Regardless of how much or how little talent I possess, drawing is a skill which must be learned. There is very little about drawing that comes naturally to me. It is a skill I am forced to develop through practice.

Me, I envy people with genuine musical talent, and athletes. But I don’t have what they’ve got, so I have to develop skills in other areas.

In other words, Bill Mulligan and I aren’t as different as he may believe.

The timing was uncannily appropriate, as just two days prior I had resolved to stop screwing around and commit to pursuing a career as a professional writer and illustrator.  I had all but given up on the idea and was feeling increasingly miserable as a result. I didn’t make the connection until my girlfriend, the lovely Jeannie, did a one-woman intervention and helped me connect the dots.

I’m going to be taking the first step come Monday of next week, when I begin taking advantage of a weekly figure drawing “open studio” offered by the Steve Carpenter Studio in Rochester, N.Y. I discovered this resource last Friday when two of my friends — one of whom posts here under the nom de plume “Keef Yourick” — took Jeannie and I to see a gallery showing/open house. For just four bucks an hour — less if you pay ahead — you get to spend four hours drawing from live figure models and having your work critiqued.

Steve Carpenter is also one of the officers of the New York Figure Study Guild. It’s a wonderful organization that provides weekly critiques, gallery showings of members’ work, and more. Come my next paycheck, I’ll be joining the guild as well.

I feel like a college student again, compiling a shopping list of art supplies as I get ready to pack my little art bin and head off to class once a week. 

I am also embarking on what I anticipate will be a very lengthy period of self-study in all phases of illustration. I expect it will take a long period of really hard work to get my skills up to a professional level. But to paraphrase JFK, we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I’ve been playing the boxing game that comes with Wii Sports, and had been moving through the levels of difficulty pretty rapidly until reaching a plateau. That’s when something very disturbing began happening to me. I began feeling frustrated by every loss, and that frustration soon gave way to anger bordering on rage. I began lashing out, at first by yelling obscenities at the game, and then on one particular evening my anger boiled over to the point where I was kicking and punching the furniture.

Yeah, you read that right. I was kicking and punching things (and hurting my fist and foot in the process) because I was losing at a stupid freaking video game. I was mortified, to say the least.

I’ve always known that I’m not very good at accepting failure, but standing there in the wake of my temper tantrum I realized my problem was deeper than that. I *hate* failure, and I hate *myself* whenever I fail at anything. I set standards for myself that are so high I get a nosebleed just thinking about them, and I punish myself with emotional brutality when I fall short. It took the sheer absurdity of having a meltdown over a video game to force me to fully understand just what I’ve been doing to myself.

I made a decision that night: regardless of what it was in my life that had led me to think and feel this way, I wasn’t going to be led any further down that path. I decided to play the game again and enjoy it regardless of the outcome. I began measuring my victories in terms of how much fun I had, and soon discovered one of life’s paradoxes: by losing my attachment to winning, it was easier to win. And more fun, to boot.

I now understand that I can just as easily apply this sort of thinking to my other endeavors, including my artistic pursuits. Will that increase my artistic output? Who knows? I know that my attitude towards failure is at least one component of that which has been getting in my way.

I am, however, no longer given to declaring “I have the answer once and for all and you will therefore see ‘The Victory Streak’ completed by this or that date.” Instead, I’ll simply do what I can do and you’ll find out about it as it happens (if, of course, you’re smart enough to read this blog ). As I approach this endeavor again, however, I can tell you one thing that will be different: I will focus on enjoying the process and the things I learn from it regardless of the outcome.

Anyway, while I was at the airport waiting for my luggage to come my way via the baggage carousel, an interesting thought occurred to me. I began to wonder how people might have reacted had I, upon seeing my bag, put my hands on my hips and cried out, “SHIT! Why didn’t that DETONATE?”

No. This is about 37 years worth of struggling to get my life together, and my attempt to put a metaphorical stake in the ground and say, “It’s now or never. The battle will be won or lost here.”

37 isn’t that old by today’s standards, but as I approach my fourth decade I’ve begun to realize how quickly time creeps up on you. I’ve been to more funerals in the last three years than I’d care to see in a lifetime, and I know they won’t be the last. I’ve lost both of my maternal grandparents, an old friend, and a beloved pet. My girlfriend’s second cousin died after years of surviving longer than anyone thought he might; and her sister-in-law’s mother died on Christmas Eve of this year. A neighbor who had been living next door to my parents since before I was born succumbed to some awful disease that I can’t name and don’t understand.

Never before has it been so crystal clear to me that my life is finite. Whatever dreams I’ve got, there’s a limited and ever-narrowing window to bring them to fruition.

Concurrent with this epiphany has been a gnawing sense of frustration at my inability to keep my commitments to myself with respect to “The Victory Streak.” I’ve set deadline after deadline and missed every one. Some months ago I set a deadline for the end of this month and I can tell you I’m not even going to come close to making it. I feel like I’ve shot my credibility to hell with everyone else. I know I’ve shot my credibility to hell with *myself.* I see other people’s blogs and Web sites listing me as a “comic-book creator” and I think, “Like HELL!” Right now, I’m not an artist. I’m someone who talks about being an artist. I feel like I should shut the fuck up until I do something worth opening my mouth about.

Yeah, I’ve never had much compassion for myself. Never was that brought into sharper focus than when I participated in a thread in Colleen Doran’s blog around the topic of what gives you insomnia or something like that. I posted about my own lifetime of struggling with sleep disorders, and Colleen opined that what I described sounded like “hell.” I rejected the description, pointing out that there are people in this world without food, without medicine, without any measure of safety against violence. Colleen scolded me for ignoring my own suffering. And I realized that, yeah, for 37 years I really have suffered. I really have.

All my life I’ve struggled with inattention and lack of focus. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I’ve tried numerous medications, and while medicine has helped it’s not a cure. It’s a daily struggle, a war with and against myself. My mind races off in a seemingly infinite number of directions, unbidden by me. Words come tumbling out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about them, even for a fraction of a sliver of an instant. I’ll be in the midst of a riveting conversation, wanting nothing more than to listen to what someone is telling me, only to realize that my brain has shifted gears and I MISSED IT.

I also spent much of my 20s in the grips of a severe depression. I needed years of therapy and medication to pull out of it. I look back on that time and I can see a big, smoking crater where years of my life should have been.

It doesn’t end there. I mentioned sleep disorders. I suffer from Restless Legs Syndrome, which causes an overwhelming urge to move one’s limbs to the point where they’ll twitch on their own if you don’t give in. It’s always worst at night, which makes it hard to sleep. Add to that a case of sleep apnea I didn’t know I had until it was diagnosed two years ago, and, yeah, I’ve spent most of my life severely, cripplingly sleep-deprived. Hell, there were times when even the stimulants I take for ADD couldn’t help me keep my eyes open at work.

Sleep deprivation even robbed me of the ability to read effectively. Reading relies on an ability to scan words and sock them away into short term memory until “batches” of them can be processed. When your short-term memory is impaired by a severe lack of sleep, well, that gets a little tough to pull off. Also, the act of concentrating on a text often caused me to, you guessed it, fall asleep.

I’ve had a shitty time of it, and it’s high time I admit that to myself and cut myself a break.

These aren’t the only things that have gotten in the way of me pursuing my artistic endeavors, of course. There’s also my ever-present fear that I’m not, have never been, and will never be good enough.

Over the past few years, however, I’ve begun to realize each of these battles can be won. I’ve conquered my depression; I’m learning to live with ADD; my Restless Legs condition is now controlled with medication; and a CPAP machine has me sleeping more soundly than I ever dared to dream possible.

Having won these battles, I now know it’s time to fight the biggest battle of all: the war against the currents of time. Because you can get swept up by those currents and let them take you in random directions, or you can learn to navigate them so you end up where *you* want to be.

I realized that my lack of focus and direction has in part a result of having ADD and sleep disorders. But recently I’ve also realized that treating those medical conditions isn’t enough. That has merely created a situation in which I *can* learn to acquire discipline, focus, and direction, but I still must *choose* those things.

I recently found a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen that has been of great help. “GTD” (as it is known to its enthusiasts) has a reputation of being a bit of a cult. Well, it’s not. It’s a simple productivity methodology that I’ve begun applying across all aspects of my life, and the early results have been very promising.

The other good news is that during this last period of letting my artistic abilities lay fallow, the plot for the first issue of “The Victory Streak” has come to me in fragments of inspiration and today, without fail, I am going to begin to write it. I feel in my gut that this will be the best story I am capable of writing at this time — and that with time and effort my skills will only grow.

I am also eager to put pencil to paper once again. I recently bought a book called Working Methods in which numerous comic-book pencilers explain their process from start to finish. Reading it was a bit of an ephiphany, as I came to realize that most artists don’t simply lay down a piece of art board and begin drawing. They sketch designs on scrap paper, and often do a rough version of the drawing which they then place beneath the final art board and, with the aid of a light box, use as a guide to creating the finished drawing. So now I’ve got a lightbox and hopefully my days of erasing and redrawing until I ruin an expensive piece of Strathmore Bristol are over.

I still fell this gnawing fear that I’ll once again let myself down. That I’ll once again make a fool of myself with this sweeping, grandiose declaration that is followed up with nothing. But I don’t belong to my fears. They belong to me.

There is one fear I *will* allow to motivate me. I do not want to go to my grave wondering what might have been.

To any of you who made it to the end of this torturous post… thanks.

I’ll start us off: I got three nice button down shirts that can go equally well with dress pants or jeans, three new ties, new socks (I asked for them), new slippers, an NFL-draft version of Monopoly, a new wallet, a Gander Mountain gift card, a battery-operated lantern for camping, and a book of Wendy’s coupons (because I do so like me some Wendy’s!).

Your turn!

I’m not going to repeat the lie for fear of spreading it further. Instead, you can check out Colleen’s own blog  if you really want to know more.

All I intend to say is this: all of us should remember that just because someone says something doesn’t make it true. The problem with gossip is that it gets filtered through dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people, so by the time it gets to you it may be so far
removed from its source that there’s no way to assess its validity. That’s why people who normally have a fidelity to the truth will sometimes unwittingly repeat B.S. that has as its ultimate source some rampaging moron with nothing better to do than spread slander.

Or worse yet, why otherwise intelligent people like me will unwittingly believe it.

Yeah. I’m sayin’. Be skeptical. Be very skeptical.

Oh, and Colleen’s personal life should be her own goddamn business anyway.

Below is Jerry’s amusing attempt to counter the above photo by trying to fool us into thinking he’s badass:

Nice try, Jerry.

Here are the rules:
- Each player starts with eight random facts about themselves.
- Those who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight facts and post these rules.
- At the end of the post, choose some people to get tagged and list their names.

1. I suffer from sleep apnea and Restless Legs Syndrome.

2. I just bought some vintage Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Vince Colletta Thor comics.

3. When I was 16, I wrote a play and, in collaboration with a friend, produced and directed it for my high school.

4. In order to promote our play, I contacted a local T.V. station and they responded by having my friend and I as the featured guests during the interview portion of their local midday news program.

5. I do not like bananas. They make me sick to my stomach.

6. I just set up a wireless network at home.

7. I have joined Weight Watchers and as a result have lost 10 pounds.

8. I am a registered Democrat.

Okay, I don’t even know if she reads my blog but if she does: Marina Lemar, you have been tagged.