jayceeloop is considering the relative merits of seeing if being downsized is on his horizon vs. simply pre-emptively quitting to embark on life as a not-otherwise-primarily-employed musician.



I cut my strings with full-time employment in favor of a music career in August of 1992--three weeks shy of 16 years ago.



It was an absolutely reckless, senseless, disastrous move to make, and I don't regret it at all. Not even a little bit.



I have *always* wanted to be self-employed.



Even though I make next to no money (e.g., way less than $100/mo. so far this year), the only arena in which I present myself as "unemployed" is with financial institutions and other bureaus that have no frame of reference for understanding lives of barter and mutual support.



Otherwise, for nearly all of these 16 years I have considered myself to be self-employed, not un-employed. UnDERemployed, yeah, most of the time, but even that makes sense in its context of my mental and spiritual and emotional health and the external forces that have shaped me. I don't consider myself to be the euphemistic "between jobs;" I am on the path I belong on.



There is a tyranny, no question, involved in being on the brink of destitution all the time. But I long ago judged that tyranny to be less objectionable than the tyranny of wage-slavery.



I would much rather be miserable being deliriously happy in my Bohemian, wonder-filled, explorative, serendipitous life as an artist (and I am not infrequently miserable about it) than be miserable putting in days and weeks and months and years of my life on somebody else's time-clock.



I believe, firmly, that money is a sacrament, by which I mean that it is a physical representation of a metaphysical reality. It's not so much, I think, that time is money as that money is time.



As a grammarian I know that there is no literal difference between those two clauses--subjects and predicate nominatives are interchangeable--but in this case, money is the physical representation and time is the metaphysical reality.



As I pithily put it in a poem a few years ago, "You pay for your life, or you pay with your life."



Wasting most of an hour at The Exclusive Warehouse Outlet of the Evil Empire, aka Sam's Club, last night, I was forced to reaffirm that truth. The one thing we went there needing and intending to buy was not in stock.



Saving money and time is, I submit, rarely really possible. Sooner or later, one or the other's gotta go.



I'd rather do without the money and have my entire clock be my own.



That means that, unfortunately, I am always on my clock.



Fortunately, my work is also my play. Is also my work. Is also my play...



I intend never again to have a job. I intend always to have my work.



It depends on what you value: I've chosen time and self-actualization. I may lose it "all on one turn of pitch-and-toss"--I have a shitload of medical challenges that include cardiovascular disease, by which I fully expect to be ushered to the Other Side on very short notice, and I may be felled by a blood-clot long before I ever get the chance to make dents in the music or publishing or art worlds, along with hope of residuals in my old age.



But for now I'm in good shape: I've successfully rehabilitated my heart and I'm on a good program at a charitable clinic. So I have a reasonable hope of self-actualizing because I have a reasonable hope of the time in which to do it.



I do without a *lot* of toys. But I have learned to be poor. As Westley said to Humperdinck, "We know the secrets of the fire-swamp. We can live there happily for some time."



If one is willing to undertake the discipline of doing without and taking on great uncertainty in exchange for a dream, cutting the strings with financial security and taking the plunge is, I declare, very, very much worth it.

Your result for The Attachment Style Test...

The Cuddleslut

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In answer to kc_risenphoenix's question, my position on marriage has long been that as a legal institution, marriage should be available to all adults who wish to be legally related to one another in a peer relationship.



It's not about "gay" or "str8" or anything having to do with sexual/affectional/erotic orientation or preference. It's not about gender. It's not about love. That's why I prefer not to say "gay marriage," but rather "same-sex marriage."



I in fact knew a heterosexual woman who had once been "married" to a Lesbian. She was perfectly comfortable referring to her having once had a "wife," even though she told me that by the time the wedding night was over, she knew that she was most definitely not herself a Lesbian. But that relationship lasted 10 years nonetheless.



I staunchly believe that they should have as much right to marry legally as my bf Justin and I have to marry legally in Canada, where he is a citizen. Love--the nature and quality of love--has nothing to do with it.



To me, it's about civil rights, period. Even though I'm old enough to be Justin's father, I most certainly have no interest in adopting him, even if one could adopt a 28-year-old. I am his lover, not his daddy. And while he is endearingly childlike, I don't want him as a child--I want him as a husband.



Marriage should, I believe, justly be a tool. It's a medieval institution, and there's nothing wrong with it serving the same legal role it served in medieval times--sans the wife-as-chattel thing, of course. My point is that it was about legal partners and heirs.



As far as legal heritage goes, I see nothing wrong with having more than one legal partner, any more than I see anything wrong with having more than one legal child. So yes, of course, polyamory should be legal, too. Since so much of heritage is slugged out in probate court, anyway, just drop the pretenses and make marriage a business relationship and have done with it.



And let all those who don't want the fiscal protection of a legal marital relationship face the fate they have chosen. Which means, let prenups be marriage contracts, and let those who don't desire prenups forego legal marriage if they wish.



And don't punish the offspring! (The Hebrew Bible [Deut. 23:2] says bastard children are accursed to the 10th generation! The 10th! But this isn't my theology blog.)



Let the churches do what the churches will do. Let the civil arena give civil rights, as is right and just.



That about sums it up.

I still find it difficult and painful, sometimes, to read my old journals from the year or two before I came out. Some of my issues still don't feel even close to being resolved, even though I know I've come a long way--and the sometimes-difficult-and painful practice of reading old journals reaffirms that: I deal with the same issues, but on a *much* different plane of experience.



Looking back, understanding that coming out was the most important work of magick (i.e., focusing the will in order to change consciousness) I've ever performed, I find it kind of amusing, looking back to my entry for July 8, 1988, which was so not-profound that I might skip over it if I were compiling The Essential Khrysso from my diaries and journals and letters and blogs and didn't remember this anniversary date.



Excerpts:



"How odd, that two incongruities like God and homosexuality would be so alike in being with me all my life, tracking me down, hounding me until I conceded to them. Conversion... is like coming out.... [Both consist in just acknowledging] what has been true all along.



"Boy, what a profound statement. Without my struggles I wouldn't have my revelations.



"Upon reading [Congressman Robert Bauman's autobiography] The Gentleman from Maryland, I have to admit that



"I am a homosexual.



"It took me a while to get those four words written down.



"This is