A Plan

I am trying to come up with a plan, but everything seems so absurd. I have been going along with the economy and the "recovery", but that hasn't panned out and things just seem to be getting worse. Having survived as a brick and mortar / internet business without any financing has been my main accomplishment to-date, but now it is in my personal life that I can't make ends meet and I need a plan. Counting on an increase in business doesn't seem safe as I have reduced my staff and done everything I can to create more business and nothing really helps these days. I have started running ads on Google to increase my online sales, but that is just creating a new bill that I may not be able to pay. All of the logical methods are as risky than my absurd concepts that are cheaper and just as likely to fail as the more reasonable ideas. My conundrum about what to do to save my home is filled with pitfalls, that make the most conservative ideas seem as risky as doing nothing. Nothing is guaranteed to fail and spending any income to make money also will deplete my resources to where I can't survive or pay my bills. A plan may only be a chart to disaster, but if you are in unknown waters it is a good suggestion to have a chart.

Truly I simply like making things and indirectly I have become a business person to pay my bills and provide for my family. At times it seemed altruistic, but the underlying responsibility to provide is built into my Greek genes. I always wanted to be rich and I have located myself in an area where rich people live figuring that at least my kids will have the benefits of the good schools and the safe environment that an affluent geography provides. I could and most probably will end up living anywhere, either on a boat in the Bay for free as an Anchor Out or as a camper in my truck when all else fails. My job now is to come up with a plan to try and keep those possibilities from happening. I need to keep my existence going for the sake of the children, my wife and the few helpers I have that are keeping the store running in Los Angeles. I don't think my contributions to society are that great that I must be saved, but I do want to continue my work on designing a structure that will withstand weathering and be light enough to be considered a mobile home. I suppose that my efforts on that front are just in case I fail at creating a successful plan, then I will have that mobile photo fresco home.

There is no easy answer since business logic doesn't mean success any more. I may be getting old and need to accept that I can't generate sales and money the way I used to. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a justified fictional reference here, but I don't like the way it ended, so I am reluctant to use it as an example. It is easier for me to fail than it is to give up and the one thing I remember about the movie version of the Death of a Salesman is that the main character didn't give up, he just died. A plan to a way to keep fighting because no matter how absurd attempts at success may be, they are all I have. I don't have deep pockets or loans or a magic parachute to exit my situation with. I don't even like the idea of paying my increased mortgage payments to delay foreclosure, but I don't consider it as rent so much as paying for a place to keep my life stable and keep my kids in school for a few more years until I can send them off on their own. This may be a luxury that they don't deserve, but I need to try and do what I can to allow them to stay on track.

The Plan: Create brick stickers to generate income that can be used to save my home and work space which will allow me to continue my research at creating photo fresco brick panels that can be used to build lightweight shelters. This can be reduced to Sell stickers to Generate income, but without the explanation there doesn't seem to be a motivation for people to buy my stickers. I will explain the plan below.

I have created a variety of products, from Christmas ornaments to Keychains, but each thing that I may as a product is just another product on the shelf. Some of them sell, but nothing has taken off and been successful beyond the cost to make them profitable enough to make any money or to devote my time to them. I am not giving up my day job of selling t-shirts online and managing my retail store in Los Angeles, but that isn't enough income to make ends meet, so the alternative new products have been attempts to fill the monetary hole. As my resources have dwindled, so has my patience and ability to finance new products, which means I can't make a bunch of stuff and sit around and wait for it to sell. I am living day to day and order to order, so my products can't wait for me to do a trade show or to wait until they go viral to make money. I have to be able to make something that doesn't cost much and has enough of a markup that the profit can be dedicated to my personal bills. Still I have to make something, I have to have some item or thing to give to people or I don't know how to make money. I don't want to make my lifestyle a contribution, but I do want to make something that has added value and symbolism is all that is left to work with. The brick is my symbol and a brick sticker has the markup potential and versatility to work as a product that I can sell to tell my story and make a statement that is consistent with my beliefs. Trust Me, I would do things that are contrary to my beliefs if I thought it would make a difference, but if you have to go out swinging then you may as well support your own spirit.

There isn't much time to work with and I can't count on this blog as any sort of traffic drive, but I write here to document my efforts and to try and provide a basis for my actions. I have a mortgage that is currently above $3500 a month and I have been trying to negotiate or modify the mortgage with the bank to no avail. Every day I wake up and wait for the phone to ring thinking that once I get a response I can stop thinking about the bank and go back to work. Still, no response. Assuming I get the modification before I go into foreclosure then I would still end up with a $2-2500 mortgage, which I think I can pay if I wasn't distracted by the negotiation. I know I can't pay the $3500 or more, if interest rates go higher. I know other people have worse situations than this, but I have to work within my parameters in order to survive and if things don't look good for me then I can only imagine that things are also much worse for others.

I've sat through a weekend at a NACA event and witnessed the carnage of the banking system on homeowners, or home lien owners, to be more exact. Nobody owns a home anymore, we rent it from the bank until we die. This is a desperate situation and no matter what the Obama administration has done our political and legal architecture has allowed the banks to continue to exploit the housing crisis in America. I don't deserve to own a home any more than the next person does, but I can't give up what has been created and I want my kids to be able to get through High School which means at least 5 years of existence in my current residence. I can't count on being able to afford the taxes and cost of my residence beyond my productive life, but if I can delay having to abandon my home until then, then it won't matter as much. I don't personally need that much to survive and I know how to get by on my own, but for now my life isn't just about survival.

My work has provided me with income that has provided me with a home and my instincts are what have driven me in my work, which means I can't stop now. My instincts say find something you can afford to make and put it out there with the honest facts that it isn't just a business, but a life that I am providing for. I want to be successful without making it personal, but that hasn't worked. My bricks are my symbol and if I can make $5 for each brick sticker I sell then if I can sell 100 stickers a month I can create enough profit to save my home and continue my work. My work isn't the end all be all, but I do feel I am working on a project that can also provide shelter to others in an affordable artistic way, previously detailed in many post on this blog.

1,000 stickers a month, which is about 35 stickers a day. Hmmmmm, this doesn't count the time that it takes me to make the stickers and continue my other two jobs, so let me recalculate. 20 days a month would equal selling 50 stickers a day at $5/ea. The goal here is to keep my expenses down, so I may have to sell them on the street by walking around and actually handing them to people. This means that I would have to commit to selling ten an hour for at least five hours a day, including some commute and other time or a full 8 hour a day job when you include the facts of getting to and from a place to sell things to people. If it works, I can do it. I can multiply my presence by using my website and retail store in Los Angeles to also sell the stickers, but I can't count on them to sell more than 1-5 a day without making it a big deal on either and distracting my other business operations. I have a stack of 30 stickers, not enough to make a days work, but enough to do a test.

I think I am going to go out tomorrow and make a go at it. I may ask for donations and/or say that the full stickers are $5/ea, but give away a free one made from scraps in the meantime as a promotion. I don't want to confuse the idea of saving my house, but the bricks represent a mixture of providing a shelter for my family, for others and defiance to the banking system, even though the money raised would mostly be going to the bank. I don't like that fact, but without the bank creating this situation I may not have the resolve to try this sort of absurd approach to solving my problems. I can only hope that by solving my problems I can also solve or help others.

I have considered printing or making stencils for words to go onto the Brickers, but my wife indicated that my referenced were hateful. I think things like DEFIANT, PROTEST and so on, would be a contrast to the types of pleasant words often found inscribed on rocks. I would like to think that the bricks represent a protest of sorts, but I need to increase my vocabulary before this makes sense. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment so that I can decide if I should move that concept forward. I would like to comment myself that it is very easy to write your own comments or words on a brick sticker and it can be posted somewhere around your town as a personal protest to the mortgage situation that our country faces. I will provide a link so that you can buy one of these stickers online too.

Brick Stickers - Stickers

Cover your car with brickers or cover a cardboard box and make it ur home.

Back to the Bricks

Back to the Bricks I go. Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a Brick. I had two great dreams last night. One where the dashboard in my old truck, 1972 Ford F250, was booted up and it ran on the Android operating system. And the second invention in my dream had a computer display mounted inside the wooden frames I am making thereby giving the wall same functions of a flat screen panel. The truck was the most impressive dream world invention, but the flat panels into the wall is the most realistic and plausible.

I had a great success with using acrylic paints as the gel coat and bonding them to plaster, but I am worried that it may only be forming a skin type bond that could release once the plaster dries more. Acrylic paints are strange materials in that they often seem to bond to things, then later they pop off and release from other materials. I was excited by the initial successes and did a few experiments to see just how quick I could get some acrylic to set up and bond with the plaster, but this is when I pushed the process to quickly and failed. I ran out of Tufstone and mixed in some Duracal then attempted to bond that to the acrylic. The problem was that the acrylic didn't dry for more than 2 hours and the mixture of plaster only dried for another two hours, so I think I was too anxious to make things go that quick and that is when I saw the acrylic partially peel away leaving a skin like surface dangling from the cement. I was able to peel that off and with a little pressure I can pull the entire painted layer away from the plaster.

Another failure was with trying to remove a piece from the mold and I broke the brick panel into pieces and even the layers to I had poured separately split horizontally, exposing the weakness of pouring two layers of Duracal plaster cement on top of each other. Even though the Duracal was still wet, less than 30 minutes of dry time, the two layers did not bond and most likely would eventually separate from each other. It looked good in the mold and it looked good when I poured it, but in the end, it failed. Epoxy or some type of resin is the only good way to bond multiple layers of cement or epoxy.

Another failure was a screen painting of brick with a layer of epoxy and a vinyl sticker applied to it. When I cut the piece from the frame it curled beyond recognition. And finally I applied a layer of epoxy to a printed sticker as a top coat and it made a smooth looking print nasty. Bubbles, dirt and everything else stuck to the epoxy coated surface and made it worse than if I never had coated it at all. At least I have a better idea of where to stop when I get something to work.

Silicon molds still seem to be the best surface for working on, although if I end up staying with epoxy as the gel coat, then I can use the cheaper vinyl type molds to make my photographic reliefs. Another success that I had today was in the bonding department. I clamped and attempted to bond two panel sections together at the angles made by my silicon mold. I wasn't sure the panels would hold, but with a nice thick layer of epoxy both the cement and the epoxy panels stuck together without using any bolts. The bonds are strong enough that they can hold a second panel fully extended into the open air. The panels I made take too long to make, but I was happy to see that they would support themselves if I connect them with only epoxy. I am hoping that I can find a different way to replicate the panels in higher quantity that these earlier methods so that I can get to building instead of testing.

Shelter, - It's a brave new world

Shelter - It's a brave new world, or is it?

Things change and if anything is as important as the things we need to provide shelter and warmth, then I am not aware of it. Although communication is a huge new factor in modern existence and it may even equal the cost of living for some other categories of life, it is recognizable as a relevant fact of modern life. Still the basics are shelter, heat, food and clothing. Shelter has come to dominate the cost of living and this is not a new phenomena, but a historic fact of living in an oligarchy. The symptoms of the disease are the same, even if you change the definition of the system you live in to a democracy.

It is hard to imagine how to...

It is hard to imagine how to demean myself further, but I am willing to. I have felt the wrath of God and have survived. I have delved into the confluence of society and moved on. I still do not know why I work so much to where I can't conceive of a safe passage to death. Prosperity is no longer a goal, but truly a dream. Dreaming is no longer a respectful voyage, but a mistake. I personally feel that our ideas were built on a society that was living off the wealth of the land and it was acceptable to make money off the backs of others, so we no longer have a society whose ideas match up with reality.

A perfect society would have people working at what they enjoy to do and their work would not be toil. This is what we imagine a good life to be, one that has an employment that provides wealth enough to be able to pay for one's own self and family. Why is this that hard to accomplish? Why have capitalist, socialist, anarchist and communist alike failed at this task?

Tweaking society in small amounts one way or another is all we have as a method of advancement, so the answer is not held in the doctrines of philosophies that would make dramatic changes to our social existence. We are not even a carburetor in an engine, nor the fuel which we make engines work, but the air required to make it burn. People are the oxygen that make an engine explode and create power, otherwise a fuel does not burn. A combustion engine is built on the presupposition that air with oxygen exist. We are that air.

I am at the end of the road

Not on the road, but the end of the road. I know my path to where I am has manifested itself and I know what is around me came to be from following the road, but somehow I feel a connection to Kerouac and the hippies that followed that by being here, at the end of the road, I am them. I am the last stop on the way to Muir Woods, to the coast, on Highway 1, where if you go further you have gone beyond man's world. I am the last place where nonsensical exist in a financed world of opulence. If I leave this space then trees won't talk to me anymore.

How to make money

I need to make money and the ads on this page do not provide any significant income. I could live on writing gibberish as long as I want to live here:

http://palmsprings.craigslist.org/reo/3271636964.html

And yes, I am considering my backup plan, which is this.

I am not against this, in fact I believe in lowering my expenses to the point that I can afford what I want to do and what I need so that they balance. In fact, I would love to move into this the place shown on this ad and make it a museum of sorts, a Palace of Fine Arts. It is deserving. However, I am not able to afford a place for my real life to exist, then one that includes a school for my children. There may be schools near this structure, but I don't think I would move there for my kids to finish their education while I worked on the house. I just wanted to point out that I have options, my wife and kids may not have so much flexibility on where they are willing to go if the house is foreclosed on.

I still see myself as some rich person that enjoys the benefit of a budget that isn't "0". The truth is that finding a balance between "0" and whatever number you need is the answer to economic success. Too much requires taxation, too little requires being a beneficiary of others, including the state. A balanced spreadsheet is the ultimate request from the providers to our cause of existence. No more, No less.