“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” – Kurt Vonnegut
So, here’s the thing; I’m fucking lazy.
Maybe that’s not even the right word. “Unmotivated,” maybe? You see, I have ambitions. Aspirations. I have a fuckload of ideas. Ideas all the time. The decent ones even turn into plans.
That’s the stage where it all goes to shit. The plans. Even now, as I type this first post, I can’t help but wonder if it will even ever be uploaded. That I’m not just sitting here, pecking out some intended manifesto of self-loathing that only I’ll ever read.
I’ll be twenty-nine in a few weeks. Twenty-nine. And — same as every other year — I take a quick glance at my life and come up a little blank. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with everything I have. A good marriage, a nice old house on an eight-acre stretch that I own, a good job at a small business that I like and isn’t hell to go to every morning… But I’ve always had this desire to create. I listen to music, watch movies, read books and comics, and I can’t help but feel that I should be contributing to this swarm. Even if it’s nothing but trite and unclever shit, I should be making something.
One thing I’ve realized — and this really isn’t easy to admit — is that I’m terrified of failure. I’m a complete coward. Nothing seems more horrifying to me than to put something that I created — a part of me — out there, only to have no one give a shit. So, although I try, I never finish anything. I lose my nerve and scrap the whole plan. But this itself is failure by default.
So, this is it. A plan I intend to carry out. The first comic has been finished and ready to upload. The art is sort of shitty, it probably isn’t funny, and I couldn’t care less. That’s not the point this time. This site is intended to be a motivator of sorts, a deadline to meet and a reason to hone my sub-par and atrophied illustration and writing abilities. But more on that later…