Bottled Emotions Released Like a Genie From a Lamp

I've been sitting on top of some emotions ever since I started a figure study. Originally, I was going to make an overtly and very blatant sexual Tarzan-like male figure from a photograph I looked up and saved. It ended up looking more and more like a tired African-American slave who is in dire need of food and water.

I kept looking at this picture after completing it yesterday wondering if I had the right to produce something like this. I don't think I do. I was told, as an artist, your best well to pull inspiration from is the well of your own experience. Your history and who you are.

Maybe I am taking this way too literally, but I feel that I have no right to have produced this drawing. I am not African-American. I have no relatives that were slaves of any kind. That alone should tell me not to produce something like this. So why did I go with it?

I don't know.

After completing the drawing, I decided to take a break. I've been pretty much drawing since the start of summer, despite several distractions and other addictions. (Damn you, E3, and your previews of up-coming game consoles I'll never be able to afford! Damn you to Gamer Hell!)

I think I was better off drawing until my hand fell off.

While posting on several of the forums that I am a member of, I found a post asking what celebrity you would like to me if you could pick any. Anyone that really knows me knows who I would pick. Unfortunately, something slipped and I added that I would like to meet them for personal reasons. Someone saw this and sent me a private message saying that he knew one of them. Briefly and a long time ago, but he knew one of them.

This world just seems to get smaller and smaller, doesn't it?

Recovered data from a corrupt hard drive, what little that survived that is, bring back memories of a time that hurt me to the point where I can't stand people let alone my own family. And what am I left with? Conversations with myself at night wishing the idea of alchemy from Full Metal Alchemist was real so that I could show them that I'm worth giving a damn about. Day dreams played out at night about being a black cat demon from the world of Inuyasha whose power is to know and collect the deepest secrets of humans and demons alike only to be hated until one faithful day when he comes across a girl from the future. And during the day? Reminders that I am not worth a damn. That I'll never be worth anything to anyone. That all I'm good for is for feeding the dog while everyone else is on vacation like they are now. (If you can call a weekend over at Virginia so my sister can do some college event thing she volunteered for a vacation, that is.) And the frosting on this bitter cake is the want to go to Disneyland for their 50th Birthday celebration and, for once in recent memory, have fun without having to worry about how much lunch will set us back given the $50 ticket price.

It's a wonder why I haven't resigned myself to my lot in life. Then again, maybe I have. It just probably hasn't sunk in yet.

Sometimes I feel like I need to go back in time to when I met Andrew and not get involved. Maybe then I'd be better off and only have to deal with the trauma that high school left me with instead of realizing high school was a joke and having a broken heart without any chance of it healing completely to where I can actually care about a person.

Holy crap.

I really have stopped caring about people. I've even stopped caring about myself.

It seems wrong. To be an artist and not care. To be an artist and not have any kind of strong emotion short of anger and the want to change that which can't be changed. It's like being a musician with no sense of time. Or a writer with no real grasp on the idea of what a character-driven story is.

Dear God, what am I? What have I become? Am I nothing more but a shell of some hopeless romantic who died when his heart did?

Just when I think I am over this damn dark chapter of my life, I find out that there are several more pages left in it. I need an out to just come along and take me away. And soon before I start the fall semester as an uncreative piece of wasted flesh who cannot even challenge himself creatively to cover a canvas with something remotely interesting.