I'll be turning 24 tomorrow. A lot of the people I know my current age (23) and below are complete losers. I'm pretty much a complete loser, as well, but I hold myself in high regard among losers. I'm sure tomorrow when I turn 24 I will be super awesome and cast my shroud of loserdom aside.

We're all lethargic, apathetic, and unmotivated, with zero confidence, and maybe, just maybe, endless potential lurking under the surface. (Although with some of us I am uncertain.) Sometimes I wonder if it's a Los Angeles Suburb thing that has effected all adults who have grown up in the LA area, but I've also seen it with people younger and older in various places, all born within the last 30 years. We're raised to feel like we can do anything we want, but we're also infused with so much anxiety about it that we can't ever pick one thing to do. We end up stagnating in pools of half-acquired skills. Now it seems like a lot of us are just shutting down.

It's sad because all you've got to do is realize how easy it is.

There's this stuff called beeline hemp rope (with a brand new snazzy website it seems) that people who, say, smoke things, like cigarettes, or other things, use in lieu of a butane lighter. The website claims that constantly inhaling all that butane and flint induced flame causes headaches (something that I will totally agree on) and that by lighting your whatever with this hemp stuff, it's all natural and better for you.

Is it really? I don't know. I use it, and I like it. Lighters definitely leave a certain taste in your mouth, even when lighting a cigarette, and this hemp rope stuff just makes things smell a little like a snuffed out candle (which I don't find unpleasant at all). They sold me on it, they totally sold me on it, and then I started thinking about what their costs are.

A 400 foot roll of thin hemp string costs about $10. You can buy blocks of organic beeswax from a variety of online shops (and oddly, the top Google result for organic beeswax sells impurity-free blocks that look like what is on the Beeline website, but they're all sold out of bulk sizes) for $40 or less depending on how much you wanna make. So far that's $50 total cost.

I figure the process of making the stuff just involves heating up the beeswax until it's liquidy, tossing the hemp string into it, and then automatically pulling it through some sponges or a small hole to scrape the string back down to size with the wax soaked into it. You could have a blow dryer running on cool set up to blow on the string as you roll it onto another spool. How hard could that be? You have a one man operation here. No employment costs.

A 400ft roll could cut down into 40 9ft packs you could sell by hand for $3 a pack. That's about $120 in profit on $50 and your own time. Admittedly that's a somewhat unrealistic way of looking at it. (They sell a box of 189 feet in packs for $26 [with shipping], and that includes little folded cards with a staple and graphics on them made out of recycled paper, so there are extra costs involved.) But as the volume you produce goes up, your costs go way down, and if you just spend a few hours making hemp rope on a single day you probably have a four month supply.

Point is: whoever this beeline guy is, he operates with zero competition. If I suddenly decided to make hemp rope locally and sell it to various shops around my entire area, I could totally take over the whole market here. It's almost so ridiculously easy that I feel like a moron for not doing it myself. Any one of my friends think of this, and could do this, but they don't. I don't know why.

I read this article in the LA Times yesterday about how incredibly awesome Tyler Perry is. I'm white, and most of his movies seem to cater to older black women, so it's just natural that I would have no idea who Tyler Perry is, but I saw his name so many places over the course of the last two years and always wondered if he was some sort of millionaire cinema star I had never heard of.

Guess what the article said? He is. Tyler Perry has made seven films in the last four years that have all grossed over $45 million, and they're all made for under $10 million. The guy has his own 30-acre movie studio. His new movie, Madea Goes to Jail, which I'm sure no one reading this site has seen, made $41 million on it's opening weekend, the biggest weekend since Twilight came out a long while ago.

Tyler Perry saw an opportunity. He discovered some skill in himself to entertain a certain demographic of people that no one else catered to, and then he pursued his vision. Now the guy is a multimillionaire with nowhere to go but up. How can you top that? Tyler Perry is already a legend, and he doesn't really seem like the kind of guy who is going to throw it all away on a drug habit or weird plastic surgery.

In short: That guy's pretty fucking G.

That's your job. My birthday present from you all will be your eventual success. You'll read this and you'll think, "You know what, there's this small demographic I could exploit to massive gains if only I marketed the exactly right thing to them, and I know what that right thing is, and I am going to exploit it like a madman."

Stoner eco-friendly hippies or middle-aged black women. Just do it.

Music Note: I was told by twitter follower @SaltyDroid that I was to post Sunset Rubdown by the end of the month or I am fucked and I want to respond.

1.) I listened to the first song off Random Spirit Lover and it was interesting. I didn't like it, but it was interesting enough to make me eager listen to more of the album at some point. However, obviously I did not make it in within the month time period allotted, so I have failed.

2.) I have been fucked. You have some crazy psychic salty powers or something, Droid.

Bonus Note: Even in this global recession, Netflix is showing huge gains, and all they do is send DVDs to people so they don't have to leave their houses. Imagine how much more money there is in ensuring that depressed people with no money don't have to leave their houses? Eventually we'll all be so busy getting rich off making sure we don't go outside that it'll be just like The Machine Stops! I'm excited!