you ever watch a drew gooden video and wonder if anything good & not cartoonishly evil can exist in our society
i have been thinking a lot lately. i don’t think my parents intentionally planted a love of storytelling in me. yeah, they read to me, introduced me to stuff, most of which even they didn’t have super strong grasps of. my dad’s media comprehension is terrible, mom’s is off & on. which means it’s a touchstone of me somehow, something that’s mine. don’t know why it’s there, but it is. always has been despite me treating my brain like garbage for a long time, & continuing to nowadays against my will.
once upon a time i wanted to be a director. i don’t wanna be a director. certainly not in the general sense of the term & what it involves now. i love writing. don’t wanna be a writer. sit me at a desk every day and tell me if i don’t produce something worthwhile in an hour i can’t pay my bills? i’ll shoot myself, thanks. any artistic talent i have is, ehhhh. i’m not great at drawing or painting, could maybe improve with more work.
i like editing & feel i’m competent at it, but again, what does life look like if you edit for a living now? i don’t wanna sit in my 1 bedroom apartment at a desk 8 hours a day. that would make me go insane i think. much as i love editing, i’m slow at it. & it comes when it wants to and not before.
i did discover i’m pretty decent at painting objects by working my current job, but a stone is easy to paint. i know i can’t really fuck it up, if you get the paint outside the margins you can scrape it off or rough the surface, at worst you can dump chemical on it wash it out and start over. i genuinely love doing it, it’s one of the reasons i keep the job even though it’s such a rare opportunity, because i’m good at it and people see i’m good at it & it does bring me joy to see it done & know i did it.
where does that leave me for jobs? i don’t know. i think i don’t really like the idea of working for other people—i’d like to maybe build a physical skill that i could sell to anyone wherever whenever i needed it—but i don’t think i would ever want to entirely work for myself, either. i like the peace that comes with just being a cog sometimes.
but when i think about my brother, who is a pretty remarkable artist, in concept & writing & imagination, instinctive emotion, language, grasp of themes, musical talent? it does make me sad. i’d love to see him somehow find an outlet. nobody likes creating for an audience of no one. but i don’t think the answer is turning everything into the next mcu, because not everything is suited for it and nobody wants it. if there is something in the margins, why is it so hard to find?
















