I had hoped to come up with a new storyline for the continuing saga of our vacation but I suddenly realized that I’ve begun a large percentage of the posts in this blog with a whiny prologue about what I had actually wanted to do, followed by my reasons for failing to do it along with a kind of meandering description of whatever inner turmoil had induced me to do what I actually did, which was nothing. I won’t do it this time, by which I mean I won’t whine about what I meant to do, anymore than I already have, and I will stop trying to describe my inner turmoil, and I will most certainly not do nothing in this particular post. I will do something. Which I have already done.
The other thing I intended to do, the big idea I had for the future direction of the story of our trip, is a comic strip based on the pictures, something I’ve talked about doing many many times before but haven’t because it involved a lot of work. But now I will do it, and by now I mean I will begin to think about how to prepare to do it now, I will not do it by actually doing it during this blog post, other than to post the first picture of the series, which I intend to alter using the magic of iPhone drawing apps to be a comic strip of two kids talking on a train, something like this picture but more alive:
Then after I alter the picture I will add the word bubbles which will depict some of those darn things kids say to each other while their parents smile at each other and nod. As I get older and see all the neat digital art people do I have come to see myself as less of an artist and more of an art critic who draws to help with his criticism of really good artists, and as I read more and more and write less and less I have come to think of myself as more of a critic of literature than a writer per se, and in order to critic literature I see myself more and more as a cartoonist who has opinions about literature that I like to think about while I draw, than as an actual critic of literature.
If I give up in the comic strip idea, which now that I’ve given myself permission to give up is all but definitely as good as given up on, I plan to veer this blog onto a literary criticism course, and away from any artistic pretensions completely.
Which now that I have actually explicitly stated that I will do I might as well do, because if I even try to do anything else I will know at the back of my mind that I am just killing time before I start the literary criticism. And now that I have decided to do the literary criticism right now, I find myself looking back fondly at my artistic days, my lonely nights toiling away at my cherished dreams of being a webcomic creator.
And voila, those good old days are back! Maybes . Or maybe not.
