Oy, Part duh.

Well things have changed a lot since my last big tell all cuss-fest. Grandma would not have been proud, but I don't think she could have blamed me.

We last left off where the IRS had basically sent us reeling and KCMETROPOLIS.org was in a death spasm.

Oh how a few months and a shifting wind can help. Hey! Interesting...I said last week that a recession is when you cannot catch a break.

Well, we caught a break.

Somehow Marcy has managed to stay alive, stay in her house and stay a major force in KCM. For that alone, I am more in awe of her than I have even been. And the fact that she still has her head screwed on tight is such a testament.

We both went into a deep, deep funk the past couple months though, as our dreams of helping our town out were about to be dashed into the ground...this has been a weekly occurrence, when just as we would get something figured out, the dam, held together by wizardry would crumble anew.

We finaly got to a point where while undergoing yet another major reconstruction of our budget and complete overhauling of the organization we were like, WTF are we doing here? This is madness!

Either there is a way to do this or there's not. If there is, fine. If not, I quit.
Turned down by yet another funder, no work and the tax-man coming knocking on my door, I was not averse to quitting and taking the loss and saying buh, buh to KC, who could have given a crap.

Then the wind started to turn. I think it was God coughing at first, really. Hack!

The IRS granted our 501c3.

This was a brief moment of joy as we realized, what good is a not-for-profit without a cent? The only chance we had left was Bank of America. The only chance. Otherwise the poorhouse for Marcy. and me, well who knows. I only say the poorhouse for Marcy because she was the one with her time in the chair, editing and posting. And since the site was all manual, fifteen stories a week was a lot to handle.

Contacting writers, presenters, scheduling tickets and blah blah, and finally posting the articles was mostly her. Me? I was trying to get money for mortgage and really, trying to keep some semblance of a career going, as I had no idea that it would take such a long time to get KCM...nowhere.

Oh, I helped and tried as best I could to research and build a new website, and as the waves of positive news would come in every once in a while, meaning, one week we heard from Bank of America that we would be getting funding..and so therefore, we would plan to meet with our web-programmers, and I would go into intense long stretches of, learning about Content Management Systems and Joomla! and CSS and RSS and, the next we would hear from Bank of America that they still had some questions about this and that and we wouldn't be getting this much funding but there may be a chance for ...

I know this may not make much sense, but feel free to clarify, as this is going into the story of KCMETROPOLIS.org someday anyway.

I told Marcy that I felt like I was inflicting wounds on myself, deciding yet another week to keep going. Oh the pain.

Really, it was damaging to continue. But where the pain would not be, there was also the realization that KCM would not exist. AND furthermore, all of my colleagues, all doing fantastic work facing oblivion. Where the answer to the question of the tree falling in the forest is, no, there is no sound.

There is only some hiker to come accross a dead fallen tree someday.

Wow, what a fate. One can lay fault on any number of things, but who cares really. The outcome is worse than finger pointing. The loss of a dynamic culture, unable to be documented...

Think of it. Noone comes and reviews a painter's gallery show... well, that artist still has their painting.

Noone comes and sees a performing artist's show... it never happened.

So, contemplating that, what was I letf with? Giving everything away? career suicide? Not to mention my wife!

Augh!

So I put on a fresh pot of coffee and just kind of said, I'm doing both. But first I had to get some income generated.
Topics?
The everlasting Hymn CD? yes.
Frank Sinatra? Yes
opera? no.

It's really hard to tell you what happened first. As sleep is something of a misnomer when you are driven AND desperate.

Oh! The www.NathanGranner.com website.
So I finally decided to kick in the dough to get a modular website done. like 14 bucks a month. really a lot right now, bt whatever.

going to the site bandvista.com I was like, hey, this is pretty cool. Basically I put my website together in a few hours. Not great, but it's not 15k, like the KCM designers were talking about.
Infact, I kind of like the straight ahead way it's put together. It could use a bit more customization, but overall,sa'llright.

Then I hooked up with www.Artistdata.com, a site that spreads your calendar to a number of different social websites...hm.

I'm thinking, wow, there's got to be a way to do this for KCM.

Two weeks later, I found it.

Coincedentally, Bank of America came through with some support. Not a lot, but for what we are about to be doing, just enough. just barely enough.

No there's still no pay. And yes, I'm still trying to cull together the career. Though there are gigs...which you can find on www.nathangranner.com calendar page, fed to you by www.artistdata.com

More than anything though, is hope.

Hope that the ship will come in.

KCMETROPOLIS.org will be opening its new site on April 29, and let me tell you, it's a thing of beauty. ANd hopefully, it will lead to other things, that will allow us to more substantially support it and even more importanly than that, its many writers and contributors.

Let me finish by paying homage to them.

It's the contributors who have given us the ability to have the choice of whether or not to lacerate ourselves and continue. We could lash ourselves to the masts and hold on, but if there's no ship that separates us from the water, there is only oblivion.

It has been the dedication of each of these individuals to keep writing, keep covering what happens in KC that has allotted us this rare opportunity to grasp with success.

More later...
Nathan