os191228 Year of hope: The bottom of Pandora’s box  

Why hope?

The end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 puts me in the mood to think about the coming year as I paid for my business license with the knowledge that Emeralda Works will continue to be a legal entity, although maybe for the last year of its existence. What signs are there to have hope?

There is Nellie, for one thing, working for a half-time salary, and she can learn about the business license. It’s not morbid to think about it, but I will die someday – it may not be for many years – but eventually it must happen and then the business may close. Or not.

There is hope. I have a brain that’s like Pandora’s Box, which – when opened – all the evils of the world flew out like a flock of crows. But Pandora, in a panic, shut the box in a hurry, and what remained in the box was Hope. I am like Pandora, curious about this box I’m not supposed to open, and I lift the lid a tiny bit and peep inside.

There is Hope.

Emeralda Works is a sentence, a two-word sentence consisting only of a noun and a verb. Emeralda refers to an imaginary land, a region I like to think exists in the Pacific Northwest. It was formed a long time ago by the impact of a great starship, forming a triangular crater which filled with water – the runoff from the snows of three mountains at each apex of the triangles.

Works refers to the fact that imagining such a region as Emeralda (the word itself proved to be a rare one seldom used by anyone else but me) works in the sense that it feeds my hunger for better things, better situations, better encounters and experiences every day.

Then, too, there is the business of living, the short-range daily tasks that need tending to. It’s here where the matters-at-hand come in, things like business licenses, taxes, bookkeeping and legal matters.

That I have at least this business license – paid for by $61 out of our small income – keeps the legal-eagles away from usurping my time and what remains of our resources. It gives me the freedom to think of positive things and think of Hope.

Our daughter Billie Jane reminded us of the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and we watched it. I’d forgotten about it – although I remembered having been assigned reading the James Thurber short story when I was a student.

After watching the movie with Lynda, I realized I am a “Walter Mitty” in the eyes of people like Tom Kughler – subject to flights of the imagination. Thurber’s message must have been a confession of his, as a creative writer must allow imaginary things in order to be human and follow through on vision and curiosity.

He’s not unique. There is a need for imaginary travels if we are to survive. There is a need to entertain if we are to live.

ri191027 Flipping real estate: 

A difference of scale 

A good day 

I had a good day December 20 – close to the winter solstice. Carl Chew came to visit me, bought me lunch and gave me a piece of their family fruit cake. I listened while I told him about my Play Auction. He listened while I told him about my theory of the nucleus accumbens – that coffee-bean size piece in our brain’s hypothalamus (which both of us have the hyper version and thus we are artists and we meet and talk like this.)

A topic of current interest to us – partly because of our hyper nucleus accumbens activity – is our legacy. He calls his, the archive. I call mine the Artist’s Last Love Letter. Both of us aspire to achieve the same thing: A clean camp and sustainability for our families when we depart this life.

Both his archive and my Last Love Letter need a marketing and sales plan. We don’t talk about this, however. People with an overactive nucleus accumbens, right-side brain dominant, tend to suck at marketing and closing sales.

Later in the day I met a real estate broker and she commented how she “flipped a house,” and this gave her the impetus to go into real estate marketing and sales. Her real dream is to build green homes, so she also took courses and learned about this. However, I made more out of her casual remark than she knows.

I did mention to her in our conversation that there is a demographic with a problem to solve, an itch to buy a solution. I’m part of that – at least, the left side of my brain is. I yearn for a program that can apply to me, and my friend Carl.

I have nibbled all around the edges of this program. Usually I frame it in the Artistscripophily idea, that people will buy the contents of an artist’s archive or their family collection if it is not a high-maintenance, physical and opaque item or items.

A portfolio of stocks, for example, is part of a person’s net worth. A portfolio which includes REITs has a value which is measurable according to the REIT’s value. A REIT which is focused on shopping malls, for example, might be riskier than one which focuses on mini malls.

Green homes, my new acquaintance’s interest, are not popular, really. Judging by the gross mismanagement of resources in America, the environment is trumped by greed and conspicuous consumption. A wealthy person buys a Tesla, and they drive by homeless camps with impunity.

Flipping a house is another way to say selling a home, but it’s a special kind of sale. Flipping a house is a slang term used to describe the act of buying a house and then quickly selling it weeks after purchase. Generally, houses that are the subjects of flipping are somehow out of favor with the purchasing public and therefore tend to be listed at a deeply discounted price. It involves a form of creativity. My new acquaintance has a degree in fine art photography from a major art school (1978), therefore she, too, probably has an over-active nucleus accumbens.

She unintentionally clued me in to a factor of flipping because within the twenty minutes we visited, she remarked that my idea for a sip and print might be a good idea, but it can’t be monetized.

“Wrong,” I said to her. “It can’t be monetized, but the concept of monetization itself has been flipped. Today the key is scalability.” Then I told here where I learned how scalability would make the difference, and it’s relative.

A developing nation in Africa, for example, can’t monetize a new idea by the standards of a developed nation like the United States or the EU. That’s because we are under the illusion of scalability at a higher monetizing level than in a developing, desperate, life-or-death nation like Uganda. I would include my friend Mavis’ country, too, Botswana, even though this country is doing better than most African nations.

“I could run a sip and print for six people right now,” I said, “Because I have three presses.”

This means I could monetize at least one sip and print session. She is a videographer, so between the two of us we’d have pictures to develop the next level – either a repeat of the first one or as a pitch for monetization.

Personally, I believe it’s better to have customers’ money than investors.

As for my friend, Carl, he’d be a step closer to the correct direction for his legacy if he’d tie it to my grand vision, the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, and turn the interaction of his legacy, Stamp World, toward artistscripophily.

In a sense, the monetization factor has been flipped in America, because we are a third world nation now. It’s just that few people are humble enough to point it out and live accordingly.