{"id":1445,"date":"2026-02-16T18:55:54","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T18:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2026-05-18T22:32:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:32:51","slug":"filthy-lucre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/filthy-lucre\/","title":{"rendered":"Filthy Lucre"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Filthy Lucre<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Insofar as I\u2019ve been a punk for over three decades, a strange contradiction has pulled at me my whole life: money.<\/p>\n

Babysitting.<\/p>\n

Selling corn nuts,\u00a0<\/p>\n

Weed, mushrooms, acid, My labour.<\/p>\n

To be clear off the top, I really don\u2019t care about money.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Its inability to be fair, just, or rational isn\u2019t a bug, but a feature.<\/p>\n

It keeps running on the gap between its promise of greatness and the reality it delivers.<\/p>\n

The sweet spot I\u2019ve found inside this system is rooted in punk rock:<\/p>\n

when all else fails, DIY. (do it yourself).<\/p>\n

Entrepreneurship, in that sense, has always felt like the least worst way of performing Das Kapital, to borrow from Marx.<\/p>\n

Since I was eleven years old, I\u2019ve had some form of side hustle on the go.<\/p>\n

At that age, I tried to corner the market on corn nuts.<\/p>\n

My mom bought a Costco-sized box of ranch-flavoured corn nuts, individually packaged for school lunches.<\/p>\n

There were thirty bags in the box, and the math did itself.<\/p>\n

At Three dollars each , that meant almost a hundred bucks.<\/p>\n

What an eleven-year-old would even do with that money, I had no idea.<\/p>\n

My brief flirtation with hockey cards\u2014another interest I mostly faked (see also: Cars and sports in general) so the other boys would like me\u2014suggests the answer was: belonging.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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I made colourful posters with my sister\u2019s felt markers, hung them up around the school, and set up shop in my locker.<\/p>\n

Business boomed.<\/p>\n

I sold out in a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

That same year, I got my babysitter\u2019s license.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I babysat steadily through grades five and six.<\/p>\n

Junior high brought a stranger side quest.<\/p>\n

My sister Rhiannon was a competitive swimmer\u2014go Keyano Bears!\u2014and parents were asked to volunteer at fundraiser bingos.<\/p>\n

What I realized quickly was that parents hated working bingos and would pay handsomely to avoid it.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s butt as they passed.<\/p>\n

By sixteen, starting high school, the next opportunity appeared quietly:<\/p>\n

sell acid to the goth kids.<\/p>\n

Profit wasn\u2019t the goal.<\/p>\n

Free drugs were.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d bike around Whyte Avenue delivering sheets of blotter wrapped in tinfoil from the dealer\u2019s house to wherever they needed to go.<\/p>\n

For every \u201cten-lot\u201d I moved, I got two hits free.<\/p>\n

A couple of close calls with the cops ended that chapter\u2014at least until university.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Like many upstanding twenty-something Albertan students, I graduated to selling mushrooms and cannabis.<\/p>\n

Summer nights meant riding my bike up and down Whyte Avenue, dropping off baggies, watching for police.<\/p>\n

It was lucrative.<\/p>\n

I even had a pager like a proper 1990s drug dealer.<\/p>\n

When the screen flashed 420*911, that was my bat signal.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My roommate Greg and I sliced the bags open on the living-room floor and started filling freezer bag Ziplocs\u2014handful after bulging handful\u2014until a dozen couch-pillow-sized bags of mushrooms surrounded us.<\/p>\n

That summer, we were the most popular kids on the strip.<\/p>\n

Entering the workforce taught me something else about money:<\/p>\n

From then on,<\/p>\n

my own labour would have to be the main source of it.<\/p>\n

No more fly-by-night schemes, I needed a job.<\/p>\n

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\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

I also did a stint in a telemarketing \u201ccall pit\u201d of ~50 people who had no sense of \u201cinside voices\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

I spent years trying to earn a living, and somewhere along the way realized I was really trying to earn a self.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Insofar as I\u2019ve been a punk for over three decades, a strange contradiction has pulled at me my whole life: money. Babysitting. Selling corn nuts,\u00a0 Weed, mushrooms, acid, My labour. To be clear off the top, I really don\u2019t care about money. It doesn\u2019t motivate me, drive my decisions, or put gas in the tank,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":37,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1894,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions\/1894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}