I write at 8 PM, twelve hours after waking from a long sleep. It’s been a day. A watershed day, and quite probably even a good one.

The first six orders of coffee beans are fulfilled, according to my storefront software. In the morning I will run to the PO and they will officially be on the way. That leaves three more to go (plus one for a t-shirt from Printful), and a total of seven more bags that need the roast process.

I know now that I can do that by tomorrow afternoon too.

The hardest darkest part, beyond just at last cracking the seal of the job, was finding out that my sixty dollar label printer is just a paperweight for now. But the workaround was simple–a little more packing tape carefully applied (NOT over the barcode, anywhere else is okay).

The best part was a comment from the Postmistress. When I told her that the packages contained coffee beans I roasted myself, she said, “Well that’s a skill!” … which some hungry part of me interpreted as ‘a real and plausibly manly skill’ …

… which upon reflection, I think, is close enough to accurate.

I am not just an artist now. I am a neophyte artisan and entrepreneur as well. I have a measure of purpose that does live inside me, but not just inside me. People have given me money. They have expectations. I have obligations. Not in the stupid please-the-Deam way that happens with employers. I am the employer. I employ myself. Essentially this is practical anarchism.

I still have to follow a number of the Man’s dumb-ass rules, but way fewer than I had to as a drone; even an elevated house-negro professor drone.

No one tells me when to Be At Work. I don’t need to smell a certain way. I can smoke vile weeds in my office if I want to, because it’s my office and not theirs. I am only beholden to the people who have trusted me with their fat cash money, and I’ll be responsible to them, twenty-six dollars worth of duty and value at a time, or whatever the number is.

I don’t have to write letters of recommendation for free, because I have no students and no colleagues trying to escape our mutual cellblock. I have no network.

My house smells like Nicaraguan chaff and hot caffeine.

I think it might work for me.

The Postmistress told me that there was a person here in town whose business was shipping manure.

And another person who only shipped sand from her backyard. (It was supposed to have rare minerals or something in it; the conversation was brief).

I don’t have any sand, but I’ve studied that riverbed and I know where to get it. If I need to …

I don’t need to, yet, but the point is: some people, some times, will buy anything.

I don’t know yet what-all I’ll be selling, but in the new year …

my product lines will expand, beyond t-shirts and the organic primo beans.

Solstice of winter bless me please.