I'd like to spend my life making art. Don't get too excited, I'm not a terribly talented artist, and I don't really want to be. That's not to say that I don't want to improve, I simply don't want to find myself constantly competing in some market trying to sell my efforts and labor to the world at large.

This isn't a socialist diatribe though, I'm talking about the love for making things. I love making things, indulging in the act of creation to bring something that wouldn't exist otherwise into being.

When I was in high school, I made comics. Little crude ones featuring little cartoon slugs doing various mayhems. I'd show them to my friends and everyone would get a chuckle out of them.

Pride had nothing to do with it, I had something in me and I wanted to share it with friends. And when I found myself out in the world far away from others, it hurt to not be able to share them with anyone.

I don't make stuff as much as I used to. I put my drawings and doodles away to focus on college and never really got back to them. I didn't used to make them for anyone.

At some point it felt like if I wanted to make art, it had to be for someone else. Not just for some capitalist consumption (not a socialist diatribe), but like it's only real if someone else can appreciate it.

I've got a mountain of old doodles in my filing cabinets, and looking through them now and again takes me back to those days when I would just waste time in classrooms drawing strange creatures and making silly comics.

So lately, I've found myself making things again. Not just Warhammer minis, but a lot of little things. I guess this blog might count as one of them. I've been sitting and practicing music a few times a day (I can strum simple patterns and sing at the same time now woot) and it's left me thinking about why I do things.

I think about a few masters of creation that occur to me often, madmen who were obsessed with their crafts. Steve Ditko, Prince, and George Lucas. Can you guess the similarity between them?

Steve Ditko is the artist who came up with Spider-Man (I have a lot of opinions on Stan Lee's place within Marvel's creative process). He himself was a bit of a prick, being a devout Randian Objectivist, and found himself heavily screwed by business managers throughout his life. Ultimately, he secluded himself in an office in New York City and very rarely ever did any public work.

It was said by some of his friends that would come to visit that his office was piled with comics. Comics stacked to the ceiling, constantly working, constantly drawing. He was asked "Steve, who are these for" and he said "Just me."

Prince has a similar story. You've probably heard the stories told by Kevin Smith and others of the vaults of completely produced music and assorted media that Prince kept, not for anyone's consumption but himself. You may have heard that the studios he worked for in the 80s restricted him from releasing albums too often as to not "dilute the brand" much to his frustration.

When George Lucas sold out to Disney, he was asked by an interviewer what he was going to do with the truckload of cash Disney had given him, and he stated that he would make movies. The interviewer asked when we might see them, and he said we wouldn't, the movies would be for him and his friends.

I myself am a bit of an attention whore. I love getting compliments, I love having people tell me how much they like something I did, or made, or whatever. A not insignificant amount of my self esteem often rides on it.

But one of the great goals of my own self actualization is to create for myself, to make something beautiful for just me, and maybe, just maybe, someone who is passing through. I don't know what it would be like to be a person with that kind of confidence.

Except I look over my old doodles from when I was practically a child, things nobody else has seen, and I realize I've been that person before. Maybe we're taught to create for others and be a part of the market as we get older (not a socialist diatribe), but more likely our human need for community and companionship pushes us to share of ourselves with others.

I have a lot of community of people that make me feel wanted and as if I belong, and I'm pretty lucky in that I have a small selection of close friends I can always share with. I find myself more interested in what they think of my work, anyway.

But I think it's important to see myself as part of my community, also. Someone who has needs that I want to attend to, to both create for the sake of it and encourage to create more, like I do for my friends.

It's important to do things for ourselves, I think a big part of self-love is giving ourselves to ourselves. I don't think self-love is necessary to make your way through life, I think happiness can be grasped even by the most self-loathing of us. Though I think that if the ability to love me is within reach, that it's my responsibility to reach out and grab it.

I think there are many terrible forces at work that would like us to stay firmly entrenched in the kingdom of misery to make it easier to sell us something (not a socialist diatribe), and the contrarian part of me wants to adopt my own happiness as a rebuttal.

So I'm not sure what I'll do next, I have wanted to continue my drawing practice, and I'll have time soon when things settle down as the weather cools, recent days have been a constant dance in the sunshine that has been a more than welcome respite from whatever misery I put myself through in past years.

Well, in any case, whatever I do next will be for me.