"Art is pointless"

[hunter]

12. My parents were for the most part California artists with day jobs until they retired.

Then they were full time artists with pensions and Social Security.

They did okay, usually in work related to their art. My dad has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from a prominent university but that's not what paid the bills.

My wife is a talented artist but she's got the sort of day job that doesn't leave her much time for her art. It's also possible medicine is her primary art. That does pay the bills.

Maybe half of everyone in my extended family is some kind of artist, some of them professional full time artists. But we all learned at an early age, sometimes by bad example, to have some sot of backup plan. It's always best to develop more marketable skills you can fall back on.

Plumbing is an art. So is car mechanics.

Some parts of my childhood, whenever my parents decided to be full time artists, were completely insane. At one point we were indigent Americans living in a van in a French public park after we'd left Franco's Spain in the middle of the night. The local people were so disturbed by us they bought us a tank of gasoline for the van and ferry tickets to England. Then things go really weird...

As a naive kid I'd hoped to be some kind of writer like my mom. That was not to be. I found work moving furniture, patching up crappy student housing and working in medical labs.

I still can't write worth shit in spite of the English Minor (which is actually called something else) on my university degree.