Well, well, well, here we are. Another Monday. I wonder what your week looks like as it stretches out before you. What sort of people come here to gaze in upon the lives of these fictional people? Who still reads these kinds of webcomics that started out with little skill and a dream?

When I was little I drew enough that I was better than most other children in my very small school. Some teachers even tried to nurture that creativity by offering resources to me. When we moved to a larger city I quickly learned that my doodles were not really all that good compared to the work of the many other artistic kids in the area. I faded into the perpetual 3rd place of my life and stayed there until I decided I was never going to be able to get anywhere with my drawing. I took to sculpting and writing, although I never completely abandoned drawing. I just accepted that I was never going to catch up to people who were totally dedicated to it. The idea of being an animator got tossed aside. As the years went by I leaned more and more towards sculpting, but eventually I ran into the same problem I did with drawing. I was always average, or slightly above average, in a pack of people who were more skilled in every other objective way. My stuff was unique, but it didn’t lead anywhere really. If you want to make money as a sculptor you need to be able to sculpt properly and I never could. The problem is, and has always been, I have the spirit of the exceptional with the powers of the mean. I don’t improve quickly when I practice. It’s a long process of slow improvement, so I get left behind by people who can form those pathways quickly. Really my greatest strength has been not giving up in the face of mountains of evidence that I should. Outlasting the talented isn’t a totally valueless ability. Some days though I look at all those people ahead of me and it’s hard to keep dragging myself along doggedly behind.

Humans are endurance hunters. In the distant past we would hound our prey continually, until they were too tired to mount a defense, then swarm them. In some way I’m honoring those ancient people by slowly stalking my targets until they’ve worn themselves out. I hope my neandertal forebears can look upon me with pride as I struggle among these homo sapiens.

When you start a project it’s best to look at the small things you need to do right now, while keeping the end goal in your sights. You don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by the scope of your overall goal by focusing on what you need to do now. The problem is that it’s difficult to see if you’re actually making any progress when you’re standing so close to the ground all the time. Sometimes I just have to take it on faith that I’m still proceeding at an acceptable pace. Fighting that feeling of doubt isn’t always easy. I try to not even think about all the children who are rushing past me at the speed of light. Struggling against people in my age range is bad enough. Recognizing that there are young people casually sprinting past the people I’ve been trailing behind for years already is almost to much to even entertain on a theoretical level. I guess that’s what my work is all about though. The struggle of the average to find something to keep them going in a system that barely accepts their lives as worthwhile.

That’s one of the reasons why I never believe it when large companies talk about how much they care about human life. If that were actually true they could start by treating the people in their immediate area with dignity, but they don’t. It’s all talk. Just a shield of words to keep all the nobody’s from stripping the system for parts and grounding up the leeches for mulch in our gardens. I hope I live to see they day when the nobodies realize there’s more of us then there are of them.

“Can you count suckas?
I say the future is ours, if you can count.”

Hope I see you back here on Wednesday. Until then, stay tuned boppers.

Posts authored by Jackie

2702 Obstacool.