Five Tips to Defeat Your Fiverr Slump.

[looseink]

11 hours ago, damooch916 said:

Been a long time looseink. I’m not sure that I catch your drift. 

It's my poor attempt at humour...lol

[damooch916]

2 hours ago, looseink said:

It's my poor attempt at humour...lol

I’m glad to see you back. Also, I admire your resolve to return to - and to endure - our strange little dystopia. Sometimes I think of the long standing forum members as active participants in a sacrificial ritual. My deity promised that I’d father a nation for my effort. But some of us were only promised a water bottle with a halo logo. Depending on what nation I get, I may opt for the water bottle.  

[theratypist]

1 hour ago, damooch916 said:

I’m glad to see you back. Also, I admire your resolve to return to - and to endure - our strange little dystopia. Sometimes I think of the long standing forum members as active participants in a sacrificial ritual. My deity promised that I’d father a nation for my effort. But some of us were only promised a water bottle with a halo logo. Depending on what nation I get, I may opt for the water bottle.  

I wonder how you were as a child, Damooch 😆

[vickiespencer]

3 hours ago, theratypist said:

I wonder how you were as a child, Damooch 😆

It would be interesting to have a chat with Tommy's parents. 

 

[minario]

....And for the Article, Your cooking was amazing with the right recipe and the Aroma was....

 

I picked up a few tips from your lines, They'll probably help( I will put them to good use I promise) and the sarcasm got me, i was honest with that!

[minario]

On 6/12/2023 at 10:35 PM, mandyzines said:

I thought this post was going to be serious when I read the intro! Thanks for not disappointing me.

I blame Fiverr for finally becoming a 'choice' during the apocalypse. 

You're welcome ma'am( On his behalf)...

 

[damooch916]

13 hours ago, theratypist said:

I wonder how you were as a child, Damooch 

 

10 hours ago, vickiespencer said:

It would be interesting to have a chat with Tommy's parents.

I was a child performer. I started performing in traveling bands at four and started leading them as a vocalist/instrumentalist in my preteen years. The average age of my work contemporaries was 45. Either that, or all the kids that I knew had extremely gray hair. Though, if you’ve ever met a musician, it’s essentially the same as spending time with a preteen. Around this time I joined my first songwriting staff.

 

This is probably a fine time to explain that my family was a fairly culturally important entity in the northern Californian music circuit throughout the 40’s to the 80’s. I’m a third generation songwriter/musician/performer. 

 

My childhood was a strange combination of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Twin Peaks. Both the show and the eatery. In some senses I didn’t really have a childhood. In other ways, I was extremely adored by my peers for being weirdly autonomous. Imagine being named in roll call each day and the teacher remembers “oh, Tommy’s not here - he’s on tour.” That sort of thing will drive your social status up a few notches. My social life was much like my stage life, everyone offers reverence to “other than” personas. I had unlimited access to any age peer bracket - and operated in a category that I’d seemingly invented. I knew, fairly early on, to view the whole experience from a dissociative, reflective, analytical perspective. I disbanded with the nostalgia of it in real time. And I rarely think about the social excess my gig life or youth life elicited. 
 

 

My father was an academic mammoth. For perspective, my Dad had a hallway named after him in the very high school that I attended. This was due to his having named the school, the middle school and the elementary school while being president and valedictorian of his senior class. The expectations were fairly high. Or in Dad’s words: 

 

“A “B” average won’t pay your rent to live here.”

 

My charge was to beat him scholastically, socially and musically. He kept a shelf housing an entire encyclopedia set and if you ever made the mistake of asking “what does that mean” in conversation, the answer was his finger pointing to the shelf, where you would recite the word and the entire description (no matter the magnitude). 

 

Granted, that sounds militant (and it could be) but my father was also my best friend. I moved out at 14 and not only did this not seem strange - it was fairly expected. As a career songwriter himself, I found my father fascinating. We went to coffee every day that I wasn’t performing, I’m not even kidding, throughout my entire teenage existence. He plainly described the job of songwriting as “writing.” There shouldn’t be a distinction, because you shouldn’t limit the burden of great material to learn from or compete with. I made a study out of that philosophy. He died when I was 18 and my life as a Californian went with it.

 

Ultimately, you don’t live a life in the service of rock n roll and end up a choir boy. I have a million stories, as you can imagine. I would have three million, but I’m obligated by the code of musical weirdness to forget more than I remember. Besides, you only paid me for one story. Pay me enough and I’ll stop talking all together, then we can do this whole thing over as a silent film. 
 

I had an uncommonly great childhood and I realize that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, given the abject strangeness of it’s construct. But it’s also the least interesting time of my life. The stories get more bizarre, more fine tuned, more complex and more refined as I became an adult.
 

As a kid I was self contained, self assured, romantic, boisterous, cerebral, all encompassing, enigmatic, passionate and confrontational. I’ve never suffered fools. I worked all through my youth. Getting home at 2 am to be awake by 6. I put food on the table for adults who had 50 responsibilities to my 1. I had obligations that far exceeded my own - and I had to navigate the overwhelming amount of glad-handers who wanted something from me, ranging from social equity to work to far more nefarious wants. I lived as hard and as uncontrolled as anyone ever did. I also dedicated myself to studying music and the Western Canon of arts and hub sciences. 

 

Those very opposed, very deep characteristics make me a weird combination of life long business owner, artist, traditionalist, eccentric, academic, values advocate, humanity cognoscente, abstruse, unfathomable, fatherly, silly and  unabashedly masculine.

 

That’s who my family was. That’s who I am. We were an unapologetic American family.