Okay, hello. Chapter one. Scratch that. This is a chapter. speaking. My story. Talking about my life. And thinking about a blog. I suppose it’s a. At first a family blog. Excuse me. At first, it’s a personal blog and simultaneously. Eventually, it shows itself as a family blog.
I guess the most important thing to express. If this were my last breath is the sheer depth of going broke. Going in debt. Losing your job or your passion, or your trade, being in poverty. Inside this prison and trying every day to crawl your way out and find your way in to the economy, where you are supposed to be based on your experience, your training, your schooling your lifelong education. The entirety of that life long education. So I’ve worked a lot of jobs, my first official job was a grocery bagger at the supermarket. And then after that, I basically started a lawn, a landscaping business with. At first it was myself and then it became a business that my myself, and one of my best friends, or my best friend.
At that time, you know, my business partner, as we also had a similar interest in poker. But for a couple summers we ran this landscaping business in our respective towns, my business partner was one town over. And by the second summer. Over the course of the summer, I had made $10,000. And this is like cutting grass, taking care of everything in the lawn. I eventually painted houses. I painted about once. Oh very quickly flashing back to when I was about 14, the summer when I was 14. And this may be my first official job because I was paid for it. I was working on our new house. That was a five minute drive from my old house, which my mom was living in at a time when my parents divorced, so my dad bought this property and hired a builder, a carpenter to essentially got the entire place and and rebuild it. And so I got to work on that project for an entire summer. It was me and a few of these guys. And, you know, full days shooting the shit. Hammer Nails, cutting wood sanding, everything. And having lunches together as men. A year before. I also had what’s called a Bar Mitzvah. For those who are probably familiar in the Jewish tradition, you go to school for a few years after school. A couple of days a week and then you learn this. A unique part of the scripture, and you sing it, and you become a man in the Jewish tradition. So this was like, I think another kind of coming of age, your manhood, you’re working, you’re building a home with these grown up men doing all sorts of men’s stuff, becoming a real man’s man.
So that might be my first official job second job grocer third job official entrepreneur. Now there’s one thing that we haven’t discussed yet and that is how I launched this business. This landscaping business which would later become known as clean cut landscaping, was launched, using a very simple marketing strategy, which my dad suggested basically invented, I could give him that. He said, Go get some poster board. Attach it to some stakes and write on it, odd jobs, slash, yard work. College student. And then my phone number. And this, again, was a full summer of work, two summers three three summers I forget how many summers, if I’m recalling because think it was on the third summer where it really became a poker summer. And we were.
My business partner and I, my poker partner and I, we were beginning to go to Vegas and trying our hand at the mecca of poker. In the summer times. So that was, those are my jobs. And then later on in New York City, I would work at a restaurant bussing tables and doing some light hosting, and also we did do cashiering, when we were a grocery bagger. So that is on the list as well. To be a cashier, I mean, it’s like, that’s a lot of people’s first job. So I worked a couple months in the restaurant industry and in the New York area also worked as for, for a month or two months, as an accountant for small boutiques products. Household Products Company, that my one of my closest business friends at business school, in college at Emory University had started with his brother. And so I worked there. Sixth Avenue. 19th Street, I think. And then finally I worked in the healthcare industry. First, as this is a whole nother side story so maybe we’re not going to get into it but doing sales in the healthcare industry. But, uh, pretty wild west healthcare industry of financial security. You know the word is just, I don’t like the word but we did a lot of research, we eventually got licensed to sell health care packages to people. Okay, so we were doing that most recently, when probably halfway, probably six months after COVID broke. And if we think about their jobs, we’ll we’ll come back here but that’s pretty much the extent of our jobs and then poker.
As a career went for six, seven years, travelled the world mostly Southeast Asia, but started in South America. And then in between Europe, a bit of Europe. That lasted about four years. And then, the US government came in and basically said it was jealous of all the money floating around on the internet, that it didn’t know how to tax and regulate. So it just came in and basically disrupted the whole entire world’s online poker marketplace. And so that didn’t go over very well so the job was taken from a lot of us, and there’s still money that the government has seized and has not paid some of us back. I’m owed, close to $8,000 by the government. And it’s been years now. years since. This all happened. And it is on the record. Today we actually received our stimulus check our second, or actually third stimulus check from the government for 14 $100. So now we have 14 $100. So this brings me full circle to what it’s like when you don’t have a stable income, and the career path you chose has kind of been pulled out from under you, or eliminated and for whatever reason. After poker I was basically a freelancer creating experimental short films, commercials, music videos, mostly collaborations with other artists, and building an independent business with a subscription element advertising revenue, partnerships, branding, potential and and distribution and copyright. And, and, and ownership of stories, personal stories. Are there any other kinds of stories. And then most recently we’ve over the past couple years we’ve applied to a few grants, there’s four or five grants that are worth applying to in the technology realm of things, which in our case it’s point of view camera glasses, which the camera sits quietly in between the eyes. So it’s a very immersive kind of filmmaking and story visual storytelling. Because this camera is so small that it fits invisibly in between two people. And in between a relationship. So we’re developing stories now for the glasses to hopefully raise some funds and sell to some platforms and distributors in the future, because this is the most immersive form of filmmaking out there and it has to do with a new technology.
So that’s the world of technology and storytelling and filmmaking, and now we’re thinking about going back to school and just trying to get there. But to get there you need an end essentially to get school loans, so you can study. In my case it’s experimental psychology, but it’s called Narrative psychology so the psychology of stories and storytelling, and human behavior and psychologic structure, emotional structure, language, linguistics, philosophy, it’s all kind of, but it has to do with narrative, the structure of a story. The Beginning, middle and end, and how that is the exact same as the structure of our language. Every sentence has a beginning, middle and end. So that’s the philosophy. But being in suffering or struggling or now snuggling with poverty, isolation, loneliness, to be completely alone, and, and also to have had complex childhood experiences, like I do believe that we all have. So, surviving in this world, having a certain brain chemistry. Just being broke though, at the end of the day, financial, emotional, depression, you can’t separate the two. So, there are no, so we talked about the invisible bootstraps, sometimes and if you don’t have boots, then you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I just received my 14 $100, I have 14 $100 until this point, again, it was either odd jobs, or most recently, living at home during COVID. Shout out to my mom, doing whatever we can for money, trying to get situated trying to have relationships with a divided family. That’s really the, the most recent study that we’ve been focused entirely on because this is your emotional family unit. And simultaneously, this is your economic family unit. So at times if you, if you are in this. If you go broke, and you need to lean on your family, go for it lean on your family, make a contract, you know, make a mega contract there’s a family loan agreement contract out there that you can both sign and decide what happens to the money and how, because money is just get gets slippery but a lot of us young people, you know, jobs are not only that the economy is changing and jobs are not just changing but they’re disappearing, and they’re going to continue disappearing.
So, you know, employment is not secure. So I think we wanted to just tell this story as a first chapter, potentially, this is what, you know, there there’s work you do for money to survive. And then there’s life life’s work, your life’s work, which are your dreams and your dreams are always mixed with your stories and your memories, and your ideas and your thoughts, every single day. And they’re all evolving, and they’re growing up, and there’s no reason to get attached to any of them, because they’re constantly changing, you want to change your mind. We want that, because that gives us, not just flexibility, but the superpower of being able to make adjustments in the moment in everyday situations. So, you have to remain open. We have to be able to make adjustments in these situations, and step back, and then step forward, and then step back, and then step forward, it’s a pendulum, it’s constantly swinging. So anyway, these are the waves, we keep it wavy here, but this is a chapter on our working experience and how this is a very difficult time, not just for us but for other people who have lost their jobs, who are evicted from their homes. Luckily I don’t have any kids of my own, or a partner at the moment but I think a partner’s is pretty much the next step of this whole thing to eliminate your loneliness and your isolation. And then that’s a community, the community is made up of relationships.
So you become a part of the community, by finding somebody to live with and explore all these ideas with and think about the future with and think about the past with, and live in that past future moment in that future past way, because I don’t think you can separate the two. The human brain does not separate the two. So maybe that’s, this is like the first part of the story. There’s a college story within this story that we skipped over. And maybe that’s something we’ll come back it just doesn’t seem like studying business. I heard it said recently which was interesting, you go and you study business when you don’t know what you want to do with your life when you don’t know what you want to study. I think is how he said it. Shout out to Brandon savage. Because I think that’s a true statement, I think a lot of people just choose business because they don’t know what they want to study. Like really study what what really it piques their curiosity, because making money is not that interesting. It’s what you do to make the money, it’s what you do to that sustains the resources that it sustain ideas, new ideas, I mean that’s basically what the economy runs off of new ideas and entrepreneurs, startups, the American Dream, the new American Dream, the new American dreamers. Shout out to drift Sonix de RIFSONI x. And then to anyone, where we’re talking to right now essentially building our community every single person is a community. And when you start a relationship that’s not specifically a kind of a relation, you just have relationships with people in your life. And hopefully you build with those people and you create new things with those people that’s called collaborations, and sometimes you fall in love and you obviously talk about love, and think about what if love is or was more than we know. Alright so that’s what we’ll end right now telling our story. Just telling it and seeing where it goes.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
