The other day I looked up my old store location just to see if the internet remembered anything about it. Pretty much the only thing remaining about my specific store is the location info and that it is permanently closed. It’s funny, or maybe sad, or some combination of those emotions, but sometimes I wish I could go back and look around in the store of my memory. In many ways I had an abusive relationship with that job. It was so close to being a perfect way to live out my days, selling nonsense to other people with no perspective. Unfortunately, just like an abusive partner it would hurt me, then tell me it was going to change. It caused so much trauma over time that I ended up trying to work out some stuff via this comic for almost 20 years at this point, and I’m still trying to do that to some degree. Fundamentally I’m perpetually grappling with mortality. Everything, good or bad, will pass into nothingness over time. On some level whatever makes us self aware hates that. For whatever reason that instinct is particularly bad in me. I’m endlessly frustrated that people can’t do obvious things to make the world nice for everyone because no one knows how long they will get and it seems terrible to me that not everyone can enjoy existence.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I don’t fit in with any group. I’m too conservative to feel comfortable around other artists and too liberal to feel comfortable around conservatives. So I exist, mostly alone, and write stories about people who have the things I don’t. Even those stories exist in a dull space where only a sliver of people can enjoy them. This limbo of middle ground where it seems like normality should exist.

My work life has become disconnected from the places that made me want to start it in the first place. Even though I know I’m not the last webcomic artist in the world, and still read one webcomic regularly, I feel like the last man standing. Never existing in the right time. I don’t exactly feel regret though, because I can’t see a version of myself that could have succeeded any other way. Sometimes I feel as though I was guided here as a way to save me from everything for a little while longer. Like I was a cog in someone else’s plan. Perpetually stumbling into moments where I was compelled to do things because some outside force needed me to do that very specific thing. By being in the wrong place for me I was in the right place when people needed me. That isn’t a bad fate really. It’s better than dying in a car accident at 27, or suffocating in a crib as a baby. I should be grateful to whatever force of causality allowed me to have whatever happiness I’ve had. And yet I feel like I had something kept from me. I’m not even sure exactly what. It’s not like I don’t have friends. I have friends who have stuck by be in spite of mountains of evidence that they shouldn’t have.
Maybe I got exactly what I earned based on the effort I put in and now I’m just sad that I wasn’t better at life than I am.

Where are you? Why didn’t I find you?

Whatever. It is what it is.

Someone sent me a lego set the other day. This is a note to them: Firstly, thanks. Secondly, Lego is going through a phase of not having the kind of set that you mentioned that I’m interested in at the moment. Just check back from time to time if you’re dead set on continuing with your goal. The economy is making everyone cagey about certain things. I listed some more things but the pricing is all out of whack and fluctuating. But anyway, thanks again for the set. Those are probably the last ever from that theme.

Well, it’s time to post, so I had better shut up and do that. Remember to take a minute to relax and regain your perspective as things begin to get unhinged. Look at the stars and think about how small you are and how short a time you’ll be here. That way you can remember to enjoy it when you can. I’ll be here on Monday if fate allows it. Hope to see you then.

Posts authored by Jackie

2692 Model, But Again.