If I had a day job, I'd keep it.

I don't know why, but I've been having trouble writing lately. It doesn't matter if it's for my own private paper diary, this here blog, paid web-work or just a grocery list. I'm just blocked.

When I was a kid, I loved drawing. "It makes my brain feel good," I'd tell my mother. And it did -- like nothing else ever. Drawing was the only thing that made me feel fully engaged, fully present in the moment. It was good, and I was good at it, the best in my class, except for that one new kid in third grade who drew really good spaceships. But he vanished the following year, so no harm done.

I wonder sometimes if I should have pursued art, gone to school and learned illustration, or just kept drawing until I figured out where it might take me. I think that's why 'personality type' tests depress me -- there's this feeling of inevitability to being a type: I could never have turned out any differently. This is the best of all possible worlds.

The other day, my cousin Molly and I visited the Lucas Arts office complex here in San Francisco (one of Brian's ju-jitsu buddies was doing some freelance work there and generously offered to squire us around). It awakened an odd mix of feelings, mostly frustration. Why didn't I ever think to go in to special effects, I wondered. Why don't I write rip-roaring adventures, the kind that burrow into the popular imagination? What's wrong with me, that I can't seem to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, when I've been grown up for some time now. Where's my freakin' Yoda? And why do I waste my time thinking thoughts like that, when it's the doers that I envy? Wouldn't doing be the best antidote for this paralitic broody melancholy?

So I'm drawing when I can't write. Then, if I feel ready to write all of a sudden, I'm already sitting there, pen in hand.

Anyway. In the meantime here's a picture I drew of our visit. No cameras allowed at Lucas Arts!