Thankful for change

For most of my life I’ve lived in a lack mentality. I don’t call it a mentality to excuse the poverty of my folks or my lack of real effort and thought towards my future, but I have come to learn that despite everything, I am in charge of my poverty and it come from my feelings of lack. My entire life, since kindergarten and on, the rich kids have always liked me. Bragging about their Guess brand jeans, was the first time I really felt the lack in my family. I was clean, had recently bathed and looked like one of the rich kids, but my clothes didn’t have the name brands on them, and I would lick my lips and chin with my tongue in nervous habits until I had sores around my mouth. When I realized I had to stop, or was forced to stop licking my lips, I began chewing on the collars of my shirts. I would chew holes in them, and come home from school with the entire front of my shirt wet with spit. It’s not easy to sit in school 8 hours a day doing literally nothing.

For smart kids, or anyone who is ‘with it’, school is a torture session of you having to be quiet and stay out of the way so the teacher can execute her lesson plans and tend to the slower kids. In 1989, there was nothing too out of the ordinary for me and the other kids. We basically all did the same things. Our parents worked and we went to school and then after school care. I’m fortunate enough that name brand clothing was the only thing I lacked, and as time went on, we started shopping at Ross and buying the last years fashion trends so I could fit in with the rich and popular kids at school. I’m thankful my parents finally got us out of Azle and moved us into Fort Worth.

I wonder what I would be like if I’d stayed in Azle my whole life. Certainly, I was introduced to a wider variety of richness and poverty when getting to Boswell, and now, the richest most popular kids all did drugs. My mother remarried in 1994 or so and with the addition of another income, a man’s income (still important because of the glass ceiling) things got a little easier around the house. We had specified amounts we could spend on school clothes and supplies and our Christmas time was filled with presents under the tree. I wore Guess Jeans, Sketcher Boots, and Rayban sunglasses.

I think around the age of 15 or 16 was the last year my mother bought me school clothes. By this time, I was staying out all night and hanging with the friends and she’d grown tired of it. After I graduated high school a year early, my mother told me I had no business living at home and if I was going to act like an adult, I needed to be one. She made me leave the house somewhere around my 17th birthday, but at this time I’d taken to selling pot so who could blame her. When I moved out, I went working at Bruckner’s Truck Sales, but I made around $9/hr. which was around $300/week. That’s only $1200/mo. or less than $30K/year. My apartment cost me $350/month back then, and with bills it took me about two weeks work to come up with all the money. I had about $200/mo to spend on groceries and I had a car payment and insurance. That pretty much took the rest of any money. I think this is where the feelings of lack started.

I had no future. Just barely making it out of high school without going to jail, now working for $1200/mo. It was at TCC where I heard about waiting tables from someone. I had never thought about doing that at all, and after a string of events that had be bouncing between service centers in Fort Worth and Dallas, I settled off Park Row in Arlington, TX with an apartment that cost around $500/mo and began my career in the service industry. For a hard-working go-getter, you can pull yourself out of poverty working in restaurants. At Olive Garden, I began to make around $500/week and when I moved over to Macaroni Grill things went up to as high as $700-800/week. This was life changing and kept me busy for a few years. I bought nice clothes, had nice waiter friends, a girlfriend, a nicer apartment off Matlock and I-20 and generally a better life. I didn’t start saving anything though and just lived week to week for the next few years. Everything always super tight and barely manageable and most weeks I was forcing myself to work doubles at Macaroni Grill and then early mornings and days off with Chaney Schmidt and his construction company.

Even though I enjoyed spending money, the largest purchase I had ever made up to 2006 was maybe to spend $100 on a girlfriend for a necklace or something similar. I managed to pay all my bills and with the little money left over I went drinking with the service crews. Even back then at $5 a drink, that can get expensive.

So, the picture I’m trying to paint is this one of lack, of just barely making it by. I was getting fed up with life and this was forcing me towards ideas of careers in education, getting married and maybe even traveling a little. I’d started going on camping trips around Texas, that didn’t cost me anything but a day off and $10 site fee and that also sparked a change in me and my desires. I had also gobbled down many fiction books by this time in 2006, nearly everything by Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway and also quite a few important ones by Aldus Huxley and George Orwell. I was thinking I would move to Austin, attend the UT and get a BA in education and continue being a teacher, but in my first teaching job at the Transition Center in Fort Worth, TX where I taught landscaping to high-speed-mentally-challenged kids and signed a yearlong contract for only 16K I grew disillusioned. I was having to keep my job as a waiter for part-time in the evenings to make ends meet. Even with the 2% yearly raise offered by Fort Worth ISD, I saw a life of poverty and hard work ahead of me that just didn’t seem worth it.

I’m thankful I made some decisions to travel to Europe and go backpacking in the Summer of 2005 and then to study for a year in Barcelona, Spain in 2006-2007. I’m thankful that in 2008 I decided to learn how to play the guitar, and I left my mediocre life here in Fort Worth, for whatever was out there waiting for me. I’m thankful now that I can earn a respectable living with that guitar and that now I have no boss. From 2008 to 2019 things were hard, but I was free to explore. I found out I didn’t need much money and I could be happy living in my car and traveling around on 10K/year, that’s only around $30 a day and I now know how to make that in a few hours as a busker or a spanger, although I never really took to spanging. Without having to pay rent or any of the other stuff normal people pay, I could afford a life of adventure and travel and not need money. During those years on the road living in California and Oregon I hated money and all the people who had it.

Today I’m grateful for the mobile showering units in S.F. where I could get a free shower once a week. I’m thankful that I continually found little parking places and friends who would take me in for a warm couch and some comradery and drinks. During those years, I really didn’t have much. My car was repossessed, I got down to one change of clothes and was really teetering out on a ledge. I wrote secret stories in my notebooks and dreamed big dreams of the future, and although I was very happy, anyone with half a brain stayed far away from me. I’m thankful that today I own my own little lot and my parents let me take over payments on a camper they no longer use. I’m thankful I have a place to be and a place to go where no one can make me leave. I’m grateful I sleep where no one can wake me up, that I own a blanket and sheets and pillows.

What I learned out there is that we don’t need anything at all to survive. My brain wanted the bare minimum and so that’s what I created and that’s what I lived in. I made tons of friends and admirers along the way who couldn’t believe I’d quit school, quit my apartment, quit capitalism, quit life and was still out here moving around like a living being. Back then most of us were scared shitless of our parents and longed for their approval, longed for a way to pay them back for all the struggling it took to raise us. We also fear the paddle. I’d been paddled maybe 50 times or more by the principals during my education. I was also whipped at home. Disappointing my mother was the last thing I wanted in this life, but we’d lost the state championship that year and I’d not gone on to play varsity football anyway. My father’s father was a millionaire and lived 30 minutes from us, but he had a new wife and new kids and all their wealth and status went to them. My mother was left to fend for herself during the first few years after her divorce, and even with a man in the house again, a man who could make money just like my dad, my step-dad didn’t have the deep pockets of a millionaire father.

The kids suffered. I suffered. I grew to feel my station in life was one of poverty and lack, that I’d never be allowed to eat snacks at whatever time I wanted and in whatever quantity. It didn’t take me long to realize that forbidding things around my house wasn’t so that I would grow up disciplined and appreciate things more and know how to be an adult, it was forbidden because that was all we had. Even at my father’s house, the millionaire’s son, things were tightly locked away, especially food and milk. He had bigger houses and nicer toys, but we were treated as the same leeches everyone treated us kids as back them. I felt at times I was just too physically big to continue on in this world. My body demanded too much food and I cried in my bed at night before sneaking to the cupboard and stealing food to eat in my top bunk, knowing I would be punished in the morning and deprived of something else.

My mother was much kinder and did her best to assure there was food in the house at all times, and because she’d grown tired of raising two boys, she most likely delighted in the times when I would want to do something independent and for myself. My mother did cook almost every night growing up and the salary of a social worker did afford our little family the opportunity to go out to McDonalds on occasion or even into Fort Worth to sit in the train cars at The Spaghetti Warehouse. Things weren’t terrible and when my mom met Randy, my step-dad, all our lives improved. Randy worked hard and brought home more money and he had a more worldly approach to things, although my father and step-mother did their best to disparage his image in my eyes every chance they could. My father was a cop, my step-father a car salesman. But just like I had found independence and security in waiting tables, so had Randy found that he could make more money selling cars than working on them. I remember it was a celebration at our house when Randy started bring in 50K all by himself. $1000/week was an incredible feat! I think we went to Disney World that year. Amazing, I tell. Purely fucking amazing.

But I guess with all their hard work, just trying to get by, we kids grew to be bad, and the poverty mentality was still there. I made a little money here and there as a kid, raking leaves and mowing lawns and even got my first job at 15 years old and work 50 hours a week all summer. I felt rich! Because my parents let me keep all my money, I felt like I could do anything. I kept a job or two from 15 in 1997 until I quit my last teaching position in 2013. I went back to work at Starbucks for a year in 2014-2015 and have labored as a sound guy from time to time in hotels and bars to make ends meet since 2013, but I swore I would not be broke and also berated by a boss at the same time ever again. I’m so thankful at how things have worked out.

What I found is that if no one needs you and you don’t need anyone, then you can live with dignity on very little money. In my youth I didn’t mind sleeping outside or in my car or bumming a friend’s couch for a week or two, but as I grew into my mid-to-late-twenties, I had a change of perspective. I needed a shower at least once a week, I needed clean food and good water. I needed to take care of myself and pay attention to my health. I’m thankful I have grown to be able to do those things now.

I used to ride around never ever have what I needed. I would lack change for the meter or toll, eye drops for my eyes, a lighter for my joints, pens for my job. It was always something. I rarely ever had what I needed and often had to stop and search and spend the money on those things on the way to do the other everyday things in life. Living was exhausting and so with whatever little ‘extra’ money I had, I went to the bar, I continued to experiment with drugs and alcohol and socializing was the great release. It’s very easy to ignore poverty and lack of a future while 10 shots and 4 lines deep sitting around a bunch of strangers all willing to pretend to be your friend so long as you don’t bring up any troubles or point out that we are all there in lack.

I always had problems with my cars and rarely wanted to spend the money need to maintain them properly. I’d run out of gas. I’d get pulled over and given 5 tickets at a time. Nothing seemed to ever be in order and I was often a complete shit show. To make matters worse, I’d developed an overly confident personality that walked around like a mummy of denial. Wrapped 100 times over in layers of unwillingness to accept or see my situation or who I was. I carried on this way. I’m thankful for the love and care of my mother and step-dad, and for the education they helped me to get. It is education that has saved me. I’m so thankful for all my experiences and all the travels and books and teachers I’ve met along the way. All the people who helped me to figure it out.

Today I ride around with everything I need. If I need something new, I stop, buy it in bulk, store it away and have it as I need it. I live in this wonderful state of abundance and I’m thankful for that. I used to shiver at the $7 price tag on a bottle of Visine. Now I buy 4 bottles and not worry about it for a month. I do this with everything now. With my food and my drinks and all supplies for the house or anything I need. I buy the best and I buy the bulk amount. It’s changed who I am and I’m thankful for that.

I’m thankful that today I make all my money off music, off my guitar. I’m thankful my step-dad let me borrow his guitar all those years ago when I started out playing. I’m thankful that I see a future of $1000/week for years to come, and all being generated by my guitar. I’m so thankful that my experiences with literature and music have taken me to Spain and the love that has developed there. I’m thankful I can walk the Camino every three years for the rest of my life. It’s a huge undertaking, but I now live with a savings account I built. I’m thankful for my savings and for my working capital, all garnered through musical efforts. I’m thankful for the story “Parable of the Lean Purse” which changed my life just a couple years ago. I started saving 10% and giving away 10% of everything I earn and I’m thankful to see the tangible results in my everyday life of this cosmic blessing. I’m thankful for the cosmic. I’m thankful for the guiding light that has brought me so far. From a scared child in the back of my mother’s car at 9 years old, out in the middle of nowhere, me fearful we’d run out of gas and be stranded, and my prayer to God going out from the car. I’m thankful I now know God. I’m thankful for this world and this life and the ease I’ve always lived in, even during the suffering.

I’m thankful I’ve become what I am. And I’m thankful for the independent and prosperous future I see.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”