This is weird in itself - I rarely have a keen interest in money, it doesn't rule me most of the time, and as d has more than once aptly put it, 'Money is not the currency of life, love is.' But January is always an utter bastard when it comes to money, a post-Christmas hangover that seems like the longest month between pay cheques, and such an extra-special fuck-you in the mid-section when you have buggerall in the bank account and still...Jesus, how long till payday?...that you start to regret not having children cos there's bound to be a chimney sweep who could productively shove them up chimneys for grocery-money, because (flings hand to forehead in melodramatic pose) heaven forfend we should drink tap water!
Still - the day was the day, mostly by virtue of the fact that if the day were the night, it would have freaked a lot of people out, and there would have been running and screaming and suchlike nonsense.
Then this afternoon, a Facebook friend request was approved from someone I'd forgotten I'd ever sent the request to. By all accounts a groovy person, and someone connected to someone else...of whom I'm a fan.
Long story short, I'm a fan of a bloke named Mitch Benn - comedian, singer-songwriter, Who-fan, novelist. For a while when I first discovered him, I was probably riiiight there on the boy-crush/Misery borderline of fandom, because I, as it turns out, am pigging useless when it comes to people whose talent I gneuinely admire. It happens rarely, but when it does, I'm utterly hopeless. I met Billy Connolly after a gig once, and while the whole thing is a bit of a blur in my mind, I'm faaairly sure I did that thing that six year-old girls do - standing on one leg, swaying exaggeratedly left and right, saying nothing but gazing adoringly. I'm certain at one point he asked me if I was alright, or if I was having a seizure...
Anyhow - as I say, big fan of Mitch. Erm, this was Mitch, by the way, singing a pretty apposite song to the whole Disappearing Man thing, back in 2009:
As you can see, in the immortal words of Irish comedian Dara O'Briain, Mitch used to 'winter well.'
Not long after this video was shot though - in fact, semi-simultaneously with my initial Disappearing (Ohhh, the notions of sympatico that raced through my brain! I swear, I'm over it now!), Mitch took radical steps and lost a shit-ton of weight.
This was Mitch far more recently:
So there's that.
The point is, having had this Facebook friend request accepted, I got to learn what he's been upto lately (See, see, not a stalker any more, honest, didn't even know stuff...). He's just started a Patreon page. Go check it out, you'll get the idea pretty quickly.
I'd never heard of Patreon either, but it's a kind of gentle crowdfunding thing. You support artists, writers, creatives etc on a 'Per Thing' basis, and can cap your support at X-amount-per-month that you're comfortable with.
Ohhh the wheels that whirred in my tiny mind at that concept. So, say 10p or 10c per blog entry means a monthsworth for around $3. Multiply that by the number of readers and what you end up with is a seriously good motivation to blog every day. In addition, say $1 for every seven pounds lost and you wouldn't believe how focused I'd become on melting the blubber.
Now of course, this is pie in the sky (Mmm...pie...), because a) most of my readers are reassuringly poor, and couldn't afford to subsidise my gibber that way, and b) I'm not sure even I would actually pay money to read this stream-of-consciousness gibber, so I'm fairly sure what would happen is that the number of readers would either plummet, or, because of course there's no coercion or bar involved, the number of people willing to pay to support the Disappearing Man with actual moolah would be meaninglessly small. That's the difference of course - the reason Patreon works is because it supports actual art and artistry, rather than some bloke ranting about calories and walking and Nazi Scales.
But if nothing else, it got me thinking about motivations. When I learned of the Patreon concept I was all set to go off and set up some sort of payment plan for production of the blog and loss of the weight - inspired, it seems, by money. And yet the goal in and of itself is actually more important than money. It's health. It's potentially living longer, doing more, still having working kneecaps and eyeballs and kidneys (oh my!). Somehow, that goal felt more diffuse in my brain, less worth working hard towards than a handful of cash in the middle of January. Utter folly.
Clearly, it's time to get a bit of a grip. Twelve thousand steps later, my bit has been done for the day. It won't surprise you to learn I dug out some of my old Mitch Benn albums and they helped to power me up the first long hill.
It might surprise you, though being me it probably won't, that I scared the living daylights out of a jogger. I have a disturbing tendency to be...erm...very Welsh when I walk, which is to say I sing along, out fairly loud, to whatever's on my iPod. Which is fine if you're singing Mitch Benn songs on a first long hill. It gets perhaps a litttttle bit creepy when, at 5ft 6 and still flirting with the borders of 19 stone, while belting along what seems like a dark, deserted street, you break into the Frankie Valli part of 'Sherry,' suddenly and from nowhere.
Still, I'll give him his due, that jogger could put a sprint on when he felt the need...
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