freelansing in Seattle

I don’t usually post about my personal life on this blog, but this thing I wrote elsewhere seems somehow relevant. Maybe relevant to a lot of aging activists in similar circumstances.

Some Thanksgiving conversations with family got me thinking about my life choices and life trajectory.

How do I concisely explain my current predicament of being a broke-ass unemployed old dude living on the dole, about to lose my housing and uncertain about what comes next?

Well, it all started with me being a young man wanting to change our society, believing that better communication was key to that project. So I threw myself into publications I thought did that. “Alternative press” as we called it at the time, which I’d now call progressive independent media. First RAIN magazine, then the Portland Alliance, then Seattle Community Catalyst, then Eat the State!, then Prison Legal News, with a few others in between. Four decades of pursuing mission-driven publishing.

I was always a big-picture, generalist kinda guy who studied systems theory in college. Politically, I was interested in a lot of different issues, & in terms of skills I pretty much did all the things in publishing: writing, editing, graphic design, marketing, ad sales, distribution, and anything else needed to make stuff work. Independent media was always a struggle to survive.

I was pretty decent at all the things I did, but people who specialized in any of the things I did were better at them. People who just focused on one issue knew more about it than I did, those who focused just on writing were better writers, others were better editors, or graphic designers, or (later) website designers than I. I always just aimed to do whatever was needed for my current project and to do it well enough to get by.

I always considered my work very important and always strove to do it however I could with little regard to monetary compensation. I learned to live on very little money (“living lightly,” as we used to call it, or “minimizing my ecological footprint,” as we might say today), and as long as I could pay current bills, that was enough for me. I’ve never had a credit card or accumulated any debt—always paid as I went. I frequently believed in some big breakthrough on the horizon, in the larger society and/or in my own career path, that would put me in a more successful position, but it just never quite happened.

Just two years ago I’d figured I could at least coast into retirement at age 70 on my long-term contract with the Human Rights Defense Center, but then I learned they had different plans and I was suddenly out of work, with a skillset no longer in demand, and mostly out of touch with the community connections that had sustained me when I was doing more piece-work contracting.

So here I am, involuntarily retired in my mid-sixties, with an obsolete skillset, and now living on public benefits and wondering where I can go when next year I have to leave the communal house I’ve lived in over 30 years. At every step of my journey I believed I was doing the right thing, but now I’m pretty much in a flowing body of excrement without means of locomotion. Oops. Life can be funny that way.