Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Bootstrapping 101
In these days of economic strife and in this world so full of people expecting to be handed everything on a platter for the asking, I’m always encouraged to see a hardworking entrepreneur who takes his future into his own hands and works hard to make a place for himself. So you can imagine how much it warmed my heartcockles (now with more cockle! but reduced heart....) to see as follows:
It was a Friday morning, 8:25 by the clock. I had disembarked from my bus downtown and was walking down Bush street, having reached the corner at Sansome. It’s a very busy, businessy part of downtown, with tall stone buildings and high-end clothiers and a general feeling of advanced commercial and financial activiites. And it was here that I saw a man out forging a new kind of business, one upon which I can only wish him every good fortune.
He wore a green fedora - quite a feat, in that he was actually upside-down. A slim, muscular, young-looking fellow of African descent, he was dressed in blue jeans and a black t-shirt and he balanced on his fedora-wearing head with his legs upraised in a figure-4, his hands securely set on the pavement and his head supported between and above them atop the narrow mouth of a small (but not mini) green glass bottle that, by its label, once contained Jameson’s whiskey. And there he remained, suspended in mid-air, legs contorted, feet high overhead, remaining as still as he could, with a battered coffee cup on the sidewalk in front of him to receive the largess of the masses. The masses, for their part, seemed amused and delighted by his creativity and antigravitationalism. I didn’t see anybody give him any money, but I am confident that work such as his is its own reward, right?
