I was trying to figure out what I should do with my life.
Again.
A friend of mine was diagnosed with liver cancer. He's 45. It made me ask myself "What would you start doing if you found out you had less than a year to live?"
My first thought?
Finish a comic. Finish THE comic. Do the story that means the most to me. Use the skills that have been honed the finest in your life, not the ones you're in the early stages with.
There's something to be said about the first thing you think of.
I, naturally, over though it anyway. I kept questioning whether I even LIKED drawing. I get so sick of it. I dread doing it. On the other hand, I was loving my guitar playing, and time went be so fast when I did it. Now that I'm a few weeks in, I dread that TOO. I think it's a Harold thing. I think I get bored easily. I think I'll get the most satisfaction from sticking to things, even after I get tired of them. More satisfaction that beating another video game.
Last night I starting getting horrified by the idea of death, and that I'm guaranteed to deal with my last breath someday. I went to sleep in a panic of dread.
This morning I listened to the "Art & Story" podcast. It was about "The Big Panel". About doing the thing that scares you, artwise. Once you conquer it, you've added it to your artistic vocabulary, and now can never go back to cheating.
What was my "Big Panel"?
Perspective.
Drawing a big cityscape horrifies me.
So this morning I decide to play a song I just discovered the day before while weight lifting (another thing I've gotten into that I'm already getting tired of): E Talking (Nite Version) by Soulwax. I found it really gets me in that "Get off your ass and get shit done" mood. I also decide the the "E" referred to in the song is the enemy, because in my mind and experience, that means the most.
So I'm playing this song at work, and as I'm listening I accidentally hit a shortcut key combination I've never hit before that brought up a 2 point perspective grid in Illustrator. I had no idea that even existed. So here was the one thing I feared, coming up using something I didn't even know existed. I use Illustrator a LOT, and I thought I'd hit all the accidental short cuts you could find. For this to pop up while I was struggling with comics and perspective, while listening to this song, was th God Wink I needed to get through this part of life. So now I'm going to work on the comic, or at the very least, the webcomic.
But which means more? What's more important? Make people laugh, or teach them it's OK to be a parent instead of a "big shot success"?
More later.
