Time it is for you to look past a pile of old books. Read them have you? Page turners they were not. Wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing you do not already possess. You're still looking to the horizon, never to the need right under your nose.

When I was a kid, I remember watching a documentary on futurism. They were discussing what the world would look like in fifty to a hundred years. I don't recall much about it save for one line:

"The future will be weirder than we can imagine."

In my mind, this line always gets conflated with the J.B.S. Haldane quote: "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Regardless, whether we're talking about the Universe or the nebulous mental construct that is the Future, this is not going to go the way you think.

My dream was always to open an animation studio, hire my friends, and make great animated feature films that won awards and were highly praised. I wanted to be an American Hayao Miyazaki or Shinichirō Watanabe or Fumito Ueda. I always liked computers, and being very future-thinking I figured it would only make sense to make animation on a computer. So after High School, and getting an art degree from a local college, I set forth to the the great unknown realm … of central Florida - to study Computer Animation.

This was 2005. 2005 was a great year. It really felt like a culmination of all my life’s interests. I made a ton of friends and we stayed up all night smoking cigarettes and eating terrible diner food and studying the art of 3D.

Then 2006 rolled around and everything changed. There was a final exam of sorts that kind of came out of nowhere. All throughout the winter of the previous year, we were told we’d do a group project that would then become our student film and we could send it off to companies and see if we could get our collective feet in-the-door and careers started. However, as we returned from Christmas break, we were now told that there would be no student films. Instead, we would each create three animations, or models, or rigs and submit them for review.

This didn’t seem like the biggest problem, although I was disappointed that we couldn’t go forward with the student films. We had already created storyboards and character designs by that point - they literally pulled the plug on months worth of work for seemingly no reason. If I had to hazard a guess, I would assume they wanted us to all stand on our own laurels in the coming job search - be self reliant etc.

Anyways, some of my friends went on to ace this exam and eventually worked for Bethesda on Skyrim and Fallout, others on Call of Duty, feature films, and children’s animation. There was a lot of success from my class, but not from me.

I eventually had to withdraw entirely and never graduated. I ran out of money trying to pass. I had already taken out more loans once, I couldn’t bear it to do it again. So, in late 2006, after months of trying to pass two more animations, I came home.

In the years afterwards, I went on to work such exotic jobs as Grocery Store Produce Boy and Museum Security Guard. I felt like an idiot. Spent so much money, got nothing out of it, and it wasn’t because I got cheated or swindled, it was because I simply wasn’t very good at the thing I was trying to do. Computer Animation isn’t like what Walt Disney did, or what Hayao Miyazaki does. Computer Animation is more akin to puppeteering. You make the puppets, you make the sets, you rig them up - which is essentially a computer-y way to place all the handles and strings, and then you go about moving them through 3D XYZ space taking keyframes along the way. It’s super interesting, and despite it all, I’m glad I tried to learn it. In the right hands, life can be brought forth from simple polygons moving around. It’s magic.

I eventually landed on my feet. I got my first career job not with Pixar or a video game studio, but with the US Army. They hired me as a Visual Information Specialist, whatever that means. They needed advertisements for their recreation division as well as an eventual print shop lead. I was pretty tailor made for such a position. This job was in an IT office also, so I eventually developed enough skills there to move onto my current IT career and the rest is history.

I think a big part of the problem for me was that Computer Animation didn’t involve drawing at all. You could draw things out for planning purposes, but the actual work was at a keyboard and mouse, rather unintuitively clicking around furiously until Maya or Blender or whatever does what you’re trying to make it do.

Drawing just makes a lot more sense to me.

The old ways of animation where you draw a picture, then another, and another, in sequence; and then play them out 12 or 24 times per second - as difficult as that is, and time consuming, to me it looks about a million times better. I don’t think there’s been a 3D movie or video game or feature film with lots of special effects that looks better than Sleeping Beauty; I don’t think there’s been a big blockbuster piece of media that rivals Akira or Spirited Away. I don’t think you could even make a cogent argument against that.

When I started writing this, I knew I wanted it be about my failures as an artist. Why I haven’t reached my goal of running a successful animation studio and being an American Miyazaki - or have even finished a single comic book. Comic Books, after all, have just a few pictures per page, not 24 per second. Surely, that must take less time and not a decade and counting to produce a single issue.

Surely.

I knew that there was a great line from The Last Jedi about failure as a concept. Yoda says it to Luke - it’s the last thing Yoda ever says to Luke actually. Failure is the greatest teacher, he says. Luke had all these ambitions after he redeemed his father and seemingly balanced the force. He was going to set forth and rebuild the Jedi Order. However, in the blink of an eye, it all changed when he sensed darkness in his nephew. A darkness he had sensed before and instinctively tried to snuff out immediately. But it was all a trap, a way for the snake to turn brother against brother, to get biblical af for a moment. It was a plot set by Palpatine, who didn’t die, who could not die, as he had cloned himself endlessly and used the dark side of the force to imbue all of the ancient sith lord souls into his own. Episode IX is total ridiculousness and I love it.

What I didn’t realize in doing a bit of research into Star Wars was how often the concept of failure comes up.

“This is why you fail,” Yoda tells Luke in Episode V after he faces himself in the cave. “I have failed you Anakin!” Obi-Wan pleads as his apprentice turns to the dark side in Episode III. And of course: “I failed you, Ben. I am sorry.”

All three trilogies share the theme of failure. The dark side: fear, despair, war and suffering- it always wins - disconnecting us from the present moment and getting in the way of us doing the next good thing. What Yoda is trying to teach isn’t how to destroy the Sith or be a superhero and save the Galaxy. He’s trying to teach how to not worry - to not suffer. Do not read into the past endlessly, do not fret about the future. Be here, now. Do what needs to be done in the present.

The future is indeed weird.

I have failed in my pursuit of my youngling dreams, yet I know that a more immature mind than my own dreamt them. What gives me solace is to think about if I could time travel and go hang out with my 19 year old self… What would we talk about?

“Are you rich and famous?” He’d ask.

“No,” I’d say.

“Do you live in a cool place and drive a cool car?” He might interject.

“Actually, yeah,” I’d admit.

“And I’m married to a woman that loves me and I love her and we have two cute cats that do adorable things all day and I have a giant collection of video games - my own private arcade practically - and my own pool and cityscape rooftop and I work out a lot tryin’ to get ripped and…” I’d drone on.

He’d pause for a moment, and then look at me seriously.

“Do you make a living drawing and telling the story you want to tell?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”