—the rawest deal I can have in this post-zoomer age of pursued validation. Thank Lu at least I’m a millennial. Writing this fully acknowledging the infinite and infinitely more crucial things going on everywhere. That said, there’ll in all likeliness never be a time when the world calms down enough for me to not feel some tinge of guilt to sort through one’s own problems while staying empathetic to the world’s fan-shitted mess.
Create more than you complain, therefore even the complaints of this publishing is a form of repurposed creation.
For the first time in 4ish years, this life as a DIY nobody artist has begun trickling into a form of transition. My magnum opus still needs a completed professional sound mix that won’t cause public epilepsy but even while that gets rectified, life is still changing. For the first time in 4ish years, I need to ask myself what my point is.
If you subconsciously wish death and failure on me, well lick my golden ass cause this isn’t a suicide letter. Unlike 4ish years ago, I’m still fine with being alive. My problem is the life I wanna even partake in. For 4ish years it was Stay Alive Long Enough for OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO to Exist as a Start-To-Finish Megamovie [and Not Some Thing I’m Rambling About] That’ll Shatter People’s Unchallenged Tastes. Even without the mix yet, it exists now, backed up 4-I-think times, which reminds me I need to transport one backup to a confidant with rundown manual of where everything’s located cause the files are all named like elaborate song titles.
Now that it’s no longer existentially imperative that I don’t die before my most imperative purpose is fulfilled, it feels weird being alive. Not just cause the world keeps finding ways to set itself more on fire, but cause I don’t have all focus prioritized on one Thing that transcends the flames. If a plane lands on me now, ODC is a completed entity, even if only seven close [by my distant standards] bonds have seen it and half of even them don’t get it. Someone I know would find a way to release it regardless my post-mortal wishes [Release It Fuck].
I write all this knowing I spent the climax of my 20s peripherally noticing everyone I’ve experienced puberty alongside of move ahead to securing careers, getting married, mortgaging houses, producing offspring, while I have stayed maybe-aggro-put exactly where I am. This is my transition because for the choice of devoting my actualization potential to a now 3-hour existential battle royale adventure, I am finding out the consequences of what will happen to me going forward.
It’s not hot turning 29. I have no regrets about my choices but I’ve anew begun feeling shameful around strangers. To a degree I’m being hard on myself cause I’ve only just finished this 4-years-all-consuming project and my immediate thought is “This was pointless no one will ever watch this I’m a pure failure” and it’s like “Bro caaalm down.” It’s suffocating feeling like everyone has Their shit together while I live among them as a kept-at-distant low-bar comfort of “Hey it could be worse, you could be That guy.” And I don’t care how many people say that’s not true, cause if they’re either contributing members to society or money-making artists, they’re thinking that even subconsciously.
I am officially the age of this gross-ass-but-likable-to-others guy a decade ago during college when I invaded a theatre collective run by a backwards-lib bitch who still rages at the sound of my name [Hey Ann], and so this dweeboi Pavlo was 29+ and just hanging around and hitting on 18-year olds—people my then-age—as if it wasn’t vomitrocious cause it’s easier for him to look back than face ahead.
I am also closing in on the age of this other guy indefinitely dating a girl like a decade-or-smth younger—the girl who I was the same age as—and wondering “oh fuck is that guy my fate?”
So cause I have values, I need to not become what I resent as much as possible. It’s reckoning, officially being in the age range that my late-teens-early-20s self would hate the guts of for invading his age group to escape their own. And while it saves me mental mileage to red flag myself and go “okay you can’t ever be weird with this person, that person, this person there, also that—” it is low-key depressing.
It’s depressing officially missing the time window when a majority of artists I’m inspired by “made it”. Then again, what do I really want? Do I want the work I create to succeed or do I want I to succeed? And honestly it sounds gross to wanna “make it” when that’s what everyone wants and the logical extreme of that is Will+Jada. The other extreme is van Gogh, where you die mostly-if-not-totally alone/unloved, nothing romantic about it, only for everyone a century later to profit off all that. I don’t know what’s worse, dying alone and forever unnoticed, or dying alone only for rich famous people to jerk off to themselves awards-performing your life out.
Paradoxes are all that exist for the sad nobody artist. Problematic solutions out of that include becoming internet famous for shaking your dog in the morning, and I the thought ended there.
This is not another post-quarter-century crisis, rather it’s the Bad Feeling that I’m already Old young and not only missed out on all Young young people nice things but also got relatively nowhere as a grain-rejecter. It’s not a destructive panic, but a understatedly saaaaaad dread. Not that I want what all those Young young people got to have like popular pool parties, preposterous amounts of TV-MA fornication, and a boundless cornucopia of Richard Linklater memories to go with their capitalist-thriving career-securement. But it’s an aloneness of its own kind, being the only one I personally know doing what I’m doing—therefore feeling cut off even from a modern society that’s somehow connected in its inter-disconnection. And I feel the understatedly sad dread because I have nothing to sustain off of, let alone counterculture-show for, save for the defiant odyssey of art that no one cares about and the stupid-stubborn counterculture worth I need to anoint myself with inhabiting.
I just hate that this is a choice you have to make; either vapid success or transcendental success. And right now I need to make due with self-serving success. Where the damngod fudge is everyone
So do I regret all this? Hell Yeah. But I would’ve regretted infinitely worse chasing after that well-adjusted not-die-alone life, cause that Definitely wouldn’t have worked out for a non-t-shirt-brand weirdo. So I guess my given regret cancels itself out.
Where’s my hope? Most recently, Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All At Once. I’m grateful there are artists like Domee Shi and Daniel Kwan making this world a better place. And on a self-absorbed level, it’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter if I or what I do ever matters.
I think that’s the root of my fear. Being a grain of sand in the storm, despite my self-awareness. Especially when I know for a hard fact that what I got on my hard drive[s] is utterly cracked.
Ok before I public-journal ramble into social media internet loser territory.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 