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Maybe it like was ten months ago; my lot in life was waiting tables at the I-35 Denny’s after being slapped with a sort of digital scarlet letter only possible from being a guest on the Caleb Hammer Financial Audit show. To avoid the psychological cheese grater of full-time restaurant work, I sometimes hung TVs and built furniture in peoples’ houses and convinced myself I was my own boss two or three days out of the week.

Amidst the grind of being the internet’s occasionally-employed cousin on a Tuesday, I was sitting on the floor for one of the meditation sessions that I got knocked for in the comment section when the universe/God/Allah/Xenu/TomCruise smacked me in the face with a long-avoided cosmic reality check.

“You can EITHER become a professional actor, OR you can re-vamp and scale Anywhere Shirts. You CANNOT effectively do both at the same time.”

I paused my stopwatch and made some coffee. My addictions are real but they’re only the socially acceptable ones like caffeine and YouTube and those Jameson shooters you can fit into a pair of long socks on the way to a movie theater. I am twenty-eight years old.

Anyway.

The universe was right. My noggin had forged a dream of starting up my old tshirt company from the Navy days, right as Jeff and I were moving into this Austin three-bedroom rental we’ve affectionately dubbed Project Mayhem House like in “Fight Club”, which came with a backyard shed that we’d basically have to burn down if we DIDN’T turn it into our own version of the Paper Street Soap Company. I was also on the tail-end of two indie film gigs I had scored from a wannabe acting profile on backstage.com (in hindsight, my best role so far is this fictional version of myself who knows anything about showbusiness).

Momentum had been built in both directions and the proverbial steering wheel rested in my spindly tall-guy hands. Two roads diverged on morning wood, or something.

The acting grind would involve more waiting tables, or maybe a moving company; some dayjob where I could start and stop with a chorus line of two-week notices for spontaneous movie roles without getting permanently fired. Which, if you see the Caleb Hammer interview, seems to be my preferred situation with just about ANY job.

The business re-vamp would be best suited with a steady nine-to-five setup. Construction, the post office, tap-dance instructor; some kind of REAL job with regular hours and PTO where I didn’t have to quit in order to work the main thing.

You’re already reading this on anywhereshirts.com so you can guess which one I chose. About a month after I made the call, my current boss walked into Denny’s and asked me if I’d take a Tuesday thru Saturday schedule as a maintenance guy at a high-rise condo he managed down the street. I soon got the chance to throw on a paint suit and close the chapter on my shot at the acting union. Now I was working for real and “The T-Shirt Thing” was back under construction.