The more I learn about Osamu Tezuka the more I adore the guy. He was publishing books when he was 15! I watched a documentary about him I had watched years ago and saw new things in it, like he drew using a dip pen. Those lines weren't gotten with a brush, they were with a particularly good dip pen nib.
Tezuka had everything I didn't; a stable, upper-middle-class family and a mother who actually did little flip-book anime's for him, and you don't publish at the age of 15 without some family connections. But it's not like I didn't get art materials whenever I asked for them, no matter how poor we were, and tons of encouragement that I saw as pushing but what hope did my family have? I now know that art's a much more solid field than tech, and maybe my parents knew this already.
Before we were poor, kids in the neighborhood called our house "the library" because going in from the door we almost always used, in from the carport, the whole long hallway was occupied with book shelves. There may have been a thousand books there. Lots on literature, art, tons of cartoons (my father was loyal to Walt Kelley to the end) and a bit on technical things. Since I cut school a lot, I read a lot, at home. Naturally I was attracted to technical things like The Big Book Of Transportation and You Will Go To The Moon but I guess that's natural for any kid. That was a probably the beginning of what I'll call the "tech delusion" where I decided I was going to go into tech instead of something reliable like art.
One one level, tech things *look* cool. The colorful components, wires and color-codes and all that. And the equipment, like oscilloscopes, where you see pretty pictures. I guess it's not that I wasn't a good fit for electronics, it's just that the jobs all up and left, and the very few that remain pay minimum wage.
The thing is, I'm feeling very un-motivated. Enough so that I've gotten behind on delivering packages to the post office and have customers complaining. I took 4-5 of the "latest" ones and went up to the post office and actually was able to get 'em into the chute. I went to H Mart on the way back, for sake, a beer, and some really nubbly fried fish with pepper sauce on top ... real "drunchy" (drunk with the munchies) food. I might make another run with about 10-12 more packages. People are tracking them and they expect them at a certain time.
I finally took a look in this box that's always by the door of H Mart. The (Hispanic) security guards and yes they are armed, are always hovering around so I'd avoided doing so, but I peeked in today and I saw a can of soda and I think some bananas and a few top-top cans of spaghetti. It's got to be either random things people forget on their carts or I'm thinking more likely, it's things to pacify any bums/crazies who come around. The security guards do a really good job of keeping order around there and the whole front of the market would be a homeless camp, in other words it'd be like a Safeway, if not for them.
I need to find a way to get re-motivated because this kind of behavior is gonna tank Ken's business. I might only have 3 more years to work at this but I need to make them good years. I need to find and train a replacement near the end of the 3 years too. I wonder if this isn't fairly common, people feeling burned out or disillusioned a few years before retirement because in a relatively short time they won't have to work any more.
Thinking about poor dear old Osamu Tezuka, he was not only a genius artist but a doctor who actually worked in a hospital for a while (and where, according to Wikipeda, he got punched in the face by an angry American) and was a decent piano and accordion player. So he had other interests, he just had art as his largest interest. He drew bugs the way I used to draw my seashells, although he took it a lot further, publishing about 5 books on bugs as some of his first work.
Bugs were, I think, a pretty good way to start. Just like my seashells. It's a fairly narrow interest that at least some people will always be interested in, and an easy first step. I should just pick any old thing.
I was berated with how "You'll never make any money as an artist" and we kept moving all the time and then I was making money as an artist but it had to be used to buy food and I was just convinced that the only way to live how I wanted, a stable life, was to get a regular old job like at the Chevron station or the Baskin-Robbins, a couple of my first jobs. The 70s were a hard, hungry time and the early 80s if anything were a bit worse. Studs Terkel has documented how the Depression in the 1930s just kind of broke some people, and maybe to some degree this is what happened to me.
Well, pretty soon I won't have to worry so much about working or how much money this or that activity will bring in. I can live on brown rice, greens I pick by the side of the road or guerrilla-garden, and fish I catch. But really there's so much food around these days I don't think I'll ever see the kind of hunger that was routine in the 1970s. Maybe I'm a bit like Art Spiegelman's father in "Maus" where the father is going on and on about saving the bit of cereal in a cereal box because in Hitler times... and Art snaps at him, "Maybe you'd better save it in case Hitler comes back!".
This shut-down, locked-in life is really peeling back some layers. I can't go out and busk, and the last time I did no one gave a shit anyway. This virus may not be over with for years. I'm beginning to think busking may not be a solid retirement plan. But if I'm going to do art after all, I need to be prepared to just about give it away. And if I look at what I'm spending my time on, it's some animated series I'm addicted to like Atashin'chi and a bunch of other weird Japanese stuff, and I keep being interested in learning Japanese just so I can appreciate the stuff I watch and read better. I feel like the layers are going away, and I'm reverting back to where I was at about 8 years old, loving cartoons, loving drawing, loving seashells and Nature in general.
I really did some great art. At least I think so. And then we'd have to move or some calamity would happen and I'd have to start from scratch. But I did some really great stuff, at least within the very limited society we lived in on the Windward Side, where I was "The Artist" kid for miles and miles of shoreline. It was another blow when we moved to Hawaii Kai again and I went to Kaiser, one of the better high schools, and there were kids there who'd had more exposure to, and training in, art and of course their stuff was better than mine. It felt like a giant punch to the solar plexus to see one gal's painting, of a kid climbing in a cave, and all she'd done was copy it from a picture in a magazine.
All I'd have had to do is "paint what is there", a thing I did when I did a really nice painting of a ti plant in one of those tinfoil covered pots, said would be impossible to paint. But it was such a gut-punch at the time. I've read that this happens with Japanese students often; they're big stuff at their small provincial school and get into a major school and now they're small potatoes. It's a crushing defeat for some. Here I'd gone from Kahuku to Kaiser and I was just average.
That's how it felt to me. All those years of being "the artist" and far outdone, and I knew I needed to make a living somehow. It seemed like my work and my aspirations (I'd told a career counselor at Kahuku that I wanted to be a commercial artist) were all a joke I'd played on myself. What a waste. Better stick with what I knew I was good at, and that was hard physical work. Hence the kind of jobs I took and the Army.
But pretty soon I'll have to try to *not* make money. To keep my life outside of the money economy as much as possible.
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