Yesterday we got our annual email notifying us that starting August 1st our rent would go up by another $100 a month. The timing was kind of amusing, because I had just spent much of the day writing a song about how much the rent has been going up in recent years. I've written a few songs like that, but it was the first one for a while, certainly since the genocide in Gaza began and my musical attentions have been overwhelmingly elsewhere.
As I've been keeping up on the campus encampments sweeping the country, and visiting a few of them, I've also been counting the pennies, almost literally, making sure we have enough money in the bank for the monthly rent check that's due at the beginning of each month. This month, as with various others, this has involved the strategy that is inevitably very familiar to millions of other of my fellow Americans: buying groceries on a credit card.
Two weeks ago I sent out the newsletter titled "We Interrupt Our Usual Programming," which was an NPR-style fundraising pitch for me to keep writing, touring, and recording, which these days absolutely requires some heavy subsidies from somewhere in order to work. Response was heartwarming and helpful, though not nearly enough to reverse the course I'm currently on towards what we might call the eventual "debt ceiling."
Expenses continue to outpace earnings. As the rent has been skyrocketing year after year, we began to qualify for food assistance, which largely offset the rise the rent, while it lasted. Then they decided our household income was too high for food assistance, and that expenses vs. earnings problem rears its head again.
The whole time I've been doing this traveling and guitar-picking thing, I guess it is the case that I've been operating on some kind of vague business strategy. Which is basically if the credit card is getting close to being maxed out, it's time to reevaluate, and figure out how to spend less and/or make more. We're only halfway there. So my plan is to keep on writing, recording, touring, and singing at protests, and hope the base of people who are willing and able to be part of my Community-Supported Art program will continue to grow at least as fast as the rent rises.
In conclusion, thanks so much for the approximately 50 people who have just joined my CSA in the past two weeks. It really has made a big difference, materially and emotionally. If there might be 50 more out there, that would be especially wonderful. But we're at least a few months away from the time when I need to come up with an altogether different income stream, or start driving for Uber. And I mean no disparagement of Uber drivers in that comment, which after all I may some day be myself, realistically. And then when the cars all start driving themselves, I'll move into an old broken-down caravan, like half the other people in this town.
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