Learning to draw in the shadow of the U.S. tax code

Here is my tale of woe.

As everyone knows, the price of bitcoin shot up absurdly in 2017. And, by luck, just as that price was entering into its hocky-stick phase, I finally located the bitcoin cards that I had purchased in 2011. It was a time in my life that I will always remember, the satisfaction, the vindication, the harrowing experience of getting the bitcoin off the cards and into a wallet.dat file so that I could sell the things before the price crashed back to normality.

It took me two or three months to sell most of it all. I tried different platforms for making the conversions. I used Paxful at first, until I discovered that I could buy Amazon cards through Bitpay. I also messed around with Blocktrades.us a little bit, because I wanted to diversify into some alt-coins. I was thinking about taxes while I was doing all this, too. I was thinking about whether I was going to need to declare any of this money.

Eventually, though, the money I was making got to a level that taxes were no longer a question. It would be a major felony to hide this income, and I wasn't even halfway done. At that point I said 'screw it' and opened a Coinbase account. Coinbase, by then, had already settled their issues with the IRS. I took it for granted that all my transactions on that site would be forwarded to the tax man. I didn't mind. Taxation is theft, that is indisputable. But it's also unavoidable. No matter what, we will forever have to contend with armed robbery by whatever government we live under. Bombs are not free, after all. And the people who buy and drop bombs are certainly not going to use their own money to fund their warfare. That would cut too deeply into their margins.

In any case, all of this selling of bitcoin--a little here, a little there, never too much at a time, because the price was still going up--all of it created a shit-ton of work for me. Between November and the end of the year I made roughly 75 transactions, each of which needed to be entered into the tax software by hand.

It doesn't sound like much, I admit. But you know how it is with these kinds of things. You can never just sit down and get started. You have to realize that you need to print out file X, or find form Y. And then there was the headache of getting my tax software to work on Linux. This in turn meant installing Wine. And then finding out that Wine wasn't going to work either. So I had to install VirtualBox. And so on. You get the picture.

To make a long story medium-length, I eventually conquered all of these obstacles, and also the more difficult obstacle of my own psychological dread for anything as tedious as data entry. When I finally got down to it, entering the actual data didn't take that long. Which is another lesson I've learned: everything seems to take longer than I expect it to, except for the things that I think will take forever.

Yes, the actual data entry went quick, but the lead-up took an entire three-and-a-half months out of my life. I honestly felt like I couldn't start any projects until I got these taxes done. Everything that I had on my to-do list seemed like the sort of project that couldn't be halted once initiated. In the interest of not complicating my life beyond necessity, I just didn't start anything major for the entire first quarter of the year.

It was an unfortunate loss of time, yes. However, I am not one to take losses readily. I've found that something can always be salvaged out of any situation. In fact, I think it's true that, with creativity, most "bad" stiuations can actually be flipped around and turned into advantages. That's another topic, though.

In this situation, I decided to just start making art again. I've been doing collages and mixed-media stuff since the 1990s. Art has been a great salvation for me through all sorts of down-points in my life. In fact, I did some of my best stuff when I was at the dog end of a terrible, restrictive relationship about a decade or so ago. Between two crummy jobs and the horrifying yet terminally boring chore of babysitting an out-of-control drug addict, I managed to find short moments to glue things together and slap paint on them. Then the stuff could dry while I went back to managing the slow-motion disaster of my life.

This time around, the situation was far less dire. I was only making a mountain out of a molehill. But still I used it as an excuse to start making art again. And as I made things, I realized that I needed to get better at drawing. This lead to me watching a bunch of youtube videos, plus getting some decent pencils and paper, and putting in some real time at improving my drawing skills. I've come a long way, but I'm not yet as far as I think I can get.

I do have a few things to show for it all, though. This blog entry is way too long already, so stand by while I post a follow up, with photos of some of the better things I've made in the past few weeks.