My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

Most people want to be successful. Respect is tied up in that. I’m getting older and haven’t been a success in business. I make money, pay my bills, but I never built a business up. When you live far from your family, sometimes you wish you were a big success out here so your parents could brag about you. When I was younger I left home and traveled the country. I was looking for a place to live and a way to make a living. I settled in a trailer in Woodside and watched an old man named Rusty Sunshine make money driving tractors and building fences. So that was that.

It’s a life without success. No celebration, just an occasional sense of accomplishment when the job gets done and not too many things went bad. But I still have daydreams about success. Success in the sense of making a lot of money. Which is why I drew that picture up there. Sometimes I get carried away by dreams of success and come up with a cockamamie plan – like this one where I borrow my neighbors gas grill and take it downtown to sell hot dogs for three bucks apiece.

I put a lot of thought into it. I’d go to Polk Gulch, the tip of the Tenderloin around 11 pm and serve the hungry drunks until after last call, when the cash would really roll in as impressionable dipsomaniacs caught a whiff of grilled onions and hot dogs as they stumbled out of the saloon hoping to sober up for the ride home. Easy money.

These backwards ideas have plagued me my whole life. Hatching get rich the hard way plans as I wash dishes in some degrading soup kitchen. Wondering why a smart guy like me bounces checks. Shouldn’t I have made it by now, I ask myself. Where do i keep going wrong?

We all feel like that I suppose, and it’s odd. But when you meet a character whose given up on success, or never really wanted it, that’s so darn refreshing. You can sense it right away, they aren’t judging you. They don’t judge themselves by those standards of success either. I think that’s the allure of Charles Bukowski’s persona. He didn’t care. He drank and wrote and went to work when he had to. But he was a success in the end. So the mythos isn’t quite accurate.

The slacker attitude back in the 90′s was another manifestation of anti-success. I’m not built that way. I’m always looking for ways to make money. Just this morning I was online looking for jobs in Iraq. I could go over there and drive a truck in the green zone and make $100,000 a year. On top of that, it’s a war zone. I could smuggle Afghani opium onto base and make another 100 grand. And all the looted artwork from Iraq’s museums is floating around out there to be picked up for a song…the corruption I could tap into with military equipment…give me a year over there and I’d be a success.

It’s either that or sell those hot dogs. That sounds fun too.