Creativity without the means to make the idea as envisioned or even remotely close to it is truly a curse.

Because there’s this knowledge about a genuinely groundbreaking brilliant idea which you know would resonate with people, be a big hit, make them feel emotions, and really be seen as the genius they are...

...and the knowledge that as things stand, it'll likely never be made, ever. 

It’s a curse across multiple things. The other day, I actually wrote some in a story for farn--just not the story I needed to be. I was writing bits from the sequel to Records.

The initially planned second book in a trilogy, before I realized Records was too big for a single book. The book which would therefore require me to have written all of Records first.

And I haven’t touched Records of Farn for months.

I’ve also wanted to tackle further formatting my notes and transcribing them all in one or two places, bringing it all together in a single comprehensive place.

Haven’t done that in a couple months, either, although almost every time I go on a TVTropes binge I’m at least inspired to do a couple touchups. (Because Tropes are a convenient tool for describing characters and plot points.)

And now, I am plagued by THREE different cover artist band ideas for music. One would be mostly a meme, but technically the easiest. I’d just need to record my voice multiple times, then learn an editing program to put the recordings together and figure out how to format it for a YouTube video. 

The next easiest would require me to acquire a program capable of writing various different pianos and keyboards sounds/noises, and to properly educate myself on them, learn them, etc. My bells training as a percussionist never left me, so I would have a relatively easy time learning how to write the right notes, but tuning them to sound like the piano beat in my head might take longer. 

But of course, neither of those are the ones I am most called to work on atm.

The one which I want to work on is the one most impossible for me to do solo, and in general, would probably be incredibly difficult and grueling even for a small team to pull off. Because of course I would come up with an idea nearly impossible to be sustainable. 

This third cover song band wouldn’t actually be strictly speaking a cover band exclusively. 1 - 6 times per year, one of their original songs would be released. But the idea is weekly covers, as in, 52 songs per year...but presented in a way which is effectively four times as many.

The idea for this cover band is a Gorillazesque animated band with lore, both in terms of their characters and the actual setting. The world they’re on would have the aesthetic of partially post-apocalyptic, partially-dystopian, but would technically be neither. 

What makes it so hard to make is that each song would have four versions per week. On Mondays, it would typically be the member with a deep voice singing. On Wednesdays, it would typically be the one who belts out the lyrics without a care in the world as to accuracy, a free spirited voice in the spirit of a karaoke night where the aim isn’t to sing the song well, but to just have fun.

On Fridays, it would typically be trying to make an extremely faithful cover, matching as closely to a 1:1 as possible with my voice. 

And on Sundays, the three voices would combine, to form a fourth version, with the frontman and the background singers, kinda like a capella groups, but also still having the song's nonvoice parts too.

The art style for the weekday solo covers would largely be Sepia, often with a touch of lowfi aesthetic, but also heavily featuring black at the edges, and with splashes of color for the characters and important props. (For instance, hair and eyes always colored, and significant objects being held similarly so.)

This art style would frequently be like an animated digital oil painting, but also would frequently be like a thick, thiccc lines anime animation, kinda like the normal Sunday video. (See below.)

For the combined Sunday song, it can best be described as mostly Danganronpa cutscene with a dash of Scott Pilgrim. Muted colors for the background, mostly grays of a lifeless environment which progressively springs into life as the video progresses, with vibrant colors from the singers and their stage. Thick lines for the characters, but an almost lineless (and lifeless) background initially which becomes more animated as the song progresses.

The Sunday ones would be full musical videos, a la Offspring animated music videos or similar. They would do their best to mirror and parallel the original songs' videos, while still diverging into doing their own thing.

The weekdays would be more of an animated comic mixed with lofi vibe. With the focus on the band's members lore during their segments and the focus on the lore of the world and why it looks partially dystopian and post-apocalyptic during the Sunday videos, which would also gradually show the reason why things become more animated and vibrant as the video progresses. (Basically, the music of the trio is quite literally healing the land.)

The scope and scale of this project speaks for itself. It’s not impossible for a small team of artists/animators in tandem with producers to pull off a project of that scope. But it would be stressful to maintain that level of consistency in releasing four music videos per week, even if one or two of them are phoning it in.

And it’s actually not impossible for a single person to do it all! Just highly improbable, and requiring it to essentially be a full-time job. I’m a good enough artist to draw art in the caliber it’d need to be, but not a fast enough artist. I’d need to spend months practicing the styles and background details and character details to build that speed. We’re talking probably a hundred hours of practice minimum, and then teaching myself how to animate on top of that.

Not impossible, just incredibly difficult. 

If I could animate the Sunday video in two or three days, and draw the other three in one or two days, then I could have one to three for recording and producing. 

But producing, as well as animating, would require the coordination to make sure everything is perfectly timed and aligned, a skill taking additional work and labor. 

I have none of the know-how to pull this off at the moment. Yes, I can learn, but it would likely take me a dedicated 48 hours (not two days where it’s 8 hours per day, I mean 48 continuous hours across numerous days so likely a full month minimum) at least in order to build the foundation for at least stumbling through the idea to a workable level.

So of course this incredibly difficult project (not quite Phyrra and Cyrus in scale, but also not exactly viable currently) is what I am currently hyperfixated on expanding and building. 

A project that is brilliant, but unattainable without a radical shift in my life circumstances enabling a combination of finances and skills and time which I currently lack all of.

It’s still a nice idea though. 

I’m just forever cursed with the knowledge it'll never be made, just like the rest of my wonderful beautiful genius groundbreaking heartwrenching ideas.

A girl can dream tho.

And it feels like there’s a crossroads at hand.

Down the good path, years from now our future daughter will eventually look back at my lifetime of blogging before she came into our world and have a flood of emotions witnessing the struggles in these years, and how it kept getting worse and worse. 

But this good path, the one I seek, eventually would lead to my wife and I having a daughter together through some means. There’s a past blog describing it, but basically, my wife and I at the same exact time had nearly the exact same dream about a future where we were raising a daughter together. It felt like a much-needed premonition of the future we need to fight for, hold onto, and figure out how to manifest. 

And it is that future which is one of the few things giving me the strength to keep existing despite how much has gone wrong, continues to go wrong, all the injustices endured, the exhaustion, the hopelessness, the lack of clear path forward.

That I can still see her, at least some of the time, fills me with the hope she’s still a possible future for us, and that it’s not too late, we haven’t gone down the wrong/bad path YET, and eventually, by some means, she can come into our lives.

...But then there’s the other side of the crossroads. 

Where we just fail.

Where I can’t find the way forward. 

The reality I feel is closer day by day.

And this reality, the one where there’s the death of dreams, is the one which feels increasingly all-consuming.

I did write and perform a song about it (it's on my YouTube, but I can’t quickly easily link it so just look for the song Cry of the Soul matching the publish date of this blog), and I might even write more because I am inspired even further by my misery, apparently. 

But suffice to say...It’s not looking good for us.

It’s looking pretty terrible, in fact.

I can’t see how to manifest my miracle of miracles. 

I’m too tired to fight.
And fighting makes me too angry in ways I swore I never would be again.
And I am too exhausted to try.
And too filled with self-loathing for "wasting time" on a song nobody will listen to and a blog nobody reads, especially since even if people did listen and did read...all it would do is make them depressed. 

I've been isolating myself preparing for that final defeat, because it feels like I shouldn’t be burdening others with my suffering. All reaching out to them does is give them pain, or so it feels like. 

I'm trying to break that mindset. Reached out to one friend yesterday. Gonna try and keep reaching out to more, and reconnecting as best I can. 

It might not help me. It might not help them. It might even further drain me and be a further "waste of time".

But if I can’t find the good path forward, and lack the strength to fight for it...I don’t want to have died on the bad path sad, isolated, alone, in pain and agony, with all my joy dead and gone long before I go.

So, if I am to be in my final moments...then I at least want to try and make them good ones.

Especially if said good moments keep going as life finds a way.

No reason to not live life just because of the possibility of it ending. <3

It’s hard not to be, when I've consistently failed.

There’s good things happening! My wife literally just hit affiliate on twitch, and it’s quite likely they'll start their seasonal job soon(TM).

But on my end, I have precious little in the ways of successes and an endless list of failures.

I failed to send a letter to management in the 10 day deadline.

We're going to get evicted either next week or in 2 weeks.

I've done zero advocacy for myself at work. 

And I have done none of the work to find a place to go after we lose our current place.

Creativity wise, I keep thinking up new things, but making none of them. Heck, I barely write them down.

Instead of pursuing anything productive, I'm wasting time writing this blog. The time spent writing this could be spent writing to an aid group, researching, searching for homes...literally anything which gives a chance at a future.

Instead, I'm wasting my time on this.

And when I get home, I'll waste my time on a combination of sleeping, watching my wife, and maybe if I'm up for it, gaming some more.

Mind you. Spending time with my wife is never a waste. That’s genuinely what I want to spend my life doing in every free moment. Vibing with my wife.

Nor is the rest excessive and wasteful, because my body needs it.

But it’s objectively true we're heading towards the end of our current lives, and I am doing absolutely nothing which is productive towards pursuing whatever our next chapter could or should be.

So it feels like the end of the line. A dead end. The final defeat. Where there’s no path forward, because I failed to make one.

And it’s getting harder and harder to see any. To view the world where we get what we so desperately want and need.

Bills are taking up 60 - 80% of my paychecks.
Groceries and gas eat up 35 - 50% of my paychecks.

There’s no saving money even skipping out on rent, we don’t have the credit + funds/down payment/assets/assurances for buying a home, we can’t afford a hotel yet alone a pet-friendly one, nor can we pay for boarding and we probably can't even afford a storage unit.

Just the car, the internet, the phone, and various monthly insurances? Are costing over $1000/month.

And Groceries plus gas? Easily $600+ per month, often closer to $800 - $900.

And I make $1600 - $2200 at the job which is doing everything it can to kill me, and despite working more than I can handle, it's not enough, and neither myself nor my wife have been able to land second jobs despite aggressively applying, nor can we get more aid than we have gotten.

We don’t have anywhere to move, we don’t have any plans, we don’t have any funds, and we don’t have any time.

So I'm struggling just to live, because I just feel like giving up when I get like this. I’m wasting away, despite how I know I could be doing so much more. 

I could be doing laundry, cleaning the dishes, cleaning the apartment, pursuing the various creative ideas I have, resuming daily check-ins, reconnecting with communities I just abruptly stopped being a part of circa January when this crisis was beginning to become critical...

...I could be pursuing dreams and making the world a better place through my extremely innovative ideas, my sheer creativity, my passion, my joy, my perspective, my various talents.

Instead I am...not streaming, not recording, not writing, not keeping up, not...doing anything. 

And I wish this wasn’t so depressing. Again, there’s good things happening! We've had lots of fun! There’s been plenty of joy!

...but it does feel like more and more, all that is good in my world is going to die very soon, and leave only the consequences of my inactions to show my worst side, if there’s anything left of me to show at all.

I want to believe love will win, and we'll find a way, as we always do. 

But it hasn’t manifested yet, and I currently don’t see how to. 

Sorry for wasting your time the same way I'm wasting mine.

I will genuinely try to inject some joy into lives as I can tho. Is the one thing I'm even remotely good at. <3