Tag Archives: melancholy

Dramatis Personae

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From preadolescence in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to Doha, Qatar, I have tended to gravitate toward weirdos. Even Work Rachel, though she came and left my life in a handful of months, was pretty out there. The people in my life are so off-center, and they’re so different, that I can’t help but think of them as characters.

I bring this up because I took the weekend to digitize my photo albums, and I rediscovered my past. And then, I remembered the characters in my life, and characters are meant to be drawn. I don’t plan on turning this into a thing, especially as MY LIKENESSES ARE TERRIBLE.

When I arrived at Hastings College, I didn’t exactly blend in. I was darker colors, plaids, and torn jeans, and the entirety of the Midwest was also plaids, but also a blend of earth tones and pastels. I was alone. Suddenly, someone came along, made an obscene comment about the holes in my jeans, and lured me into his den of filthy degenerates.

For a while, it was amazing. With our newfound freedom, we frolicked in innocent (yet very horny) fun, mostly involving smoking cigarettes indoors. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. We were kids, and we didn’t know better.

We started being really horrible to each other in ways I’ve compartmentalized and would refer to as “toxic,” if I didn’t feel like that word has lost all meaning. We’re not bad people. None of us were. We were young, and we got swept up in the moment.

Since running into these photos, I’ve been remembering the early days, before it got complicated, and some of the characters. From left to right:

There’s me, who seemed to be living under a bad-luck curse.

Rick was the one who befouled the reputation of my beloved grunge jeans and brought me into the group of misfits he’d been gathering. Not only was Rick a dancer with moves that could hypnotize a sultan, but he was sincere and curious, two of my favorite traits in a person.

Susan was a pretty, petite young woman who could fell a man by belching on him. She was your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, without the politics. She was never wrong, and this infuriated me. Sure, she was right most of the time, but did she have to be so belligerent about it? When I met her, she had a Canadian boyfriend, and I said, “Sure.” Then I met him.

If I were dream-casting Greg, I’d go for a young Joan Crawford, smoking a cigarette and waiting for something that piqued her interest. He moved like a marionette, broadly swinging his limbs from one pose to another, going from irritated to overjoyed in an instant. Greg taught me the value of camp and Bea Arthur, without which I would have never appreciated the one good part of the Star Wars Holiday Special.

JJ is difficult to describe. His black T-shirts, sometimes sans sleeves, heavy work boots, and unabashed mullet cast him as a redneck. And he was. He could keep up with Susan on the race to the bottom, and he thought he was the most hilarious person he knew. But sometimes, he’d get really calm, and he’d say something so profound, it would blow the back of your head off. But sometimes, he’d get really calm, and he’d say something so unbelievably stupid, it would blow the back of your head off.

These were just a few of the weirdos I got to know in my early days, far away from home, in a strange land, trapped somewhere between adult and child.

Shuffling Onward

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Saturday marked two weeks since I found out Shane was dead. I’m getting used to it. While he was still alive, I thought about him constantly. When I did something with a piece of art I’m proud of. When I ran across a phrase or something in a novel I wrote that he’d appreciate. When I thought of the most offensive joke imaginable, and only he wouldn’t judge me. When I would hear “Oh the Guilt,” a Nirvana song I didn’t know existed until two years ago, and intended to ask if he’d ever heard it.

I never got to ask. Kind of an on-the-nose title, isn’t it? Each time I’d think of something I wanted to share with him, I remembered I couldn’t anymore, and he died again. And again.

I was numb the three-day weekend after I received the news. Artistically, I had a very prolific weekend, as I went to all the cafes I frequent, in order to avoid sitting behind my desk, gazing out the window like I did when he called. Sunday, my parents were there for me in the morning. In the afternoon, Nicole and I explored Union Market, a rapidly developing complex of shops, restaurants, and cafes. When confronted with death, you need to do something that makes you feel alive.

Last weekend, Nicole and I returned to Union Market for a pop-up art fair. By that point, my thoughts about him weren’t as intrusive, and I could function on manual pilot. We wove in and out of buildings, admiring the media of sculpture, painting, sketching, inking, collage, spray paint, etc., all by local artists.

How could I wander through a collection of modern art and not think of my friend, the accomplished artist? Rather than hurt, though, I would look at some of the pieces, knowing he’d really like what I was seeing, and I was comforted.

Now? I’m feeling like my life is returning to normal. I still have those moments that take my breath away, when I forget he’s gone. There is also the slow torture of seeing the publication of my novel around the corner, and how he will never read it. I dedicated it to him while he was still alive, and I didn’t tell him. I wanted him to be surprised when the book came out.

As Paul McCartney says, “Oh-blah-dee, oh-blah-dah.”

I miss him so damned much.

Painting You a Picture

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In Downtown Gallup, New Mexico, there lies a street that only exists for about three or four blocks. This is Coal Avenue, and it is here that I will tell you about my friend, Shane.

Picture a second-story window, and standing before it on the inside is a young man, no older than twenty. He’s not particularly tall, and he’s bulky, but not unattractively so. He wears his blond hair down to his chin, and his clothes, usually denim, were covered in paint. He sticks his head outside and yells out, “I thought I told you to leave Angelita outta this!”

On the sidewalk, a tall, skinny teenager with big glasses and a long, blond ponytail shouts back something misogynist and vulgar, despite that the two boys are not the former, but are definitely the latter.

Vinny was Shane. He was an aspiring artist who returned to Gallup after many years of homelessness, wandering through eighties and nineties alternative culture like Forrest Gump. For a time, he lived in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. He later surfed couches, and eventually got a job waiting tables at the most popular restaurant in Gallup (it was Italian) and an apartment of his own, a studio apartment that he eventually decorated with a bed, a kitchen table, and pastel smears all over the walls. He even had business cards. I will forever remember them because they read:

Shane Van Pelt

Artist/Writter

When I met him, I had already found my identity in the darker side of Alternative culture. Meeting Shane at a football game altered that course, so instead of a path of black clothes and self-destruction, I became something more bohemian.

Shane had a lot of patience for me, who grew up with undiagnosed and untreated mental illnesses. When I went away to college, he was not the best pen-pal. But he did do things like leave phone messages at the front desk of my dorm informing me that Angelita was pregnant.

After his marriage, which I heard about third-hand, he and Elizabeth moved to New York City. He visited me a handful of times in college, shuttling back and forth from there to Gallup. People, seeing us together, assumed we were brothers. We were. He made quick friends with many of my friends as well because he was so freaking charming.

I ended up in New York, with nothing but a little bit of money and my friendship with him. He showed me around Manhattan and showed me where to buy weed. In fact, my first weekend there, he took me into Harlem to pick some up, and we didn’t know at the time that Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March was taking place. “Try to look inconspicuous,” he told me.

Elizabeth knew people, and during one of the first weeks I was living New York Adjacent, she took us to a party. Shane and I were the only people either of us knew, and he retreated solo as soon as we walked in the door. I found a corner and suffered, and an intellectual in his thirties approached me and asked if Shane and I were a “team.” As in a band or a writing duo? Even apart, we were simpatico.

I wanted to be a comic book illustrator, but I didn’t know how to draw. Shane, despite the raw stick figures I was starting with, was the first person to call me an artist. And if someone as cool and talented as Shane Van Pelt says it, it must be true.

He, Elizabeth, and their newborn Ava retreated Upstate, and some of the best three-day weekends I ever spent were in his drafty house in Binghamton, after I shelled out sixty bucks for a bus ticket. Together, we’d sit in his studio and work on one of two screenplays, Convenience Store Maniac or The Day the West Went Dry. The former is lost to history, which is too bad because I thought it was brilliant. The latter we’ll get back to.

When I got married, there was one person I wanted at my side, and that was Shane. I have to say, though, twenty years later, I’m still disappointed in his Best Man speech. What was important, though, was that he was there.

For personal reasons I won’t go into and because Shane is a bad pen-pal, we had drifted apart during my marriage. However, we talked a lot more after my divorce (i.e. once every few months), and no time had passed between. We were still insulting each other in gross, not-Woke ways, and we could talk about anything.

In 2022, I recalled that some of the best memories I had were hanging out in Shane’s studio and doing screenplay jam sessions. I took a trip to see him that summer, and for seven days, we extended our two-hour movie into a series. He said he knew people at Netflix. I didn’t care either way. I just wanted the quality time with my best friend.

He called me more frequently than that afterward, about once a month. However earlier in 2024, he told me he was committing to talking more often, and the calls came biweekly. He told me about his plans in Wheeling, West Virginia, which would bring him a short bus ride from me. He had to deal with some property issues because somehow, the high school dropout I knew who used his tips to buy art supplies had property issues now.

The last time I talked to Shane, it was this past Monday. He had called me, scared, because he’d been without some of his medications, and he was starting to feel the withdrawal. He told me he would be getting his medications Tuesday, so I told him that this was a moment. The moment would become a memory, like all his memories, and life would go on. The last thing I said to my best friend was a lie.

Since Shane has lived several lives apart from mine, I don’t know many of his friends or relatives. I met Elissa, his mother, once, and I knew he was devoted to her. Elizabeth has been a good friend to me with the patience of Job. I haven’t seen his daughter Ava since she learned how to walk over a three-day weekend and instructed me how to move Daddy’s paintbrushes from one jar to another. I have never forgotten that lesson, even though I couldn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth.

If you go to his website and you somehow dig up his essay about grunge (Shane’s filing systems made sense to him, at least), you’ll see a storyteller chock full of story. After reading said essay, I have been constantly riding him to write his memoirs. Somehow, Shane has packed about eighty years of living into the fifty he had, and I hope the person who inherits his computer at the very least finds more of these essays. He was also working on a novel, and I was really excited to read it when it finished.

There’s so much more I want to tell you about him. I have stories, like the time we stood on the street, Shane scratching pastels onto a rogue piece of drywall and me, narrating the process in my best (okay, worst) Joe Pesci voice. Or how he stole that boombox from a house I was sitting for, and I was the one who got in trouble. Or the joy on my face the day after Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins hugged a painting he made for her.

Shane was an accomplished artist, with shows all over the world. Thirty years ago, I watched him go from painting nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to his current style, whatever that is. Is it Cubist? Surrealist? Impressionist? Outsider? It’s none of those things. Shane was, and always will be unique.

Shane Van Pelt died Saturday, November 9, at approximately 1:00 a.m. Mountain Time.

He had met me in every stage of my life, and he still liked me. He was probably the best friend I’d ever had. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.

A Day in the Life

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I don’t know if it’s ADHD or a symptom of our society, but I hate the quiet. For most of the day, I’m listening to something. While I work on art, it’s a movie or a YouTube video. While I work at work, I put on a podcast I don’t need to listen to. On the weekends, I like to cozy up in a cafe and get swept up in the busy lives of others.

The main reason I always like to have something on is because the earworms nestle in otherwise. Sometimes they’re fun songs, but usually they’re not.

Today, I’m not plugging into noise, and I’m paying the price for it. I’m hearing my favorite Beatles song, the one I can never listen to anymore, “A Day in the Life,” from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This is one of those rare songs ascribed to Lennon/McCartney that actually had contributions from both. If you know their style, you can pick which parts are theirs.

The numbness of the John Lennon part (“I read the news today, oh boy”) is how I feel having sacrificed passion for my sanity, and the McCartney part (“Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”) is the result of that, i.e. going through the motions because you have to.

It’s a heavy song, and it never fails to bring me to tears. I found out when Newcastle died that it also described how I was processing my grief. Today, I found myself sitting on my bed, unmoving and unthinking, for ten minutes.

The only way I can feel anything right now is by writing about it.

 I read the news today, oh boy.

Jacket Off

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I apologize for the title, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Now back to our regularly scheduled essay:

In 2002, my friend Katie and I went to Andy’s Cheepees, a vintage clothier in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. I had been living tough in New York Adjacent for four years by that point, and I had acquired a new personality. I felt cool. I had cool friends, and we did cool things together. But there was something missing.

I haven’t been to New York in ten years, but when I first arrived, and through the six years I spent there, everybody had a leather blazer, black with a medium-to-narrow lapel. You were practically issued it. And the thing about those jackets was, they were pretty cool. Even though everyone had one, they were cool. It wasn’t about conforming, it was about being as awesome as your peers.

I went to Andy’s Cheepees with the sole purpose of getting one of those jackets, and I quickly found one that fit (40L at the time). However, the guy at checkout wouldn’t sell it to me. Instead, he took me to the back and found me one in a dark brown with a wide collar, looking more like a pea coat than a blazer.

Most people who know me as an adult know this jacket. It was comfortable, it was awesome, and it was vintage. It made me more confident and sexy. It was around that time that I came up with Jack Murphy: Cop on the Edge, who became my alter ego. You all know Jack, he doesn’t play by the rules. He drives his beater through fruit stands. He violates the Bill of Rights. He was married once, but not anymore, as he lives in a shitty apartment by himself. He may or may not have a dog, whom he feeds people food. He says things like, “You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.”

Upon meeting Jack Murphy, Rita called me Jackass Murphy because friends don’t want your head getting too big.

I retired the jacket in 2013 because it was pretty beaten up. I never got rid of it—it’s in my closet right now—but it’s not wearable. I replaced it with a similar jacket, almost the same color. This one looks like a leather safari jacket, but it’s as cool as the original, and I’ve worn it around Germany, England, and DC. 

There’s just one problem: I’m not sure I want to wear it anymore. Why am I making such a big deal about this? That jacket has been a major part of my identity for twenty-two years, and the weather right now is perfect for it. As soon as the temperature made it to the 40s in the morning, I knew the time had come, and I slipped it on, and meh. No joy was sparked.

I don’t feel cool anymore. I’m self-conscious about my weight, I haven’t had a good haircut in years, and I’ve forgotten how to smile. I do feel cool sometimes, but it has nothing to do with my jacket. Most of the time, I wear the denim one and layer it with a hoodie when it gets chillier. I only wore the leather one twice last year.

I’m a completely different person than I was twenty years ago. I’m a different person than I was ten years ago. One year ago. Six months ago, I didn’t have a cat. Change is the only constant. I think of it as regenerations, as in Doctor Who. Twenty years ago, I was the Shenanigan. Today, I’m the Bohemian.

In a few years, who knows? I might strut around the nursing home in my vintage leather jacket and bust some skulls. In the meantime, it’s waiting for me, if I’m so inclined. It’s my history.

A Day in the Life

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I woke up about ten minutes before my alarm this morning, and it still pissed me off. Oscar slept on the floor because I’d rolled over onto him at about 2:30. He knows my alarm means breakfast, so he bullied me into getting out of bed and feeding him. I brushed my teeth, cleaned out his litter box, made my bed, picked out my clothes for the day, and showered. Since it was super-early, I worked on a drawing until my favorite café in the DMV region opened at seven. I took the Metro the two stops and huffed and puffed it up some very Bay Area terrain. When I arrived, I enjoyed a breakfast sandwich while reviewing the proofs for my novel. I then continued working on my drawing and watched people for the next three hours, until the art store opened. I didn’t need paint, ink, or paper, so I just browsed. I also found the comic book shop Nicole had shown me years ago, but it wasn’t open yet. In this beautiful, late-summer day, I explored Silver Spring, Maryland and went home to open up my social medias.

The one and only post I could find that acknowledged what’s on my mind today was the car salesman meme, this one selling a plane that can crash into two buildings for the price of one.

I’m done until tomorrow.

Trapped in Amber

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I’ve been thinking lately about perfect moments. There those events in your history that aren’t weighed down by the stresses of life. You can start your day anxious and cranky, and you could end your day depressed and disappointed, but in the middle, time stands still, and everything is as it should be. I’m almost fifty, and I have so many.

I can remember with clarity my first kiss (in the back of a GATE van, fist-bump), even if I can’t remember the reason we were in Albuquerque, or the fact that I figured out shortly after that I didn’t even like this person. I can recall what she was wearing, and the fact that she had to make the first move before I noticed.

I remember walking by a canal in Florida with my parents, who were married forty-four years by this point and were still holding hands. I recall the yellow-green of the grass, the fence to the left, and trees in the near distance.

I remember Newcastle chasing me through the apartment until I jumped onto the bed, and he joined me, and we snuggled together on the green sheets.

There’s so many.

I have a favorite. It’s stuck with me for over twenty years because it was perfect. It’s an unremarkable moment, and I feel safe in assuming that all of my friends, including Facebook friends, experience this. There was something about this time, though, that didn’t fade.

In January or February, 2003, I had spent the night at my girlfriend’s apartment. We had known each other as long as we’d lived in New York, but we were still in our honeymoon period. Work beckoned us, so we bundled up and walked to my subway station in the cold and snow, surrounded by drifts of dirty ice. She lived on 210th Street, so the trains were all elevated, so we hid from the precipitation under the tracks, with the painted girders. Casually, she kissed me goodbye before heading off to her own train.

And that’s it. That is the moment that sticks out to me the most. I remember the black belt of her black coat and her debutante gloves. I remember the leopard print lining of her hat. I remember her hand on my heart, a gesture she made a lot with me. I remember that it was the most natural thing in the world.

She had kissed me goodbye before, but something had changed. This time I felt like I was an important part of her life, not just some guy. She seemed a little more relaxed. And for the first time, I felt like I was good enough for her. She and I had dated twice before this, and we felt hopeful that the third time would be a charm. There was a lot of hope in that kiss. We were really good friends, even before we started dating (again), so there was comfort.

The third time was not a charm. A few months later, I had a depressive episode and broke up with her over the phone. We stayed friends, though not as close as before, and then we became really close again long-distance. Unfortunately, I was cut off from most of my friends during my marriage, so we drifted apart, and our current lives are about as opposite they can get. I don’t expect she even remembers this because it was so mundane. It was my moment.

Why is this my favorite memory? I think it was the intimacy of it.

So many lifetimes later, I will always have that moment, that kiss in the snow, when everything was perfect.

With a Single Step

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I have a lot of vestigial dates on my calendar. For example, September 13 will always be the birthday of my ex, Andrea. I make a note of it every year, despite that she will never speak to me again. May 7, the day after my dad’s birthday, belongs to a high school best friend who grew up to be odious. These are people I no longer have a relationship with. But that’s the past. On the rare occasion I make a new friend, I can’t remember when they were born.

Other dates that have no relevance for me are April 30, which is my wedding anniversary. December 13 is when she served me divorce papers. Her birthday is March 23, but I can safely say that I haven’t noticed it the last five times that day has passed. August 22 (today!) is the twentieth anniversary of when I left New York.

In 2004, I was miserable a good half-to-two-thirds of the time. This was mostly because of my untreated, undiagnosed mental illness, and also, I was really lonely. Kate was the solution to this because she was, at the time, my soul mate, and she was opening her home to me. The resulting adventure was epic.

Was it a good decision? Well, Kate treated me like her property. She convinced me that all my friends were insane and that the only ones I could trust were hers, all of whom turned their backs on me following the split. (Some of them pretended to be “neutral” while actually being Team Kate. These are the people I think the least of.). She convinced my doctors and me that I was incompetent and couldn’t take care of myself. She tried to create a rift between myself and my family.

On the other hand, she was the biggest cheerleader of my art. She bought me supplies I still use and encouraged me to start my own art business. (She wanted to make greeting cards, which I did not enjoy.) She hired me a personal trainer, and for five years, I was in great shape. (You can’t tell by looking at me now that I used to run 5Ks for fun.) Most importantly, she was a champion of my mental health, and the only reason I can function at all is because of her.

In addition, she turned me into a Mac person, she expanded my flavor palette, she took me around the world, she taught me to be more financially responsible. She brought Newcastle and me together. I dressed better when I was married. I feel like I was more of an adult back then, even compared to now.

I honestly think that leaving New York twenty years ago was the best decision I could have made at that point of my life. It was when I took the first step to being an adult. It was when I packed up and chased true love. It was when I was brave. That’s why I remember August 22 every year.

The Giving Tree

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Prior to Sunday, Oscar and I were living in Nicole’s apartment, formerly our apartment. I stayed there for two weeks, and Oscar stayed a week longer than that. The problem is, Henry has been really depressed and crying all night since Newcastle and I moved out, so she was thinking of getting him a kitten. But she wanted to practice with someone old enough to defend himself.

Oscar and Henry did not get along. When the former first showed up at the latter’s, there were some really bad fights, so Nicole’s boyfriend cobbled together a gate to keep them apart, but they could get used to each other. They called it the DMZ. Oscar could jump on top of it without much effort. They could be in the same room together, and on my first night, they snuggled up on opposite sides of my lower legs and we all slept together.

His last week there, Oscar finally had the Surgery That Dare Not Speak Its Name, and I walked him to the vet in a backpack. I couldn’t watch his reaction, but he was quiet, and I think that’s a good sign.

But now we’re home. Nicole’s apartment is 850 square feet, mine is 435. I’d love to take him for a walk, but on the rare occasions I don’t pass out from blood loss and get him into the harness, his feet stop working. His motto is “Death from above!”; but he doesn’t have a lot of heights to aspire to.

I don’t want Oscar to get bored. I play with him a few minutes periodically. I talk to him, I let him sniff whatever’s in my hand, I scratch him behind the ears whenever I see him, I open my window in the middle of a heat wave. I don’t want him to get bored. I bought him a new cat tree and backpack. The tree arrived today, it took me over an hour to assemble it. It’s the perfect height to loaf out in front of the window. On the lower tier, there’s a ledge that’s perfect for hanging out with Dyad while he’s working.

Unfortunately, I have to get rid of the old one. Until January, I’ve never lived alone in my life, especially when it came to Newcastle. I’d never made a big purchase for my cat, the love of my life. It came from our joint account when I was married, and Nicole and I split expenses for the cat. So the first thing I bought was a tree for Newcastle. It was not a tall one, for an old man, but he never used it anyway.

Newcastle only lived alone with me for six weeks, and he never used it. Sometimes he’d get into the hammock that was the same height as my desk. Even if I wasn’t looking, I knew he was there. He was my anchor. Since then, Oscar enjoyed the hammock a lot whenever I was working.

I hated throwing the tree away because it’s the last monument I had to him. But I got a new kid, and I’m buying presents for him now.

* Oscar is in this picture.

Art to Art

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I’ve been feeling really self-conscious about my art lately`. I’m continuing to draw, almost compulsively, and paint or color, because I like the act of doing it. Unfortunately, I am not that crazy with the results.

I obsessively catalog and curate my art, going back almost as far as I’ve been drawing, which was 1998. I started out sketching in lined notebooks or whatever I could get my hands on, and I was so proud. I was drawing stick figures and bodies with no faces, and to me, they were as classic as a John Singer Sargent. Unfortunately, those notebooks are all lost to history. The first sketchbook where I started drawing faces was given away as a wedding gift to someone who would appreciate the symbolism of it. That’s the first six months of me making art.

The earliest drawings I have digitized are from 1999. They’re of Sean, Lisa, and Eugene, characters from a short story I wrote in college and the sequel I was working while I was figuring this out. I still write and illustrate these characters constantly.

Twenty-five years later, I continue to feel pride in these sketches. I can’t always say the same.

Recently, I skimmed through thousands of digitized drawings and picked only the ones that sparked joy, which turned out to be about six hundred. As I was paging through, I saw countless bad drawings that are making me ask myself who I’m fooling.

I’ve drawn pictures as recently as last week I would be mortified by if someone else saw it. Even as I’m getting better with basics like hands and anatomy (I’m still trying to get the hang of hips), I draw mostly stinkers. There are dozens of pictures of Lisa crosshatched with red, blue, green, and black pens, and only four of them are worth looking at. (Almost) everything I drew between 2015 and 2020 was so bad, I quit drawing altogether.

I didn’t start drawing again until the end of 2022, when my coworker saw a self-portrait I did in 2020 (one of the few good ones I did) and would not let me say no to her request for a portrait of her own. This time, I bought a cheap sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and started from scratch.

Look, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I have no training. I have two anatomy books that are useless to me because that is not how I learn. I read How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Every breakthrough I’ve made is met with a backslide, and I can’t seem to stop that from happening. I’m self-taught, and it shows.

I look at the comic book artists I take inspiration from, and they don’t make mistakes. The penciller doesn’t make one hand bigger than the other. The inker doesn’t lean too hard on their brush and make one line really thick. The exception to this is my idol, Matt Wagner. In his 1983 series, Mage, you can witness his evolution, issue by issue, as he gets better by doing it.

This inspired me to start drawing comics in 2002. I figured out how to do it by doing it. It’s how I learned to draw in the first place, and it’s the most satisfying way for me.  

I’m not going to share as much art as before. A lot of what I’ve already shared is a huge mess, and I’m really embarrassed about it. I’m also not getting as much engagement over social media, so I’m seeing that as a less and less productive way to spend my time. If there’s one that really knocks me out, I’ll share it. Otherwise, I’ll turn the page and try again.