The big lie

 Creatives have been sold the myth that you will either be rich + famous or poor and unknown. It is a lie. We are entering the era of the middle class artist.

We have been fed the story that if you pursue a career in the creative arts, you will either be a) so fucking poor and unknown or b) so fucking rich and famous. This binary (as so many binaries are) is a lie.

Society, capitalism, gatekeepers, hustle culture, technofeudalist computer overlords, and any number of ancient cultural forces, perpetuate this myth to scare artists. To pit creatives against each other. To exhaust us. To keep us from trying. To keep us in 'acceptable' employment. To steal artist's wealth and keep it for themselves. Fuck this story.

The thing is, bigness is not a natural law. It is an ideology worshiped by huge corporations because, unlike small creators, they actually do need it to survive.

Big companies need huge revenues or they die. Marvel invested an estimated $275,000,000 in Thunderbolts. After accounting for all the costs associated with distribution and marketing, it needed to make just under half a billion dollars to break even. Spoiler, it didn't.

When you think about your careers as artists, I want you to consider that you don't need to be working towards convincing a suit that you need a quarter of a billion dollar investment. You don't need to build an empire in order to be successful.

SECRET THIRD OPTION: THE MIDDLE CLASS CREATIVE

I went to a Substack summer party in London a week ago. I looked around at all the writers and I thought, this is fucking it. This is the creative class. Not everyone would've been a full time writer there, but many of us were, and I would dare say everyone made some money with their art. We were not Stephen King. We were not George R R Martin. It was Amie! It was Claire Venue! It was David Larbi, it was Jess Pain and Emma Gannon. All of us doing what we love with our life. None of us needing to be in the top 0.001% of writers in order to do this professionally.

What if you don't need a ridiculously lucky break to be a pro artist? What if there are more and more ways to make this work without needing to be an outlier? What if you don't need to go viral to become viable? What if you don't need a huge investment to make it work? What if you don't need millions of people seeing your work? What if you don't need a 7 figure, 3 book deal with a big 5 publisher?

What if you found a couple hundred people who wanted to pay you 8 dollars a month for your writing? What if those same people all bought the books you self pub as soon as they come out? What if you need 1,000 people obsessed with you and your vision. -- Amie McNee

www.amiemcnee.com 

"Free market" capitalism ...

 ... is horseshit and it always has been.

 

How I learned to hate the bomb

 My volunteer coordinator over at Washington Against Nuclear Weapons graciously published my essay on growing up in Nevada when the Test Site (and the area south of Fallon) were still doing "sub-critical tests."

It's here and worth a gander.

Hello Alzheimer's!

 Just in time for my 59th birthday, I get still more confirmation that my chronic fatigue and weird forgetfulness has a medical scientific basis. I hate being spayed.

Getting both ovaries removed comes at serious cognitive cost

 

I met more women online and in the waiting room of the cancer clinic in 2022 who were 25 to 35 years old, whose oncologists told them they needed a complete (or "radical") hysterectomy so their ovaries (and all the tissue near them) were no longer pumping out estrogen. 

I get it. Estrogen is bad, it makes cells grow, especially cancer cells. But is spaying a young woman really the answer? Do they do this to male patients? Oh, hell no.

I'm A Virgo

 Boots Riley is a genius.

And Charles Mudede at The Stranger agrees.

A shed on the side of the road

I had not been back to the Vancouver, Washington area in seven years. Was shocked at how fast and how big the hyper-gentrification of slope-shouldered "Fort" has been.

 

When I moved here in early January 2015, I experienced a) a "no cause" eviction, b) a psychotic drunk who pissed on my Toyota because he hated having a roommate and c) a power-mad little Hipster all within the first five months. My housing situation in Vancouver was like a Stephen King-inspired nightmare I couldn't wake up from.

In May, I rented a room in a basement from a Millennial for $700/month. I thought I would only be there for a few months. Instead, it was almost ten months. I was so happy when I moved out of that over-rated 'burg I practically kissed the stained carpet of the $550/month one bedroom I found.

No surprise, it's now even more expensive then it was back then.

In June 2015, in a fit of desperation I stopped at a weird weekly motel on NE Hazel Dell Ave with a FOR RENT sign. There were five tiny motel rooms planted flush to the gravel driveway. It looked like a place where junkies went to die in in the 1980s. The "unit" I was shown was a "studio" with a tiny bathroom and no kitchen, maybe 200 square feet. They wanted $600 first, last, plus a $400 no-refund deposit. And I would have had to put down a $300 deposit with the utility company for electric, gas and water. That was $1,900 just to move in. And there was a $35 application fee. I was making $12 an hour.

And everybody wonders why the homeless situation in Portland and in Washington state is so bad.

The FOR RENT sign in front of that creepy weekly motel was gone a week after I looked at it.

The Big Lie (since 1983)

 At about the 11 minute mark ...

The U.S. will hit debt limit January 26, 2023.

What’s really creepy is (the Republicans) are going to start threatening Medicare and Social Security. They will do that by saying mandatory spending – there are two kinds of spending: discretionary and mandatory. Social Security and Medicare are mandatory. (The Republicans) want to put that in the discretionary column. This is exactly what Ronald Reagan did. Reagan decided to tell you a lie, he told you the same lie in 1983 (the GOP) are telling you now. He said “Social Security and Medicare they’re gonna default, they’re going bankrupt!” None of that is true.

What is true is we need to raise the cap on salaries because up to $110,000 a year, you pay into Social Security and Medicare. After that, people who make more than $110,000 and one cent are un-taxed for Social Security and Medicare. If you make a million dollars, you only pay into Social Security and Medicare on your first paycheck, that's it!

Reagan told the same lie. He said Social Security and Medicare would be bankrupt because of the Baby Boomers by 2010. So he raised the Social Security tax by $2.7 trillion. Social Security now is short about $49 to $50 billion every year. Where did this $2.7 trillion go? It didn’t go to the Social Security trust or the Medicare trust fund, no, no. Reagan put that $2.7 trillion he raised into the General Fund. They did this so they could use the money for tax cuts for the wealthy. Now, we who are ready to collect Social Security realize that we raised $2.7 trillion not for our Social Security, but for tax cuts for the wealthy. Anything in the General Fund can be used for any damn thing that Congress wants.