Hi-ho, Hi-ho

The recent theft of my automovehicular device has left me with a renewed sense of the financial knife-edge I'm riding as I slide into the last two-thirds of the period I've given myself (Thanks, self!) in which to live and work as a full-time writer.

This little wake-up call has me thinking about what I'm going to do if the impossible happens in the next eight months, and (gasp!) nobody buys one of my scripts, my novel, or my navel-lint. I'm going to want to get a job, yes, but it will have to be one that'll mesh well with my writing habit, to which I seem to have become addicted. It occurs to me that the first thing I ought to do as I think about my future employment is to list my relevant, marketable skills. So... what can Josh Barkey do?

Josh Barkey can...

1. Climb to the top of the nearest tree faster than almost anybody you know. 
2. Throw a weighted hand-net from the prow of a canoe without falling in.
3. Speak nearly perfectly-accented but grammatically-atrocious and vocabularily-challenged Peruvian Spanish.
4. Tie nine wax-impregnated tree-boxes so securely to the rack of an ATV that even if (when) the ATV tips over, the boxes will (usually) stay on.
5. Kill a squirrel with a pellet gun and turn it into delicious stir-fry (true story).
6. Hand-plant five hundred trees in an hour. 
7. Drive a Ford F-350 at high speeds over sloppy terrain, without sliding off the road or getting stuck.
8. Stand on a stump and hook a lanyard to the belly of a chopper as it flies by, without getting my hand ripped off. 
9. B.S. my way through a college undergraduate English paper.
10. Paint brightly-colored, not-quite-professional-enough-to-live-off-of paintings.
11. Take slightly-better-than-incompetent photographs.
12. Hang off a forty-foot ladder in the rain with an angle grinder, fitting a chimney for a natural-gas fireplace vent.
13. Ride a snowboard up and down the walls of a half-pipe without dying or looking overly ridiculous.
14. Frame an almost plumb two-by-four wall, and hang a room of almost-perfectly-lined-up drywall. 
15. Score a soccer goal against almost any middle-school, junior-varsity goalie you can find.
16. Shovel horse manure.
17. Keep a classroom full of teenagers riveted by telling them to question my authority, and writing little gems like "Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves" on the board (aka: shovel horse manure).
18. Play the part of a moving human pylon in the background of a film.
19. Rollerblade like a boss. Frontwards, backwards--you name it, I can blade it. Bam.
20. Recite Pi to two whole places.
21. Serve carb, salt, and garlic-heavy Olive Garden food whilst only occasionally acting like I hate the patrons, and almost never throwing wine in their smug, corpulent faces.
22. Imitate a goat.
23. Photoshop just well enough to fool a complete novice into believing that I know what I'm doing.
24. Sing like an angel, baby. Falsetto time. 
25. In my manic moments, convince people that life is both hilarious and meaningful.
26. In my depressive moments, convince people that life is a sinkhole of meaningless depravity, and then you die.
27. Imitate and interpret the many calls of that elusive and beautiful bird, the Chicken.
28. Speak or perform before hundreds and even thousands of people, hardly ever wetting myself in the process.

Well-now-then. This has certainly been educational. Whatever happens with the writing, it's great to know I've got a whole lot of viable career options.

Eight more months, then it's back to the salt mines.