For The Ten Thousandth Time

Posted by parhad on July 02, 2001 at 10:37:36:

I am so sick and tired of the peasants among us, the ones who are in the "top 10%at their companies"...who can't get over "big" figures when it comes to money.

People are fixated on the cost of making a monument...just the basic cost of doing it, never mind any "profit" for the artist. It's as if they're struck dumb by any

number greater than 50,000 and can't think straight after that. It could be 50,000 dollars or ducks...they just come unglued at the sight of too many zeros.

Our community is convinced I've come up with a clever scam...that by playing on peoples' love of heritage or vanity, I've managed to create a cash cow for myself.

It doesn't matter that I get a quote from an American foundry showing they will charge $152,000.00 JUST to make the blow-up, make rubber molds and cast and

finish all the segments. I had estimated $150,000.00, before getting that quote. Even I was surprised at how close I'd come to their own estimate. But it made it

worse that I was charging less. That was final "proof" that this MUST be a scam...cause they know damn well THEY would never be so "stupid". It really IS

unthinkable that, not only do I literally make nothing for all this work...but I even get LESS than a company would take to do the grunt work(they would charge a

good deal more once they realize the amount of detail there is in the monument). This is so foreign to their own "make a buck" mentality that they're certain they smell

a rat. They do....it's them.

The "profit" here has nothing to do with money...but it's money everyone reveres and worships and runs after and ruins their health over and brings their entire brief

existence on this earth down to. Since they are so hot to trot after it...what, they wonder, is wrong with me? I MUST be being supported by other people...MUST

be living at their expense etc.

My financial problems are my own. What I am trying to do, while this back holds out, is put all I've learned to use by placing monuments reflecting our heritage in as

many cities as I can in order to eduvate OTHER people about us...so our children will have some name recognition...and the pride that goes with it...also I hope

some of our own will be inspired by seeing placed prominantly, in the cities of this country and the world, artworks from their own heritage...that this might inspire

them to start at an early stage of life to add their own efforts and far outstrip anything I could have done. There were no such things when I was growing up.

For wanting to do this I've been called every name imaginable, had rumors spread here and there...have had people fight me...claiming I was just out for business

and making money. They hear $150,000.00 and their reason departs them. They don't know what rubber costs, what labor costs, how much it costs to run a

furnace, buy bronze, welding rod, electricity for welders etc and etc. They just KNOW most of that money winds up in my pocket...they HAVE to believe that...it's

the only way THEY would,operate. I mean they'll all spend an hour a year donating some time and maybe twenty bucks....but, 13 years? Three so far on the

Hammurabi. That isn't in their world view at all...so naturally I must have a nefarious plot a brewing to get RICH!

It's so boring and tiring...and yet, and yet...what a gift to The Gasman's children it will be!