Failure Releases us to Dream II

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Why would I give this picture of a smiling old man such a title?  Think of this man, this IT guy, sitting at his cubicle in the basement office as he has sat in many cubicles in many basement offices, for many years, decades. Outside, the sun shines, but here in his ancient space he is in darkness. Why does he smile?  Once he was a young IT guy, healthy and strongly odiferous, full of life, playing dungeon quest at his workstation and repeatedly advising many a computer illiterate prole from the upstairs offices to reboot, reboot, reboot. He joined many dungeon gaming groups and attended many pc hobbyist conventions, and at one of these he encountered his enemy; a tall, good looking, glib and uninspired programmer, a mediocre engineer with a gift for working people, and a mean tendency for sarcasm, everything the IT guy was not. This man mocks him at meetings, mocked his homemade computer in front of his fellow hobbyists, manages to pass himself off as the bigger expert, with his fellow pc hobbyists, fooling them all with his charm. Back then the IT guy smiled and laughed inwardly, mentally preparing himself for a revenge of waiting, of patient forbearance, awaiting the inevitable end to such stories; the parvenu crashes and burns, his walk can't match his talk, he is exposed for his lack of deep knowledge, for the slenderness of his understanding, and they will meet again, at an electronics shop perhaps, where the parvenu works as a salesman, and the IT guy is a famous hacker, regarded with awe at the conventions for his deep understanding of software engineering, of robotics, of Artificial Intelligence. The parvenu cannot meet his eyes, he is embarrassed, hoping the IT guy won't remember his earlier remarks...This vision has sustained him through many years of cubicles in basements, even after it became apparent that the parvenu, now quite rich and well known, would not ever be working in an electronics shop. But the IT guy has held out hope for the basic idea of their reunion in his mind, taking care to never apply for work with the company the parvenu owns, warming himself with the talk of his friends at hobbyist meetings nowadays, who laugh and remember the parvenu back then, and reflect on the sad ignorance of the public and the lies behind all idols. But today he has seen a news item, of a celebrity death. He links, gripped by a compulsion, to the obituary, and reads; "Steven Jobs, Inventor..." the phrase works through his mind, there in the darkness, with the queasy blue light from the monitors playing upon his unkempt beard, and the smell from the young IT guy in the next cubicle beating powerfully into his nostrils, and he decides that this day, today, will be his last day working in this basement. At the moment of this picture, that thought has filled him with an ecstatic joy. He will go now and drive away, into the sunlit mountains, and he will not return. 

Failure Releases us to Dream

I've long longed to move this blog from text and occasional pictures from the sketchbooks into a full web comic, because I have given up on ever creating great or even mediocre art, and I don't like putting descriptive details in my creative writing, which you absolutely have to do to write a compelling story. I personally find descriptive details boring and I think everyone does, but even as I skim the paragraphs describing a room and the person sleeping in the room and the colors and the cat and the shadows on the wall, the half-read paragraph has convinced another more primitive part of my mind to believe in the story. So you have to do it and I don't do it because angry ashamed mumble. 

So I logically decided that if I did comics, I could still draw and wouldn't have to draw well, and I could write and wouldn't have to write the details, and I wouldn't have to write the quotation marks and come up with different ways to say "he said."  Which I find maddening to do even though as a reader I don't even see them or care. 

I have not made the full move to web comic mainly because when I try to draw a few comic panels I begin to over obsess about the memory available on my phone because I don't like to ever delete work in progress because I think I could find a use later and so I horde the half finished pictures and obsess about disk space and so I don't want to start a new picture and run out of space.  And I like to draw pictures by hand with ballpoint pens that take weeks and I prefer to write without using quotation marks or descriptive details. So it will never happen. I am inspired to do a comic:

wandering the wasteland in a cozy bathrobe

Disappointed with this one, seems to need more

The Unfinished Piece with the Long Title to Make up for some of the 1000 words that seem to be Missing

The artist gazed pensively at his work, while a shadow of self doubt clouded the usual rush of childlike satisfaction he felt from finishing a picture. "Maybe," he thought, carefully appraising the awkward lines and jarring clash of randomly chosen inks, "the ballpoint pens are the problem. Perhaps if I used watercolor, people would recognize my genius..."  Reassured, he continued his favorite artistic daydream, where he moved to New York and made friends with woody Allen. And the supernatural turtle continued its ominous approach to the helpless Lego village, under the blessing of the heartless Rainbow Bird, god of painkillers and obsessive bedtime rituals. 

Yes, I chose a fairly long title for this piece,

which I have not finished and may never finish because I'm a little discouraged because I looked on the internet and saw art by someone much much better than me. I would counsel anyone dreaming of life as a famous artist to avoid looking at online art, because unless you are one of the hateful toads who produced the art that I just looked at on line, you will either have to give up your dreams at once or you will have to summon all the vast powers of cognitive dissonance that have fueled your dreams in the first place and pretend the art you just looked at wasn't better than anything you've ever had the remotest chance of producing. Which is possible, totally possible to do because most artists and people in general are much better at disassociating than they are at art. 

So this unfinished piece with the long title, which I will not be repeating within this post, will remain unfinished so that I can pretend that if I did finish it it would be every bit as good as some other people's fancy stuff, a pretentious artist technique invented by the ancient Greeks and perfected by Leonardo da Vinci. With his inventions, not his art. His art that he finished was totally awesome!  But his helicopter would never work, please give up on that. 

So I've decided for like the fiftieth time to give up on my dreams of being a famous artist and to work on becoming a famous writer instead. I've already written a few books worth of funny text messages and monologues about knife safety not to mention all these pointless blog posts, so I'm thinking I'll just stitch them all together and add a meandering plot about a loser who becomes famous for his ball point pen drawings and invents a new martial arts style based on juggling and founds an academy that produces warriors and secret operatives and eventually becomes such an incredible and masterful artist that his drawings of the planar pentoidals come to life and conquer every flat surface on earth. It would begin with the loser sitting in the bathroom writing about his failure as an artist who suddenly gets an incredible idea for a book that he turns into an incredible picture instead because writing is hard and he becomes a famous artist after all and doesn't have to go to work anymore and spends his time at home in his undies and his cozy bathrobe playing triple town and avoiding his email and slowly and patiently acquiring heart disease which he will thwart with magic and jugglitsu judo in single combat in the snowfields Mano a Mano. Good god, I've found a better title!

We've experienced a hiatus in the blog

We've experienced a hiatus in the blog as I've been sorting some personal feelings and frustrations and I'm thinking now that I gave up on the novel way too easily. I gave up on the novel because I didn't like the first few chapters as a reader, and I didn't find them very convincing, even though I already subscribed to the political views they purported to advocate. As a matter of fact, I found myself beginning to lean the other way on the issues, and if your book is so unpersuasive that you convince yourself that you are wrong while you proofread, you should do the parties you're trying to advocate for a favor and say nothing. 

So I gave up on the novel, which was really not a novel at all, but a polemic. And a bad one, as discussed previously. If I began the novel over again, I would leave out the chapter about homosexual socialism and just stick to the story of the cat's health issues and their impact on the main protagonist, named after myself of course. I think, also, that I would omit the love scene with the movie star, as it does not seem to further the plot at all and I just added it to upset my wife after we had an argument. I was hoping she would fly into a jealous rage, but she fell asleep in the middle of my reading, at lunchtime, while we waited in line at the food truck. With those deletions I've gone from 24000 words to 5300, and I've already resolved the protagonist's main conflict, with his mother, over money, by getting him elected President of Mars. I've got nothing more to write about but the puppet show, which I had originally intended to be a kind of demented interlude between each chapter, with scenes of frenzied symbolic violence alternating with the gentle descriptions of late nights working in the stationary shop at the mall. 

It appears as though I was writing about the writings of Paul Theroux in my previous blog posts. I find this focus encouraging.  It means I've been getting enough sleep. Most people don't like writing about writing, finding it too abstract and academic. But I upon reviewing my own blog posts, I find that most of my writing is about what I would rather be writing or about what I previously wrote, so I feel I have made some progress

Test

There is a titanic scheme behind my madness

I meant to talk about Paul Theroux's writing, but got distracted by my sudden impulse to describe my recent observations on the illuminati. Paul Theroux does not discuss illuminati subclasses of course, he describes his travel experiences. I didn't mean to imply a connection between Paul Theroux and the illuminati, although as far as illuminati subclass categories go, I would certainly categorize him as a literati, and not an illiterati.

And I must admit that if there were any readers of this blog they might find it ironic that I would go off on the illiterati at all, after posting delightful descriptions of my own struggle to learn programming. Am I trying to become a member of the illiterati that I elsewhere denigrate, those fictional readers might ask?

Good question. First of all, I've decided that I am not a true literati.  A true literati would reside a bit further up the global pyramid than myself, and would make their living from doing literati stuff, reading and writing and teaching in universities. I have a humanities degree, but do very little with it, and I basically have a factory job. That would place me far down the pyramid, definitely under the literati, but lower down, and significantly less purely literati. My sub sub class is huge in number, and already in the process of dissolving, crumbling into  the amorphous base of the pyramid, about on a level with the barely employed blue collar class. 

So I have little incentive to fully subscribe to literati loyalties. I have instead decided to join the great wheel, to swim sideways by learning programming, not up, with many others, toward the other base of the pyramid, toward the techies. And they should swim toward us!  By reading.  Science fiction is only the beginning. Together we will fold the corner in, and we will make a wheel out of the great pyramid. And we  all know what a wheel does. Please enjoy figure 1.1:

And figure 1.2:

Und figure 1.3:

Und concluded en figura 1.4:

Viva la revoluccion! And you're welcome, literati.