I don't mean this really as an explanation of my recent absense or lack of posts on I Post Music Every Day (Sometimes), but no matter what I do, it'll sound a little bit like that LMAO.

Anyways, I've been in the trenches of accidentally writing several novels. I wanted to get back into writing a while back, and one thing led to another and now I've got too many books to work on redrafting. Incidentally, this is why I suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet several times. I've just been in my apartment writing books and not telling anyone but like maybe my three or so closest irl friends.

It's got me thinking a lot about the experience I had that led up to this, an experience I think is all too common. I think it's an experience that's maybe, in some ways, related to what I like to call the sketchbook dilemma -- not wanting to use something because it's too nice and your skills might not live up to the materials you're using, which ends up being paradoxical, because at some point, every material is better than what you are capable of producing. Here's a list of things you might believe if you also believe the sketchbook is too nice for your drawings:

• The yarn is too nice for your crochet
• The notebook is too nice for your words
• Your code isn't worth the bytes on your computer
• Your ideas aren't worth the time it takes to implement them
• Your thoughts aren't worthy of the time it takes to think them

It all sounds really negative, maybe a little too dramatic for what I'm trying to get across, but I have these conversations with people who have things they want to do, but they won't sit down and try to do them because... like, what if it's just ass? Like, what if you make something and it just blows? Or even worse -- what if you do something and it's cringe. Scary!

And I have gotten to the point where I'm like, why do you make so many excuses to not, like, have fun? "I want to write but what if my writing sucks?" dude whether or not the shit you write is good has nothing to do with how fun it is to write. "What if it sucks and I wasted my time?" man I didn't know having fun was a waste of time, guess I'll stop reading and making art and annotating essays and writing a blog since that's literally the only reason I do those things! Like, I'm not trying to be a millionaire by doing stuff that specifically doesn't make you much money even if you're good at it, if at all.

So, like, the problem that people have is they're like "I'm not very creative actually!" and when you probe them, you find out they didn't really try, because being creative == good art or whatever. Actually, not to be pedantic, but I'm pretty sure being creative == creating stuff. That's literally what that word means. Want to be original? Want to be good? Want to be interesting? You literally can't do any of that stuff if you don't, like, make anything at all.

I make so much fucking bad art. That's why I disappear for months on end before posting anything. I make good music once every 2 years which is why I post my music once every 2 years. Out of 30 good drawings, one of them is good / interesting. I'm literally shitting and pissing myself all day trying to make art or whatever, and I have fun every second of it, and maybe 1/30 drawings I'd say are good enough and/or interesting enough to post. I'm not going on here posting my fucking... black and white value studies of funny stock photos or whatever. I'm not posting my warm-ups, my 30-second gesture drawings, whenever I show my writing to people they're like "wow that's so good, this is your first novel" and I'm like. It's the first one I'm showing you, plus I write like an endless fountain of fucking grocery store-themed cosmic horror short stories, weird monster erotica and cringe-ass self-indulgent hurt/comfort fics that I don't show to ANYONE because it's so fucking niche, but the themes and techniques I use show up in everything I do. I don't even post my good art most of the time. Why would I? I'm not doing this shit for money and I'm certainly not doing it for publicity either.

I am not "naturally creative", my mind was forged in the hellish creative desolation of the American office job, the American grocery store, the American minimum-wage cleaning job, the American school system. These are deeply lonely and excruciating experiences made survivable through community and kinship and love. I don't think that you have to be tortured to be a "good artist," but I think to some extent we are all at least a little tortured by these systems. (I don't fucking care if you're "not in the US" or whatever, there's probably some other horrible, probably alarmingly similar thing keeping you down too. Not to say that it's a universal problem, but it's at least universal to heavily money-driven societies and fascism, which often come hand-in-hand, because money is a really unfortunately easy way to control people.) I also think the most beautiful way you can oppose these systems of oppression is to make niche art that is too weird, is too personal, too specific, too grotesque, and/or just fucking sucks.

I genuinely believe it's no-one's fault they feel like this. It's just so frustrating, mostly because I did and I escaped it but I couldn't really advise on how I did it because I don't know how to explain it in a way that wouldn't scare the shit out of most people. But I'll try.

1) In opposition to your own mind

I should specify that before I write this, I'm not an anti-religious person.