"Some are mathemeticians,
some are carpenter's wives;
I don't know how it all got started;
I don't know what they do with their lives..."

-"Tangled Up in Blue", Dylan


The first thing that strikes you is: How did I ever find time for a day job? To explain- owing to economic and political realities, I recently retired.

I always envisioned a life with a lot of free time. The question of how to pay for the "free time" ? Ah, there's the rub. So this is a blog about not getting a job.

I'm an artist, and the weekends have been a time split between traditional leisure/social activities, such as sports, art shows and music, and more professionally oriented ones, such as making and selling art. Then back to my job, often at 4 am Monday morning. Now I schedule my own time, a great advantage which I really appreciate. It's rare for working people to retire these days, and most seem to have their next job lined up before the retirement party even begins. My next job has been lined up since I graduated with a BFA: unfortunately, it pays even less than the classic retirement job, wal mart greeter.

I'm going to be a Squishtoid. I won't bore you with a long drawn out definition of what a Squishtoid is, especially since I just made it up and haven't really defined it yet, but I can give you the manifesto: squish or be squished. As background- I'm a monoprint artist. I paint ink on a plexiglass sheet and run it through a press at 2000 pounds psi pressure. What I painted comes out the other side, backward and totally squished. Kind of like life itself.

Then I sell them at shows, most of them street fair type shows. My first show was June 13-14, a chance to keep wal-mart at arm's length and keep scheduling my own time. I'll tell you how it went in my next post. For now, suffice it to say:

Days without job: 76.

Feel free to comment. Let me know if you are in a similar situation. Or contemplating it. For artists, I hope to share some of the things to look for as I stumble into my new career. For art lovers, I hope to share some of the process and thinking that goes into a monotype. For people who hate single subject blogs, I'll slip in a little "weekend squish" about books, music, cooking, entertainment and living the good life on the cheap.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope it happens to you sometime.