Happy Covid!

It's been roughly a year since I bothered with this blog, so I guess I'm retiring from it. Probably.

It used to be quite the refuge for me, a place to verbally process what was going on in my life. And visually, photographically, I guess, process it that way too.

Haven't done much with photography lately. Broke my leg, lost my job, learned things. Was driving Uber for about a month until the Corona Cooties took that. I enjoyed it, too small a sample size to see if it was really my next job, I think I spent nearly every penny I earned on gas and car repairs. I still have an active account, but when they closed the bars on St. Patrick's Day I got the hint. Plus I have roughly five underlying conditions that would make Covid-19 a mistake.

Been locked down for the most part since St. Patrick's, other than an ill advised trip to Wisconsin immediately after they closed the bars. I figured since I wouldn't be doing Uber, might as well go swap guitars with this guy. And drove straight into a zombie apocalypse with no Twinkies. I still drive a friend's kid to work on the weekends as a favor, the grandparents would be doing it otherwise and as compromised as I might be, I'm not in my 80s. I'm lucky enough to still have my similarly aged parents, so it seems a thing I can do a couple times a week.

Car broke down 500 miles from home, the harmonic balancer? Sounds like a musical instrument type thing but it's a $1000+ repair, and I think that Wisconsin shop did everything they could to not make it worse, the estimate had been $1300.

Anyway, my freelance graphic design work hasn't been super lucrative either, my anchor tenant is a quarterly magazine that promotes live local music. And there, uh, isn't any. So they're skipping an issue, understandably. The nature of that publication, it's a loaves and fishes miracle sometimes that they continue to publish even when they have advertisers. Not just for my own pocketbook, I hope it is just one issue and not the end of the road for that institution.

So I've been playing a lot of guitar. I'd hung my shingle out to teach lessons again after the turn of events with my day job, but a slow start on that front got slower when the Covid thing hit. I'd be open to teaching via Skype, but especially with beginner students, it's hard to substitute face to face, when you see their hand position or the way they're picking, there's a lot to a new player that's not obvious.

I've had other periods in my adult life when I've played a lot. This is the first time I've had my callouses flake and peel. I think maybe at 50 I have the focus to practice almost as much as I let people think I practiced in high school. I remember one day, and only one, where I managed eight hours of practice. I won't claim it was all focused, productive practice, I was aiming for a target on the clock as much as anything. I'd been putting off the summer job search at the time, and I remember my Mom saying something to the effect of, "You can't just sit here and play guitar for eight hours a day and pretend that's a job."

And I remember thinking, Why the hell not?

So I guess that's kinda now. Except I think the longest session I've managed was 6-1/2 hours, and my fingertips were sore and the callouses peeling, but I think in roughly a month I've more or less doubled my repertoire of things I can cover. And by cover, I mean be the lead guitarist in a middle-aged cover band. The problem with middle-aged cover bands like Velvet Pillow (on hiatus, and I'm not a fan of the name but Mike, the drummer, insists), is a problem of supply and demand. There's literally only supply, even when the bars were still open, not a single stool was occupied by someone hoping a bunch of geezers would come in and defile the memory of Pink Floyd, Journey, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath tunes.

Other than some depression I can attribute pretty directly to the isolation itself, I'm having fun. Like I said earlier, Uber might not have been remunerative enough, but I was enjoying it enough to keep trying and see if I could figure out the times/places to make it pay enough to support my guitar playing and eating every day habits. I could get a CDL, some trucking companies even provide the training for free, and the truck driving schools are as cheap as trade schools get. I see CDL jobs advertised even now with better pay than my last day job in a so-called union shop. But I don't think the driving was what I liked about Uber. Sure, my kids are grown, I can go over the road, and that's where entry level CDL jobs seem to be, but the thing I dug about Uber driving was the social aspects of it. I actually liked shuttling drunks home from bars, I liked taking out of town travelers to and from dinner, work functions, etc. I liked driving the guy from LA who was bitterly disappointed in Kansas City strip clubs on a Thursday night (sorry, brah, this ain't LA), as well as the dancer from a similar establishment the last night I went online with Uber. She was going home early because the Covid scare had cut the traffic to where she didn't think she'd make any money staying. I can dig it, driving Uber doesn't, I'm sure, offer nearly the opportunities to hear hateful things from customers, but Uber drivers and the dancers in those clubs both wake up every day without a paycheck and have to go scrounge one up.

Welcome to the Gig Economy?

I'm new to this, driving Uber as a hustle to make a living. Can't tell if it's a permanent career change or a bridge to something else. A passenger who formerly drove Uber grumbled that "Uber doesn't pay shit." This might turn out to be the case, but it pays a lot more than wondering why my resumé isn't generating a bunch of job interviews.

I'm a graphic designer by trade the past 30 years or so. There's tons of jobs advertised for that, and while I don't have a degree, three decades of work experience should make up for that. I've had a few applications rejected flat out for my lack of formal education, and a couple of times in the past when I've been looking I've found I can't get interviews at Hallmark, for instance, simply for lack of a degree. But all 30 of those years were in one way or another in the print industry. It's great to have mad chops at something, but the contraction of print is pretty profound.

I can't find the exact stats at the moment, but I've heard numbers like 10,000 print shops have folded in the past decade or so. The aforementioned Hallmark just laid off hundreds of people. If 10,000 shops that had a clown like me closed their doors, that's a lot of clowns packed into the clown car; I might know a bit of CSS and HTML, but you wouldn't know it from my CV. I'm 50 years old and have mainly worked with print so I look like a relic. I made good money at my last job for almost 13 years, so I certainly don't look like a bargain.

And driving Uber certainly gives me the flexibility to take on classes to update that skillset. Or to make a total career change. We'll see. If I took some classes to become a full stack developer I could probably get a pretty plum job, but I don't think that's where my passions lie. The trouble with my passions being they tend to be as commercially viable as Confederate bonds. Still photography? Classic rock cover band guitarist? Author of the Great American Novel? Stop me when I get to something that pays more than manning a Burger King drive thru.

Which is also where this Uber thing comes in. I can't tell for sure if it pays, on net (after taxes, wear and tear on my mirthmobile, etc.) enough to be better than that BK drive thru gig, but I'm giving it a try.

I like people, and despite the apparent computer oriented nature of my career, I think I enjoyed the clients as much or more than the actual work. Driving the Uber thing, I think get a CDL and go over the road. My kids are grown, truckers make more than I've ever made in my life, and if you get into some audio books or whatever, the hours can slip away pretty quickly. I could do that, but I think the personal interaction part of Uber is far more appealing than the driving part.

This isn't my first rodeo as a blogger, I had a 15 year or so run with another blog that I've decided for a multitude of reasons to segregate from this one.

I have a couple of other sidelines, teaching guitar lessons, freelance graphic design, and ideas for others, making hand built tube amps and/or boutique guitar pedals; brokering/dealing in instruments and equipment (I occasionally see things on FaceBook's Marketplace that are way under market, theoretically I can buy that stuff and sell it at market on Reverb and make a profit). I think I may have reached a point where two to four sidelines may need to become the main line. Hence my foray into the Gig Economy for what it's worth.