of the contamination that comes with concern about whether the agents of commercial value will find acceptable what I write.

To some extent this is what I do by earning my bread and butter as an English teacher.

Still, I think the time is ripe to at least contemplate again whether or not I can make a living as a writer. Can I keep myself alive if my earthly existence depended on what I write?

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TUESDAY, 5 JULY 2011

Looking back over the last fifteen years (it suddenly doesn’t seem that long), I almost feel like saying: I should never have bothered with trying to make money. It’s obviously not my thing. It’s not what I’m supposed to do …

Of course, I can’t take the whole “what I’m supposed to do” story too far. It would imply Divine Calling, or Cosmic Assignment, and although I do occasionally touch on these themes for literary value, I cannot make them part of a rational argument – or I can, but this piece is not the place for it.

The question that does come to mind when I think of an alternative personal history since 1996 is what would I have written about?

The fact that I had to make money to survive, forced me, uncomfortable as it was, to negotiate with the world, as I have seen the world over the last fifteen years. I had to somehow find my place, or define my place, or scratch out a piece of turf for myself. I had to find out who and what I was – and is – IN THIS WORLD.

I had to do it because I needed money, and nobody offered any for nothing in return. Like most others of my generation and those before me, I had to exhibit my own potential value on the open labour market in the hope that someone would see something they could profit from. If this process failed to produce results in the land of my birth, then I had to look in other places.

To say that this process of making yourself useful for someone with money or become a homeless bum was not what I wanted to spend my time on for the last decade and a half is to merely scratch the surface. But, I had to do it. And this became my story: How I’ve been trying, since my mid-twenties, to negotiate with the so-called establishment. How I’ve been trying, as I wrote in May 1998, to settle my account with the establishment – to have the freedom to choose where, how and on what terms I will have a relationship with this world.

What would I have written about if I had come from an established, “old money” family, if I had the option to retreat to a cottage on the family estate? Would my writing have been any better? Would it have been more interesting? Would it have had more literary value? Would I have produced material with more commercial value?

Who knows? Perhaps it wasn’t, and still isn’t, part of my Cosmic Assignment, or my Divine Calling.

And if there is no assignment, or calling?

Then I still know: I have to write.

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TUESDAY, 21 JUNE 2011

It bothers me silly that I’m almost forty, and I [have very little money]. I remember ten years ago, on my thirtieth birthday, I was more or less broke. I thought: “Wow, thirty and broke.” Next Wednesday I’ll be forty.

To crown everything, I often think I am wasting my time chasing after money while my real task in life is – or perhaps used to be – to write. It is almost as if I have been taking a chance since 2006 to pursue money full-time, with the idea that I can return to my writing at a later stage. Five years on, and I’m starting to panic. For more than one reason.

WEDNESDAY, 22 JUNE 2011

One discovers what other 39/40-year-olds have already realised: The struggle continues.

MONDAY, 27 JUNE 2011

It happened to the hippies of ’69, and with the punks of ’79. It happened to the grunge rockers of the early nineties. It happens to super models, and it happened to a tennis player who won Wimbledon five times in a row in the late seventies and early eighties. It even happened to the teenage queens that Roger Waters sang about in 1992. Everyone gets older. (Except of course if you die young.)

THURSDAY, 28 JUNE 2011

The last day of my thirties. It’s been a long decade. A good one …

I suspect I feel like many other 39-year-olds have felt on the eve of a new decade: Can’t we just get it over and done with? I really just want to get on with the rest of my life.

What does it mean in any case to turn forty? Is there a universal meaning that applies to everyone who wonders about their lives on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of their entry into life?

What does it mean to me that I am forty years old tomorrow? What would it mean tomorrow to say I’m forty years old today?

I am alive.

I am grateful for that.

I love someone, and for this I am very grateful.

The same person loves me. I am particularly grateful for that.

I still believe in things. I still believe in my own potential. I still believe in my dreams.

And for this I am grateful.

The struggle continues – to be who and what I can be. And for that to be good.

SATURDAY, 2 JULY 2011

Whilst working up some anxiety about all the things I have to get done before I hit fifty, I crossed another obscure milestone: Fifteen years (and two days) ago I arrived in Northeast Asia.

I had turned 25 the previous day.

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