AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT, my mental energies have of late been focused upon one primary and apparently uncomfortable topic: What I can do for money (NOT things I could do that would be totally volunteer but really cool).

I’m aware I’m not the only US citizen in my current predicament, and I’m very aware I at least don’t have any kids depending on me. But that doesn’t mean I should just give up on my creative-career dreams and just send out 1,000 resumes a week for busboy jobs.

No, tuff times call for tuff thinking. I’m gonna get outside the envelope and start pushing the box (or is it the other way around?). I’m gonna find great new opportunities where others just find weed-strewn country ditches with a beater Camaro or two capsized and rusting away.

Areas I’ve looked into or thought about:

• Ghost-writing CEOs’ memoirs;
• starting a restaurant (even more flaky a proposition than publishing, but one which banks seem to be more willing to lend to);
• starting a bookstore and/or boutique and/or coffeehouse;
• starting an investors’ newsletter (maybe not the right year);
• designing collectible cell-phone calling cards;
• starting an indie-cred sex magazine full of escort ads (it’s been done in Portland, but they’ve got more indie strip clubs to distribute such a mag in);
• creating a wacky cartoon character for snowboarders’ T-shirts that could cross-over into a Nickelodeon series (but someone else would have to draw it);
• devising “alt-culture” versions of every known book-biz cash cow (self-help, investment guides, decorating guides, calendars, romance novels–anything except murder mysteries or celebrity-hype);
• learning to bet on horses;
• devising thousand-page grade-school-level novels for that emerging long-attention-span generation (sounds easy, except kid readers are infinitely more BS-intolerant than grownup readers);
• becoming an insurance attorney a la Wallace Stevens;
• making sex videos (character-based softcore, not loveless hardcore);
• abandoning the attempt at a commercial periodical and instead simply writing shit that really turns me on and putting it out in little paperbacks for global distro;
• starting a franchised chain of indie-rock clubs between Ellensburg and Pierre, making it more fiscally feasible for unsigned bands to tour the NW corner of the US (another such chain could be started between Ashland and Eureka);
• creating spoken-word comedy routines sold only on mail-order CDs (because, the ads, would say, they’d be “too clean and nice to ever be heard on the radio”);
• starting grassroots propaganda campaigns on behalf of industrial-fiber plants other than hemp (I can see it now: “Flaxseedfest!”);
• a line of “designer” wines in labels bearing the faces of famous people who died from alcoholism;
• devising career-planning guides exhorting parents to prepare their kids for the careers that had been “hot” a year before said planning guides were written;
• devising a TV survival show in which people have to do what any people who really have to survive together do (i.e., cooperate);
• devise a TV decorating show (with spinoff home videos, books, and magazines) on how to add more clutter to your life;
• curate an anthology of highbrow literary stories about U.S. sports other than baseball;
• start a commercial UHF TV station devoted to local entertainment programming (plus a few infomercials and really obscure reruns such as “Championship Bridge”);
• discover a yet- (or not-currently-) exploited B-movie genre (explicit surgical dramas, musicals for heterosexuals);
• publishing lists of money-making ideas.

OK, some of these concepts are far less plausible than others. If I could only discern which ones they are. But at least I’m not trying to sell Internet stocks.