The Burn
This piece was published on a very old blog of mine, way back in June 2015. I rediscovered it the other day and was struck by two things: (1) how not-cringey it was and (2) how much it still reflected my current state of mind, with a few adjustments for general growingupishness.
“Create art for a living”
It’s a frustratingly polarizing ambition, that.
Some days, after a particularly good piece of prose has tumbled from my brain, or a sketch has the shining potential to become a hypnotically beautiful painting, I am bubbling over with the prospect.
Heck yeah, I can own and operate my own business! I’ll be such a raging success that I’ll no doubt be able to retire at age forty-five, with six galleries showing retrospectives of my work around the globe, and a syndicated run of my Random Thought column guaranteed in three papers for the next twenty years. Piece ‘a cake.
Other days, when everything I draw essentially amounts to stick figures throwing crap at one another (that crap being the previous drawing), and words beyond the titillating phrase “Durrrr…” completely elude me, I’m somewhat more subdued.
Maybe one day, I think, as long as I have a fallback job lined up for when everything collapses around me and I am plunged into inescapable debt, my apartment implodes, and my partner leaves me for a successful columnist to travel the world visiting retrospectives of her work. Or when I’ve saved up enough money to live comfortably for the foreseeable future (read: 5 years minimum) while I scrape and dirty my knees begging for jobs at every blog on the English-speaking internet. Maybe.
It’s a tumultuous ride, my subconscious, and it’s only made more so when this burning urge to create just feels so … stifled by the daily grind that I, like the rest of the 99%, must undergo (ah, woe is me). And I have a marginally creative job. I can’t even imagine how those poor sods who dream of theatre stardom while waiting tables struggle through. Respect.
Ideally? Ideally, I would take a month or two off work. Paint and write and draw every day. Apply for freelance or online editing and writing positions the world over. FORCE someone to hire me (with home baking, endless applications, monetary bribes – whatever).
I know someday the perfect job will fall into my lap. I say fall because once I’ve rifled through every possible future and papered the free world with my resume, something Just Right is bound to flutter out of the teetering, mile-high stack of my ambitions.
I have hope. And faith and determination – I do. Some days, though, I just wish I had a fairy godmother, or a really wealthy relative, or a wishbone.
Until that day (the day something perfect shakes loose, not the day I get a fairy godmother), I’ll keep on bolstering that creativity that burns in my gut like some kind of fiery gopher who won’t stop trying to claw its way out of my throat and take over my life.
Thank you, resolute rodent. One day you’ll win that battle and I’ll have no choice but to surrender to your artistic whims.
For now, I just keep trucking toward the change that is, as they say, life’s only constant.
Come on, Change, come on. Move your bloomin’ arse!