7 Ways to get your money...without resorting to violence or the law

It was my intention to write a blog about my new book [published pseudanonymously] and tell you all about how wonderful it is and why you should go to my web site and read about it and buy it if you found a need for it, but when I woke up this morning it was to a feeling of profound ennui-[ennui: a feeling of weariness, arising from lack of occupation or lack of interest in present scenes and surrounding objects: listlessness; boredom; tedium. [Websters]....

I am reminded once again of whatisname, Camus, who found himself unable to take any interest in anything and couldn't remember if his mother had died today, yesterday or some other time. There is a web address for my new book somewhere in this blog that you can leap to if you wish to avoid reading about my state of mind-

I feel as if I just climbed mount Everest and now I'm sitting on the top and I know that I have to start climbing down again and frankly I couldn't be bothered. I should be loaded with elation but I'm not, I should be smug about my great achievement, but I'm not. I should be surrounded with enthusiastic people who can't wait to help me with my downhill climb but I'm not.

I realise that I'm just another Joe out there pushing his own limits that are to all intents and purposes meaningless to others. After all why should anyone care what I do as long as I didn't get in their faces for some trivial reason-Is this the face of depression and isn't it true that depression is normal. It is the desire to achieve and do things that is the real cause of humanity's woes-or is that simply a depressive's rationalisation.

Oh shit -pass the bottle. Let us leave all this magma receding crust of life on the edge and go fishing for a good fuck to damp the stress out of waiting for the end of waiting.

What is the truth? I'm sixty soon, I have no job, no money and few prospects [one actually-this book I'm going to tell you about.]. This is not really an issue since I have never had a job, well a real job anyway-the kind that brought untold riches to those corporate fuckers who were brutally ruthless enough to hang on to their jobs for the entire journey and wind up at sixty with wealth and the ulcers to go with it. It stands to reason therefore that I never had much money either, except what could be scraped out of the system through craft, cunning and devious extraction- and as for prospects: enough said.

I belong to that part of the sixties generation-the baby boomers-that 'dropped out' after deducing that the 'system' was a crock of illusional shit. We were known as the 'educated unemployables'-kids from working class backgrounds diluted with enough middle class fantasy to believe that our education meant we were special and of course we weren't. The 'system' required that we put away our delusions and focus on the 'big picture'. We were only marginally ready to roll into the system except that we weren't...we were actually unemployable and remained so.

So in the forty three years that have elapsed since I wrote the final exam at one of the old system's least useful high schools-one of those places that thought education and playing rugby were synonymous activities-I have done many things-acquired an immense, pleasurable and inherently useless 'further' education, fathered three wonderful and excessively successful young humans, sustained a marriage to the same person over more than three and a half decades, mastered the thirty two step form in Tai Chi, and forgotten many other forms, and participated in a string of congenial, albeit generally not particularly lucrative ventures-For instance I once owned a part- share in a successful theatre company-long since consigned to the dustbin of history but nonetheless in its time an organisation that received favourable mention in many international journals, won many awards for adventurous work [we produced the first multiracial Othello on the continent no matter what Janet Suzman claims] and even took performances {Fugard: The Island, Master Harold and the Boys] to the Edinburgh festival-the theatre equivalent of Mecca.

I also took a one man show to the Grahamstown festival that was carefully ignored for reasons of political correctness by the fashionable media, since I was neither black nor a well established whitey, but which show nonetheless played out to packed houses in competition with both of the above.

It is only the market that matters, in my opinion; and when the average 'house' on the so-called 'fringe' at Grahamstown consists of less than ten persons in the audience, to play to full houses every night for ten days [once word of mouth took its effect] was a satisfying conclusion [a full house being a couple of hundred people]. The run was extended to accommodate the demand for seats-it was most cool.

Being so satisfied and noting that the odds were heavily stacked against the theatre as the new society unravelled itself, I retired after that apogee, and apart from a moment of madness in 2000 when I agreed to play the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, to commemorate the centenary of that poet philosopher's demise, in a role that seriously impacted on my life, I have scorned the theatre ever since and have no regrets since my instinct was entirely accurate and the theatre has generally died, along with the audiences. [In case you're wondering I don't regard that frothy, self-indulgent crap I witnessed last week at the Barnyard in Cresta as theatre-the theatre was a place of ideas- and we haven't had too many ideas in our society over the past few decades.]

My most entertaining moments over these past few decades came randomly-For instance, I entered my Grahamstown play in a BBC world wide playwriting competition and was phoned by an executive of the BBC one morning and told that my play was in the top ten out of forty thousand entries and they needed to know if I was black or white so they could make their recommendations-It was a pretty 'in your face' request I thought When I said I was white his disappointment was tangible and he rang off and that was the last I heard of the thing-ho hum-

I had a similar 'lights on' moment a decade ago when I submitted a proposal for a thirteen part drama series to the newly liberated SATV. It was a series conceived at the request of a group of black wannabe filmmakers who needed a script to start their climb to wealth and riches. We'd worked together on some forgettable film set and they were a cool and creative bunch of dudes. I received a letter from the SATV crew accepting the script and please come to make arrangements-When I walked in the door the commissioning bureaucrat saw me and without thinking, or perhaps arrogantly, blurted out- 'I didn't know you were an 'Englishman' ' [code for Whitey] and that was it: the script was 'spiked'. My black associates had no political credibility; they were simply film people who knew about making movies; they weren't politicians.

I notice from the 'Rich people list' published in the Sunday Times last week that there are plentiful supplies of Political hatchet men who have used their struggle credentials to garner delightfully obscene wealth based on no more substantial skill than 'being connected' [perhaps that is a substantial skill after all]. None of them are making movies-in fact they don't really seem to be making anything useful at all, except money.]

I later gave the script away to an American crowd who recast my 'suffering' citizens as migrant Mexican workers [on my suggestion] and maybe they even made a successful movie-the advantage of being a drop-out retired hippie is that it didn't matter.

The real pleasure of blogging is that I don't have to take shit from any semi-literate arsehole who happens to have sucked enough cocks in his life to put himself into a gatekeeping role where he can pretend to be a someone, and make fuckloads of money out of ripping off the hard working schmucks who really believe that the 'system' is going to treat them fairly. I even have my own personal web-site where I can say what I like, in addition to a number that belong to others where I can also 'tell it like it is': my way. And if I'm wrong I don't care, although I do notice that I am not often wrong-which is sad in a way. That's the trouble with telling the truth-no one really wants it do they?

So here I am going on sixty and still relatively 'jobless', prospect-less [apart from my new book] and without a large reserve of superfluous cash. I decided that it was time to pander to 'the system' before I find myself completely destitute.

I decided to write a book that deals with one of the market economy's most secret activities, an activity that I have been engaged in over many years, albeit like the theatre, I'm now retired from that shit.. For some reason no one else ever seems to have made a crack at this topic. I could speculate as to why and of course I might be wrong-I sometimes think that many of the people who write on the subject of business have more of an academic appreciation of the subject than hard practice, the people who are generally 'skat ryk' successful at the hard practice of business seldom write books -or like Alan Greenspan they hire ghostwriters.

Since I have lived a life 'on the edge' as it were, the only real appreciation of business that I have ever had has been in the field of hard practice-There is one end of the business spectrum where bullshit and political connections count for fuck all. Not that it matters since that is not the end where the big bucks are made out of stock options and bonuses and such like-but it is the place where a person such as myself: a generally anti-social, misanthropic, over-educated, unemployable citizen can eke out a more than comfortable existence-The world to which I refer is the hard-sell world of direct, door to door selling and its equally hard-arsed counterpart, the collection of money, due from reluctant debtors.

I wasn't sure if this would be a good move but I needed something that would pay better than Blogging, without selling out my values [what, do I still have values he asks himself?] to some fucked up corporate arseholes who would massage my work until it became the same mealy mouthed incomprehensible shit we find daily, plaguing the pages of the local press and elsewhere.

So I wrote and self-published a book called '7 Ways to get your money-without resorting to violence or the law'. Since I've retired from that line of business I don't mind sharing what I learned along the way to success, my way.

My optimism seems to have been correctly placed. Last time I self-published a book it was a skiet, skop and verspoeg [for offshore readers 'Shoot, kick and spit far] crime story called the Buffalo Hunters-a broken narrative tale about a gang of carjackers [buffalo hunters]. I sold it as the most violent, sexually graphic piece of writing published to date in SA, which it was and perhaps still is.

I printed a thousand copies and it took me four years to sell them all. Some were sold through the odd 'Exclusives' outlets, most I sold the same way I sold everything else: door to door and face to face.

This time however, with '7 Ways', I sold out my first consignment in under ten days and I am sure that this will be more popular than that previous book was-I learned a lot about self-publishing since then-most importantly that I needed help and a change of author name to something less obviously associated with the former increasingly despised ruling class of humans- and that has made all the difference. -That and the fact that getting money out of one's customers is the most problematic issue facing any businessperson in this country today-in fact it must be a generally global problem since the whole consignment was bought by book chains that don't exist in our sunny place.

If you want to see what the book is about you can find it at Http://newvoices.co.za/book_7 Ways.htp You are warned that it isn't easy to purchase online at this particular site. For logical reasons you can't just use a credit card and buy it online-you must follow a complex procedure. Anyway maybe you can order it through Amazon or Kalahari where such sophisticated measures do exist-assuming of course you have a need for a handbook on debt collecting [or more broadly on how to get your own way in everything] I don't really mind since this book just sells perfectly face to face-in fact having sold [and collected] more than four hundred million bucks worth of general shit in my non-career, this is the first product I've ever had where my closing rate is close to one hundred percent with every call. I love my book.

Eventually this book, which I refer to as 'an airport reading room book' will be on the local bookstore shelves, although it is more probable that you will find it at the increasingly harassed airports of the world where more and more people will be waiting around for aeroplanes and this book will be almost the only thing you'll be allowed to take on board in your transparent 'baggie'.

In the meantime the first consignment is gone, the second is on the way and is mostly pre-sold and the good feeling that went with that is over and I am faced with the fact that all that huge effort is done: I have reached the top of Everest and faced with the knowledge that I must soon begin the downhill climb the only sound that I hear is the sound of one hand clapping and that hand is my own.

I shall practice tai chi and rest my soul.