Thursday, June 26, 2008

Turning point

I am going to put together a graphic novel. It will be created digitally, designed in Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, and published through Acrobat and/or the web. It will be tied into the story behind the "This is her Zen" drawing I have been working on for what seems like forever now. I've made some progress, but nothing worth posting images...mostly blocking in color, working some shading and contour on the girl, but nothing substantive. I've had no frigging time!! I'm hoping to rectify that immediately, but in the meantime, there hasn't been much to talk about.

Which brings me to another item that has been on my mind for the past month or so, this blog and the purpose for its existence. Over the past year and an half or so, I've posted just about everything that came out of my head. Most of it has been disposable, a few items may have had some redemptive value, and I may have managed to sprinkle a few insightful tidbits here and there, but for the most part it has been little more than a brain dump. I have said just about everything I have to say that might be of any value. At this point, anyone on the net can browse through my thoughts and draw conclusions on who I am, for better or worse. There are more than 300 posts here, a few dozen more on Myspace, and even a few on Tampaforums.com, of all places, going back to 2006. After browsing through random selections of all that material, I am just not sure how much real value there is to be found in any of it.

So maybe it is time to stop sharing what I think with the admittedly tiny audience I have here. Chances are high that my life will not change the state of human existence. The odds are overwhelmingly in human nature's favor, and writing about that is not helping anyone. The conformists are still winning and honestly, I am tired of thinking about the whole damn thing. As bored as I am with the idea of "average", and as frustrated as I am with modern materialism, I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating and struggling with the ramifications of materialistic ideology. All that is being accomplished by this effort is a rise in my blood pressure. Ultimately, the only outcome has been a dog chasing its proverbial tail. In that sense, I have been chasing my tail for well past a decade now and you know what, I still haven't caught it.

There comes a time when you have to accept the world around you for what it is and move on, or you run the risk of being perpetually lost in frustration. I can attest to this firsthand, as I have been lost in frustration for what seems like a lifetime now. I am finding that you do not have to abandon your ideals or aspirations, but you do have to accept that others (probably most others), do not share those ideals or aspirations, or at least do not feel adequately motivated to work toward them in hopes of making them a reality. So you do have to abandon a certain amount of hope and relinquish a level of perceived possibility, at least external to yourself. I find myself adopting a "we could live in an utopia, if only..." frame of mind, tempered by the understanding that my ideas of utopia are unachievable in a real world inhabited by real people. I think I might finally be OK with that. If it means interacting with people on a much more superficial level, then so be it.

Eventually, you have to find a way past frustrations with irrevocable aspects of human nature and move on. I am not sure that I have managed to completely divorce myself from those frustrations, but I have come a step closer to the disconnect necessary to be free. That's real progress for me, but until I actually get somewhere, I'm not sure there is much I have to say that is worth writing about, so for the foreseeable future, it will be updates on this art project, maybe a few unrelated drawings (I have another illustration project sitting on my mind right now), and possibly the occasional tangential anecdote.

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Posted by Erik @ 6/26/2008 02:40:00 PM