Today is going to be murder to get through, but it’s my own doing. I let my depressed state screw me over. I should have planned to go down to the Supreme Court marriage Proposition 8 protests/counter protests regardless.   I actually took the days off well in advance.   But then I cancelled because I have been down ever since Valentine’s Day and I just didn’t want to deal with that part of me.   Ironically, that not wanting to deal with the emotional creative part of me is what got me into computers, and making the very nice living I am making now.   But there was a big drawback to all of that.   This path I chose, has led me to a cliff.   Now that the day is here I really want to be down there with my cameras photographing it but management wants not. Ever have one of those conversations with your boss, where the boss looks at you, smiles and says “It’s your call” and you know goddamn well what the call is supposed to be?   It was one of those.

Maybe that would have been the reality anyway.   So many things are happening at work now.   Launch is in 2018 and while that seems like a long way off, there is a lot of up front work that needs to be done.   A lot. Probably, it’s no fooling, I really have to be here and stay on top of my work.   Maybe making it up on the weekend really just doesn’t cut it.   Maybe it wasn’t a question of my boss telling me I could not have divided loyalties in his workspace.   Put that artsy fartsy stuff away, you’re an adult now, live in the real world… But this is really stabbing me in the heart now.

Sometimes I wish I could just surgically remove that emotional creative part of me that keeps wanting to make imagery.   I hear this thing inside of us drives other artists insane too and it’s been this way all my life, particularly as it’s become lonelier and lonelier and because of that, sometimes I really don’t want to look at what comes out of me.   And while it’s had its rewards it cuts me to ribbons too.   It is right now.   I could have done without it.   Life as an emotionless cog in the machinery wouldn’t be so bad.

So now, at fifty-nine, I think I know why the stereotype of the starving artist exists.   It isn’t because they can’t find decent work, it’s because they know what will happen when they do, so they stay in their little slumtown lofts and hovels because any work that pulls them away from the creative urge makes their inner lives a complete mess.   Well…more mess then what would be normal for them anyway. In the end the choice isn’t live a very low budget life but get to do your work whenever you want to, verses get a good job and appease the creative urge in your spare time…it’s follow your heart or slowly go mad, pick one.

Wish I’d been brave enough to take the poor scrappy starving artist path. Who knows, maybe the boyfriend would have been somewhere along that way.   But nerve was always something I had trouble with having enough of.   Just ask Tico.

Anyway…to those confronting the haters today and tomorrow…be proud. You are writing new lines in the history books. Wish I could be there with my cameras to get some shots of it happening.