Back in the early 1980s, when the Commodore 64 first hit the market and Apple became the first personal computer manufacturer to hit the $1 billion mark for annual sales, Mark Hull had a wife, two kids, a nice house in Fridley, tailor-made suits from Madrid, and a nine-to-five systems analyst job with benefits and a fancy title that progressed from Big Shit to Holy Shit. Two decades later, fighting a constant battle with depression that keeps him from steady employment, he’s avoiding calls from a landlord who is apparently too kind to toss him to the wind, and after many trips to a nearby food shelf, he’s just regained the thirty pounds he lost last year from sheer hunger. It’s simple, alright: You don’t eat, you lose weight.
With this in mind, Hull started Hulles, a blog that he describes in his first post—dated August 16, 2006—as “a how-to manual and a survival guide” for living in extreme poverty.
The result is a haphazard journal of real and imagined recipes, humorous anecdotes and narratives that highlight the suckiness of poverty, and of course, man’s favorite endeavor: cataloging.
Hull’s offerings toggle between Spartan functionalism and pure Athenian aesthetics. Consider toilet paper: “There are too many other things you can use instead, no matter how poor you are,” he writes. “What you are looking for is something that disintegrates in water and doesn’t feel like the business end of a belt sander.” Something like newspaper.
Smoking, however, is a ritual whose dignity must be preserved. “Believe me,” writes Hull, “when I get money, the very first thing I buy is not food or gasoline or coffee, it’s a pack of Camel straights. … That must be why they call it an addiction.”
“I find I have become an accomplished butt-breaker,” he jokes in his typical, innuendo-infused humor as he explains the practice of splitting up cigarette butts and smoking the leftover tobacco out of a pipe.
The mission is simple: Lose all the weight you have to, but don’t lose your dignity. When all you have left in the kitchen is an airline-size bottle of cheap Dominican rum a friend brought back from a trip and the liquid dregs from a can of pears, mix a cocktail and toast your great fortune.
It is precisely this attitude—Hull’s unflinching grasp on his dignity—that has raised suspicion among the more hesitant internet voyeurs stumbling into his world. A MNSpeak thread about Minnesota’s first poverty blog called him a fake, a phony, a no-good, lazy, gold-brickin’ … you get the idea. “He must be greatly exaggerating his plight,” wrote one anonymous commentator. “If you are depressed and broke to that degree, blogging does seem like it should be pretty low on the list of priorities.”
Ironically, blogging provided just the distraction Hull needed. “It was therapeutic,” he explains, “a great way of combating the isolation of depression.” He pauses as a longtime employee at Costello’s Bar & Grill in St. Paul greets him with a kiss. You’d never guess today’s social butterfly suffers from depression. He speaks matter-of-factly about his illness, and is all smiles and coquetry as the server announces the start of happy hour, signaling Hull’s switch from Hamm’s beer to Black Russians.
While it may seem a bit offbeat for a guy in such dire straits to spew self-deprecating humor and witticisms, the blog provided Hull with a means of communicating with the outside world. Hull quickly learned that “funny” was, in fact, all people wanted. “They didn’t want to hear about what I had to go through during the day,” he says with no hint of bitterness. “Nobody really cared about what happened to me, only in so much as it made for a good story.”
By September, Hull was stretching his writing muscles. The poor man’s recipes dwindled, replaced by underwear confessionals and raunchy narratives derived from cocktail napkin missives. And by October, his readership was growing from a few sentimental fools seduced by the notion of a poverty blog to a loyal, international crowd that, judging from the commentary laced with literary references and sophisticated humor, is highly educated and heavy with writers.
From the confines of Nina’s Coffee Café, where he usually blogs since he is clearly without cable or phone connection, Hull has plugged into what he describes as a “whole world of people who are brilliant, interesting, and fun.”
“The thing that fascinates me about writing a blog—as opposed to other media—is the interactivity,” says Hull. “You instantly get people’s reactions, for better or worse … Works in progress can be affected by reactions and suggestions.”
This interactivity has led to new projects. After commenting on a computer graphics image created by a Michigan blogger who goes by the name of Visual Snark, Hull found himself collaborating on an illustrated story starring a sexy P.I. by the name of Cuervo Korbel, and a cohort of other characters. “The graphics are so great that it’s very intimidating to write to,” he confesses. “With every word I think, ‘Fuck. This has to be as good as the illustration.’” Now the project, which is not yet public, has spun out to include blogs for each character, allowing for seemingly real interaction with readers that could affect the story’s plot.
As he enters his second year of blogging, Hull can catalog his past successes. He learned enough Portuguese to flirt with an attractive Brazilian reader. He ate Garrison Keillor’s sandwich. (Sorry. You’ll have to see the blog for that one, but perhaps it accounts for his recent weight gain.) And he even had a couple of stories published in Avenues and The Highland Villager, for which he actually got paid.
These new opportunities are keeping Hull busy enough to neglect his blog, but it’s not staving off his landlord. And while this would certainly be fodder for his MNSpeak critics, Hull has no complaints. “Now I have an excuse for being broke,” writes Hull in a celebratory post. “I’m a writer, dammit, I’m supposed to be poor.”
Leave a Reply Cancel reply