Three Months Into Creative Poverty

Genocide Advertism 2025. Acrylic on paper, 24 x 30"

Me and Jeff Bezos published a book last March. It was about a year long performance art project to keep my income below the U.S. poverty line in order to theoretically not pay tax to a hierarchal government of dumb brute force. As far as I can tell, I think Emma Pugmire of Crouch End, UK was the only person to have read it. But no matter, for I managed to spark a revolution and overgrow with flowers the doomsday path cut by the old farting gray guard. Not yet of course, but in a future time, after all the stupid people died in a flash with their mouths full of robot grease, composting the seeds of wisdom dreams.

I had such a good time with loneliness and isolation last year that I decided to take up the torch again back in September. I completed the twelfth week on Saturday, and am happy to declare a healthy start on my impoverishment. In order to finish the year in American poverty, I cannot exceed an annual income of $15,000 for living expenses. You can read the book to learn about the rules of the game. Basically, I am allotted $300 per week, which keeps me financially free from associating my dear goodness with the most violent government ever to drip and dry human organs strewn above the earth’s crust. By not buying into it, I am symbolically innocent of crimes to humanity, such as those caused by the rogue state Israel, American government, and any low ranking loser who would choose to join a fascist military (which is all militaries that have ever existed).

After 12 weeks I have spent $3,248.73.

Unfortunately, this does not include Christmas gifts and meal preparation spending, which I will spread out over the rest of the year to even up. You may recall that I also accept donations for free art, or just because you like to support a man, not yet (or ever) a warrior king, who is committed to saving the paradise we were given by the grace of an all-loving universe. I add it to my income unclaimed, since no human mafia can take a cut of my creative force without me laughing my belly off at the look on their grave faces. I wasn’t around when the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 enslaved the American people of the future, until several of them lifted their drool lips off pillows to push a pike through the eyeball brain of somebody who ever thought he had a right to a piece of their labor.

Any day now. Maybe. Any day now.

So there it is. Please wish me good fortune at remaining unfortunate through late September, 2026.

My Christmas book

Here is the introduction that Emma read:

This morning I made the cold, snowy walk to the cardiologist because I like to spend several days before an appointment readying my heart for the onslaught of bureaucracy. Exercise helps. Respiration was 100, pulse 70, and blood pressure 115 over 73. I’m in A-fib constantly, and only visit the heart doctor in order to get a blood thinner prescription refilled.

Jay the PA checked my vitals (repeating what the nurse had recorded 10 minutes prior), and then proceeded to talk about his life for the next 25 minutes. He has three kids in middle and high school. The younger two play sports and instruments in the school band. The oldest takes college classes training to become a mechanical engineer. He was recently diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, so he can’t choose the career he was hoping for, which was joining the Navy to work on a nuclear submarine. Jay is bummed too, but admits his son will probably land a job with Lockheed Martin or Boeing, Inc. and be just as content with annihilation work in the private sector. Right out of college he’ll make around 80 grand a year. Jay drives a used GMC Sierra 2500 four wheel drive, double cab pick up truck ($45,000) in order to haul the 2021 36 foot Keystone Carbon Travel Trailer RV ($50,000) for family camping trips. He commutes with the GMC five days a week, and on weekends, carts his kids to indoor track meets and band competitions all over the state. He’s put 20,000 miles on the monster truck since February. His wife purchased a 2025 Chevy Trailblazer SUV ($32,000) which, says Jay, already has 15,000 miles tacked on the odometer. I also learned what kind of cars Jay’s father and mother drive, where they live, their shopping habits, the bare bones emergency medical facility in Alexandria Bay, how he spent his Thanksgiving, the nine instruments his middle child plays, not including percussion! All this information and more pressed into my brain before sunrise. Before coffee!

I should mention that I also decided to walk to his office in the snow and ice because I am in the final days of a year long project to keep expenses below the poverty line. I didn’t want to mark another $21 for car use, which is my local round trip fee to “borrow” my wife’s car, the comparable cost for cab fare in Oswego. That would bring me too far “in the red” to begin the week, especially since I still had to use the car for grocery shopping, which has been standard since the project began. A brisk walk in the cold would get my heart pumping and save money to keep me from paying taxes to a genocidal bureaucracy.

Jay is a very nice and hopefully competent PA. I would recommend him solely for his friendly bedside manner. He says I don’t need to have heart work done, which means no invasive ablasion, nuclear stress test, or a chip implanted in my left atrial appendage. And thankfully, no more drugs! Just let the A-fib be as long as it doesn’t wake me up in the night with palpitating terror, while I continue to take my blood thinner. Jay is a husband, father, part-provider, consumer and enabler of oligarchy and pretend capitalism—a gem of an American, and as normal and “good” as they come. With a pinpoint lobotomy, I bet we could become fast friends. My lobotomy, not his, for I am the anomaly. I am the the kink, the peculiarity, that patch of unwanted ice his musical genius kid slips on and breaks his wrist—another bit of information he shared without my asking. (Jay gets $80/hr. to wax poetic about heart and circulation, though for the majority of our visit he talked about his recent purchases and family drama. So, after a half hour, I paid roughly $35 to hear his story, which I guess is what people addicted to bureaucracy are expected to pay to get their three month’s supply of stroke-preventing pills to pop.)

I always keep an eye out for kindred spirits in dystopia, though I admit it’s like hunting for truffles in a Walmart parking lot. At first blush, Jay seemed to possess all the right qualities for a burgeoning friendship. A gentle person, attentive, inquisitive… That is, until he began to talk about his superficial life, which proved there won’t be any dreams of revolution playing out in Jay’s mind, which is alread made up for him. GMC Sierra, Keystone Carbon Travel Trailer, a fervent Democrat or Republican, and genius nuclear engineer spawn cruising the Atlantic ready to annihilate all of his father’s best camping spots. Jay encourages his boy to tinker with nuclear weapons. Just like any lunatic would in a world gone politely insane. Jay’s truck gets 11 miles to the gallon while hauling a three ton plastic camper all over hell to high school indoor track meets. Jay will never understand why a man like me wants to live below the poverty line and encourage braver souls to hunt the billionaires.

Unfortunately, Jay and his kids are my enemies. But they’re soft ones. Dumb ones. Jay does not suffer irony about his world, therefore Jay is free in his own mind, and that will get him very close to death clean and guilt-free. Sure, there will come a reckoning, but it’s always too late for Americans to become any lasting good.

People like me are the worst. We just aren’t satisfied with everything at our fingertips. Skeletons at the banquet. Consummate squids ruining a mediocre time. Some of us seem crazy. Like me. I dive shirt and shoes into a baby pool at an adult birthday party. I do it sober, and then I start drinking. Some of us cannot see gray. We’re black and white, good and evil. If that approach isn’t smarter, it is definitely quicker. I would be an excellent Robespierre at any meeting of anxious minds. I began this project with the help of a little lined journal my daughter gifted me at Christmas. I titled it “Poor Ronnie’s Anti-Ethnic Cleansing Almanac”. It contains very little “almanac” information beyond my own careful expenditure accounting, no tide tables or phases of the moon, although a full lunar eclipse appeared in April and I probably ate a rice cake that dark day to tide me over until dinner.

No, my almanac is more social commentary about anti-genocide, which is the most tragic conjunction of all time, don’t you think? What kind of sick gray-sighted person made that phrase palatable to society? It’s very difficult to get past my lips even. This year I heard it click off the tongues of presidential candidates and repeatedly chime its dirge on the Doomsday Clock. Since October 7, 2023, tens of thousands of children have been murdered in Gaza by the international mafia of the United States government, its shadow billionaires, and the tail-wagging dog state of Israel. On January 1, 2024, I began my project to stay below the poverty line to avoid paying income tax to the killers. It is my solution to living sane among the terror insanity of Jay the PA and his mass majority of American brothers and sisters who are complicit in not only war crimes and genocide, but also the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, which I believe is the sole threat to all life beyond a permanent eclipse of the sun or enormous asteroid impact. I would not be able to change the path of such a hopelessly broken man, Jay, nor an entire population, without the threat of stupid violence. For as long as his truck gets gas and his kid blows the tuba, Jay is just one of many millions wanting to be loved and appreciated by a system offering little more than superficial trinkets atop landfills of humiliation, degradation and inevitable annihilation. Jay represents the multitude of ignorances that bolster an evil empire, and he gets along splendidly in his own mind. With only one life to live, it might be impossible to usher in peaceful coexistence before nuclear armageddon. Some of us crazy ones will have to try. Hence this little book outlining a creative path to poverty. One way to begin annihilating annihilation is to stop funding it.