Incomplete Essay: Free Money
Free Money! Free Money! Free Money! On friendship and money in and out of the Fourth Place: The Hologram
If you would like to listen along, here is the audio transcript of the essay ~
The world is melting outside my window, everything dripping rapidly in the sun. It is Thursday so when I woke up at 6, I stayed in bed a while longer to see how I had left the Internet. I watched a video by Mina Le that I had been saving for a quiet moment and listened to her synthesize so many scattered pieces of what I have been feeling lately. The phrase “Third Places” slipped into my vernacular a few months ago and has had me compartmentalizing myself and my time, feeling frustrated and bereft of fair and affordable opportunities for communities to gather together.
Since really being a part of PPS, we have been trying to find more places around Portland to read and perform. The one constant space is a beloved local dive bar where everything is $5 and there is a small decently-lit stage. We have had other venues in the past, but none that have fit us quite as well - too loud, too cramped, too many fluorescent lights, too many rules. Recently, a book bar & cafe opened right on Congress St. and we secured it for the Workshop. It’s a perfect fit and something I had personally been waiting for to pop up in the city scene, despite the drink menu starting at $9. Before this joint opened, there was a concerning lack of Third Places that we could inhabit as a troupe of poets and friends.
Much of this last year for me was roaming around Portland between jobs, time to kill w/ a disposable income. Honestly, I spent most of my money last year absentmindedly, on lunch or thrifted trinkets or someone asking for money on the street when I only had a $50 bill. Around my city, there are a few parks but not many places to kick up and hang out. Like many places in America, if you’re not buying anything you can’t stay long. You get your check before you finish your meal. You pay at the door before learning the bar is too crowded for you. In most places, you can’t even piss for free. I didn’t think about the money I was spending because I feared the familiar sweat of not having enough. Instead, I kept insisting on a life that felt like mine but one that I couldn’t actually afford. There is so much of this that is embarrassing for me to admit but I’m not in the business of pretending anymore.
Mina’s video made me want to sit down and collect what life has been affirming for me, lately: about money, friendship, and the Hologram
This week, I have an air of levity and brightness about me. My confines have indeed freed me from the excess I thought I needed to feel free and abundant. The recent implement of a strict budget has already shown me how much my life has changed since the last time I was in a financial situation like this. Around the time I moved to Portland, a year or so in, I had more car troubles and had to invest in another second-hand third-hand fourth-hand car. The difference was that I didn’t have many friends yet, I didn’t have a routine that empowered me and I didn’t know the city I was living in very much at all. I was reevaluating my relationship w/ money in the sense that I deleted my Amazon account and started to only buy items secondhand or on sale, investing in things I felt I would want to have for years to come but not truly investing in myself - letting youth hold the purse strings. While that aligned my spending w/ my values, it didn’t diminish the amount of money I was spending, at least not after I got good at it.
When I was spending money, I was looking for mirrors - pieces that felt like they reflected my life back at me, that affirmed my identity and cemented me into the city streets, pieces that I could be proud to wear and carry around and know where they came from. I didn’t really know how else to do it. So much of my life felt like I had stumbled upon it, not chose it.
That aspect of thoughtful spending hasn’t changed, but I let it get out of hand. Constantly hearing Yes as a response to desire made desire devoid of meaning. Even when I was buying what felt like the perfect gift for a friend, I felt a little flat. Here is what has changed over the years: Now, I have meaningful friendships in my day to day life that not only affirm who I am, but delight and excite in who we are together. The focus is always on meaningful time spent together, not catching up or playing pretend or showing off. Another huge difference is that, while I am busy busy busy, a majority of my time is dedicated to work that I enjoy and, at best, work that I believe in, work that doesn’t feel like I should be paid for at all. In a way, this accident and this financial crisis have aligned at a time when I am empowered to change my worst behaviors into actions that sustain a life I know feels good and assures me that, yes I’m alive, yes, I am seen for who I am, yes, we can do this work together for a long long time.
Since losing the Vibe and spending my savings on the Soul, the affordability of a Third Place has been on my mind extra. I linger on the fact that, before I slid and spiraled in the snow, I was planning on meeting a good good friend for dinner, a dinner that would have cut into my budget but that I would never admit was cutting into my budget (I was refusing to even look at my bank account after Christmas but I digress). Halfway through the year, I tried to make a deal w/ myself to stop buying so many ~ things ~ I would, instead, splurge on dinners out, drinks everywhere, a pre-roll to walk around and a coffee before work. This spending felt far more free than any pair of sustainably made jeans or secondhand books or fundraising & mutual aid donations that I could buy but it cut into my ““budget”” even more drastically as more plans were made and more friends kept calling. I have always found more value in the experiential over the material and, in the moment, my zest for life says This is why we make money! To spend it! To live and live, to give and give! While the accident ultimately cost me more than that dinner ever would, I am taking the small symbol that has found me - it is not the plans we make that get us into trouble, it is the limitations of them.
This week, I inhabited all number of spaces and have been happy and confident doing so. Yesterday, for example: I worked my second hand retail job in the morning (Second Place) and used a gift card I had been saving at the donut shop down the street (Third Place). Then I had therapy (Liminal Place) and went to my cleaning job (Second Place) before heading home (First Place).
As the snow was falling and freezing, I thought about how I was consistently traveling to these spaces confidently as myself, how that wasn’t always the case. I found that my identity could support itself. In work settings, at least public facing work settings, there is often a split of the true self & the consumable self. When I started cleaning, thankfully, those boundaries dissipated a bit. The donut shop was practically empty in the middle of the day, a sort of sad Third Place moment that I moved in and out w/ few words, offering no real compensation. My therapist’s space is beautiful and cozy. We sit on the floor together every session. But despite being a room of soft sun and big feelings, there are still gaps where comfortability has to be forced. It is a work space after all, even if it looks like two friends hanging out. Between all of these places was the Internet. Many people online have referred to the Internet as a new Third Place but I argue it’s actually a Fourth Place, a hologram overlapping all the spaces we inhabit, whether we are fully engaged w/ it or not. I enjoy the half-in half-out nature of this Fourth Place, that it is optional and playful. I try my best to enter it offering thoughtful connection. But it is not a place I stay very long, certainly not a place I like to live.
So, this morning, I started my day in the Hologram. I had messages from my friend E who I’ve been close to since college. E is a glass blower, a painter, a Virgo, a sphinx mom and someone who will be in my life forever. We don’t do a lot of catching up when we talk. We send each other articles or ask each other questions in the middle of the day, remind each other when we are reminded of each other effortlessly. E and I haven’t lived near each other since New York and even then, we were a train or two away when we weren’t on campus. What I value most in our friendship over the years is that no time is ever wasted. We catch up when we need to update each other, new jobs, new mailing addresses, new projects, but mostly it is like we are always in the same room w/ each other despite the time and space in between.
Yesterday, I shared a piece of artwork by Margaret R. Thompson in my stories and E told me the gallery she works at in NC features some of Thompson’s work, that she makes all the pigments from soils found in Santa Fe, that there are beautiful sparkling specks of mica in them, that she’s going to try and get a photo of them in the sun for me.
A few years ago, as a birthday gift, E had made me a mirror w/ stained glass and a lock of her hair. I’m looking at it right now in my living room. The other day, she asked me to send updated photos of it to show her boss. I waited until this morning when the light was generous. & I sent her videos of alligators frozen in the Shallotte River Swamp Park in NC, their snouts sticking up and out of the ice, breathing imperceptibly. There are a lot of lizards and bugs in our chat, if you look, lizards and bugs and art, miss you love you miss you.
Another conversation thread I picked up in the Hologram this morning was one w/ MM, a poet that had come through Portland on a small diy chapbook tour - he and two friends had arranged it and stopped by PPS to read w/ us. I’ve been dreaming of replicating it since they visited. It was a small miraculous experience to hear new poets and see them investing in their work, creating little books to sell, traveling the country and making connections. After the reading, the three poets lingered at Lincoln’s and I got to know them all the best I could in the last hour of the night. All three added me on insta and I promptly added them to my Close Friends list in my stories. Since then, we have been keeping up w/ each other the way you do in the Hologram, but w/ mindfulness. Yesterday I also shared a meme to Close Friends of Christopher from the Sopranos, an edit about longing. MM had DM’d me saying, “sometimes the things you decide to make close friends boggles my brain” I began to think of Close Friends as its own place, its own room in the house of the Internet, that one room at parties where the music is a little quieter and the lighting is dimmer and we are all huddled by the back window blowing out smoke together, ashing on leaves and weaving our lives together fearlessly.
I collect friends and artists on social media, my only intention is to bleed through the screen. This Fourth Place is still dependent on performance, like the entirety of the Hologram, but if you pay attention, the performance breathes like you and me. This Fourth Place opens spontaneously like a blossom in spring, like a book falling off a library shelf, like my best friend w/ a key to my place.
Google then highlighted an article for me of a group of friends who pooled their money to buy property that they would all retire together on, right now it’s being used as an Airbnb property until age catches up. I can’t find the exact article now, but there are more stories like this being published all the time, it seems. The more I see examples of this, the more I want it. I don’t want to debate the ethics of second-properties and airbnbs right now but just know that yes, I am aware of the financial inequity argument and I agree, but we’re talking dreams, here. W/ the new year, there seem to be a lot of conversations about dream lives and dream homes, things to aspire to and indulge in, a realistic fantasy about what life could look like and feel like. W/ the economy being what it is, this kind of dreaming comes w/ a lot of pain and frustration - the Now is tricky enough to manage. Give me one good reason not to dream! Tell me why we should rob ourselves of desire! Tell me what this world would be w/out fantasy!
When I look around my home today, I don’t pick at all the things I wish were different. When I imagine my ‘dream home’ it does not have everything I could ever want or need - no pool in the backyard, no 360 views, no closet the size of my first apartment, it’s just close to my friends. Where I live now, I am 20 minutes from the city, 20 minutes from the beach, 20 minutes from the woods, and 5 minutes from the highway. Being able to leave my home is what makes coming home so rewarding.
While I am not right downtown in my city center, I work downtown, so spontaneously bumping into friends or making plans to meet last minute are whims that I will always follow. Otherwise, the trick is first finding where our free time overlaps and second trying to figure out where to meet, where to go, what to do. Where in our city can we afford to roam free?
I love my friends who allow me to be generous w/ them, to buy them a little something I felt they needed or to trade rounds of drinks - spending is a way to see someone, in more ways than one. And I love my friends because I won’t have to explain why I can’t do that anymore, not to the capacity that I was, because nobody here is expecting anyone to give past their means. I am thankful for friends who practically live in their favorite bars to the point that I will run into them on a random night out, who will split a G&T w/ me and will leave w/ me when the vibe changes. I am thankful for friends who will come over in sweatpants w/ a j and their laptop who are happy sitting around at home, making snacks and starting projects. I am thankful for friends who are happy to meet in the middle of wherever we are and just walk and walk, talk and talk, focus on right here and right now w/ me. I love deeply when my friends call me when they need help moving or want to run errands together or need a ride to or from the airport.
I want to reference the Rosie Spinks piece that Mina also referenced: The Friendship Problem - linking here because it is absolutely worth a read. It is no surprise that being constantly connected has only worn us out on connection, especially when our definition of “connection” has become based more of social standing, performance, and echo chambers. The more we see of the world, the more society is empowered to pick apart nuance, call out and ostracize, claim ownership of and, most frustratingly, sell sell sell buy buy buy. There is less and less tolerance of friction and difference, not to mention less love and appreciation of it.
Until recent years, my friendships included insecurities of all kinds, flakiness, frustration and expectation. It made scheduling time together difficult and undesirable and made intimacy impossible. The tedium of scheduling and catching-up exhausts the excitement of connection before it begins. W/ friendships, especially friendships we’ve maintained for much of our lives w/ differing levels of distance, we assume the connection is there already, that it doesn’t need to be strengthened, that all that is left is the minutiae of what life has been like since we last checked in. I have felt the heart extinguish from friendships and family relations when all that is left is the catch up conversation - the rubber of the balloon devoid of what fills it w/ life.
If this entry strives for anything it is a cry for quality over quantity, for friction over simple and slick. Not having it all is not a stain, it is not a mark against us and it is not a hurdle that has any value. Desire does not dissipate when we say Yes to it, it only grows hungrier. In fact, I would argue that always saying Yes immediately to desire is not what it wants - desire is an energy in and of itself, meant to transmute our will towards joy, not rob us of it. Like a fire, desire is meant to be stoked not burnt up in a flash. If you’re not careful, the coffee you buy yourself on a bad day as a little treat will turn a perfectly good day bad when you can’t afford it anymore.
What friends are for, what family is for, what community is for - this is the kind of giving that feels natural to give but so unnatural to ask for. The point of the real connections in our lives is not only to do the fun shit together, but to have fun doing everything else together. I am thinking of all the services provided to us w/ a fee these days (everything, everything) and how life is being crafted into something that can only be enjoyed if you are flush w/ cash and know how to invest it, how we are punished in unbelievable ways if we are trying to live unconventional lives believing in free thought and community. I am thinking often how we can simply give that to each other to build community, community that we are all looking for, for free, out of love.
As a capitalist society, we are conditioned to live fearful lives of never enough, to find love in the things we buy, to expect love to look like it does in the advertisements of it and to expect payment for the love we give out. Our humanity kept behind a paywall. In my response to MM, I told him I don’t like to complain unless it feels useful. I am complaining, now, of capitalism - how it has separated us from connection and community, separated us from feeling capable and empowered, separated us from finding joy and purpose in work, separated us - often - from believing in meaningful work and a meaningful life, severed us completely from dreaming w/out guilt. In my weakest, youngest moments, I bought in. It’s increasingly difficult not to and I’m certain I will not be perfect in my learning, but life has supported me through so far.
I am guilt-free this morning, dreaming only of a life I can give away and priceless love, priceless unconventional anti-transactional love full of friction.