A year for the price of 5 rawpunk tapes plus shipping.

Farming beets and spear-hunting deer doesn't bring in a lot of currency, but people on discogs pay unholy sums for your demos.

Steve helped you land a solid job at the machine shop, and on the weekend you've got money to burn - your wife says not to spend it all on beer.

You work a high-paid programming job, but it's just a gig. When you get home, you like to blow off steam by sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of a totally empty living room and playing Ulcerate riffs from memory, backwards.

You scowl over desolated lands as your hordes return from their reaving, oxen groaning under weight of loot.

You founded Cradle of Filth, fronting one of the most commercially successful extreme metal bands of all time while somehow managing to keep it real. In between rapturous orgies with pre-Raphaelite vampire nymphs, you like to cruise the web and check up on the most authentic bastions of underground metal, smiling with detached grandeur as the blastbeats fly around your ears like fallen leaves - in slow motion.