I was shocked by the memories I had, reading about Apache Savage's eviction yesterday. My husband and I moved to California a few years ago when he lost his job in Dallas. I had just graduated from college, and we set out for San Francisco, where an empty house awaited us. His father and step-mother said we could stay there until we got back on our feet. Then, in February, after only 7 months, we got an email from her, letting us know we had two weeks to get out. I had been working under the table for a jeweler, and had just gotten a real job with benefits and taxes and whatnot. He still couldn't get hired at Safeway, where they eyed unemployed engineers with the knowledge that they didn't really want to unload pallets or run a cash register. We fled to his maternal grandmother's house, where we lived in their attic, and I lost 40 pounds from the stress of all the yelling and cursing. When we moved out to a real apartment of our own, close to my birthday, it was the best present I'd gotten in years.
Times have been hard for a while now. Stability is something I now know to be rare and precious when you land in it. Over the past few years, we've paid down our debts and been able to enjoy dinners out again and a trip or two. We still rent, because I cannot get over my horror at owing someone a half a million dollars for a home that's worth a fraction of that amount. And this is all what passed through my mind, reading Mr E's proposal for a book, to generate funds for people going through tough times. Someday, I will manage to wrest a chapter or two out of that story (among others). But for now, I know I can do something else to help, with this portfolio I've been lugging around all these years, across the Rio Grande and back and forth over the Peninsula. I can put it up for sale.
The charity auction for out of luck Open Saloners starts now. If you would like to participate, please let me know when you've started your auction, and your piece will be linked here. Let's use the internet for something productive, just for a little bit, to see how it feels. PM me with your link to join in. And please, be kind... this is the first piece I've sold since I was in high school!
To bid on this ring/pendant, click here.
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doloresflores_d
Ben Sen
scoubidou
Tom Slick
Manchu Wok
fingerlakeswanderer
Salon.com
Comments
Thanks for sharing your story. Help from relatives can indeed be a mixed blessing. Glad life has improved, though I can imagine how hard it still is. Thanks for your efforts to help others. And cool ring/pendant!
As for what we need to proceed on a book of stories concept-- first we need to come up with a format, a rough guess at how many stories / chapters we'll need. Whether the stories are going to be woven together (interwoven) somehow or whether they will each stand separately but along a common theme. How they will be published-- whether to put them as blog posts, wherein Open Salon may automatically have some publication rights or other rights. We'll have to talk with them about that. And probably other stuff too. None of it sounds onerous, just a lot of details to pull together to coordinate the project.
I am away for the weekend starting in the am and am not likely to be able to participate, or at least not much, until we get back on Sunday.
Until then, please everyone talk it up-- this idea needs to grow into a community effort. Bstrangely, ApacheSavage, Mission, Scanner, and a number of other people have already pledged time or chapters. As far as effort pledged, the concept is already starting to take hold.
So please everybody keep talking it out, keep thinking, come up with ideas, issues, problems-- anything at all that we need to think about, whether its pro or con, so we can work out strategies and solutions.
We CAN do this. Yes we can.
it is so easy to do these things now, yet we still have such a hard time getting started. if nothing else, i hope that people will think deeply about their own inertia in the face of disaster. collectively, we still freeze instead of fighting or fleeing.
but we don't have to. take care. we'll see you when you get back...
mr. e -- i love what you've proposed. i don't have any ideas right now because getting published is a bitch, especially now and i don't want to be negative. i like the auction idea. i wish we could put together a book of ideas and help for people in these situations along with stories with a happy or okay ending. i know that no one i know wants to hear my tale of woe, so i'm speaking from experience. i make things funny so make them accessible. enough from me. i'll see if i have anything to auction. i need to sell my own stuff for money... love love love and gratitude for all the ideas and brainstorming. i'm sorry taht i'm no help with all of this.
thank you so much, b, for doing this. i don't understand that thing in your bio. it makes me nervous.
fear not my bio. that just means i want people to steal my content. i'm being totally serious. you can see more about creative commons here:
http://creativecommons.org/
you have a kind heart! it's so good of you to think of others when you're struggling too. hopefully, we can maintain some momentum with these ideas and turn it into a fund for anyone who needs a bit more to get by.
i am in no way endorsing ebay (she said, though she can't see the ads popping up on this page...). i have an account, but this is my first time as a seller. if you would prefer to use etsy or some other resource, or if you already have a store front, please go ahead and use that. i'm not trying to get folks to sign up for accounts they don't want or need. hope that answers your question!
but that's no reason to put off trying. i've carried these things with me for years, and i needed a push to start selling them. it wasn't something i could do by myself.
community is circular. we're helping each other.