Filthy Lucre
Insofar as I’ve been a punk for over three decades, a strange contradiction has pulled at me my whole life: money.
Babysitting.
Selling corn nuts,
Weed, mushrooms, acid, My labour.
To be clear off the top, I really don’t care about money.
It doesn’t motivate me, drive my decisions, or put gas in the tank, as it were. To me, capitalism feels like a game no one is meant to ever win.
Its inability to be fair, just, or rational isn’t a bug, but a feature.
It keeps running on the gap between its promise of greatness and the reality it delivers.
The sweet spot I’ve found inside this system is rooted in punk rock:
when all else fails, DIY. (do it yourself).
Entrepreneurship, in that sense, has always felt like the least worst way of performing Das Kapital, to borrow from Marx.
Since I was eleven years old, I’ve had some form of side hustle on the go.
At that age, I tried to corner the market on corn nuts.
My mom bought a Costco-sized box of ranch-flavoured corn nuts, individually packaged for school lunches.
There were thirty bags in the box, and the math did itself.
At Three dollars each , that meant almost a hundred bucks.
What an eleven-year-old would even do with that money, I had no idea.
My brief flirtation with hockey cards—another interest I mostly faked (see also: Cars and sports in general) so the other boys would like me—suggests the answer was: belonging.
I made colourful posters with my sister’s felt markers, hung them up around the school, and set up shop in my locker.
Business boomed.
I sold out in a couple of weeks.
That same year, I got my babysitter’s license.
My mom started farming me out around the neighbourhood at ten dollars an hour, which turned out to be wildly lucrative for a fifth grader.
I babysat steadily through grades five and six.
Junior high brought a stranger side quest.
My sister Rhiannon was a competitive swimmer—go Keyano Bears!—and parents were asked to volunteer at fundraiser bingos.
What I realized quickly was that parents hated working bingos and would pay handsomely to avoid it.
Sometimes I made fifty bucks a night walking the aisles of a smoke-choked hall full of seniors who were, unfortunately, very comfortable pinching a teenager’s butt as they passed.
By sixteen, starting high school, the next opportunity appeared quietly:
sell acid to the goth kids.
Profit wasn’t the goal.
Free drugs were.
I’d bike around Whyte Avenue delivering sheets of blotter wrapped in tinfoil from the dealer’s house to wherever they needed to go.
For every “ten-lot” I moved, I got two hits free.
A couple of close calls with the cops ended that chapter—at least until university.
Like many upstanding twenty-something Albertan students, I graduated to selling mushrooms and cannabis.
Summer nights meant riding my bike up and down Whyte Avenue, dropping off baggies, watching for police.
It was lucrative.
I even had a pager like a proper 1990s drug dealer.
When the screen flashed 420*911, that was my bat signal.
One summer, when I was probably 20, hippy friends from BC (every Albertan has a few of these) showed up with two huge garbage bags packed tight with freshly harvested, still-wet magic mushrooms.
My roommate Greg and I sliced the bags open on the living-room floor and started filling freezer bag Ziplocs—handful after bulging handful—until a dozen couch-pillow-sized bags of mushrooms surrounded us.
That summer, we were the most popular kids on the strip.
Entering the workforce taught me something else about money:
From then on,
my own labour would have to be the main source of it.
No more fly-by-night schemes, I needed a job.
My first job was a teenage rite of passage: I flipped burgers at Dairy Queen. The only thing I hated more than that job was the boss, a gross older man who’s idea of taking a dinner break was going to the strip club down the block. I also once dunked my whole hand into a vat of scalding hot fry oil. My next job wasn’t particularly less dangerous, unfortunately. I got a job selling the world’s sharpest knives door to door for a company called Cutco. My job was to go convince housewives they needed to invest in a $300 bread knife that could cut through a 2” thick mooring rope, which I’d demonstrate for them in their kitchens. One of my other party tricks was demonstrating that the scissors could cut a coin in half.
I also did a stint in a telemarketing “call pit” of ~50 people who had no sense of “inside voices”, while also chain smoking, as we all scrapped over selling Edmonton Journal newspaper subscriptions. To complete the trifecta of classic teenage Jobs, I also delivered flyers, random bits of garbage adverts on wet newsprint that always stained my fingertips.
I spent years trying to earn a living, and somewhere along the way realized I was really trying to earn a self.