may 18, early...
And just like that- I'm done. Finished. Unemployed.
Raising my head from the burden that has been mine to bear, I see them in the street, the still employed... the exhausted security guard, trying to stay awake til the end of his shift... a squad of rice paddy workers on bicycles, wrapped up in scarves and straw hats on their way to a long day of hard toil in hot sun..the various vendors offering bright smiles to dazed looking tourists..the tuktuk driver, bored to a glassy stare even at this early hour..he likely slept in the gondola, his shower a jug of water over his head, his breakfast a bowl of noodles on the street... the motorcycles sputter and hiss and roar, sullen faces off to work on a day like any other, world without end...
Meanwhile, I have drawn my last fuzzy bunny for this year...its kind of a shock of realisation, since nothing is so different... now of course, my work and my lifestyle are extraordinary, I'm aware of that.
Globe-trotting with a laptop, drawing cartoons, single and unencumbered by the burdens of home hearth and honey, living this way for years with no desire for it to stop..But you finish a show, or to be more specific, your contribution to a show- (nobody makes a whole cartoon themself, unless they are masochistic monomaniacs) and you think... well, NOW what?
Mosquitoes circle my shoulder bag on the chair beside me- I have learned that they love dark holes to take cover in, and every time I grab the bag a small cloud of them rises...any one of them could be the beast that kills me, or I could put a drunken foot wrong crossing the street tonight and wind up a tangled string of dirty meat under the wheels of some vehicle... a thousand thousand ways to die, every day, so suddenly stopping work, another mission accomplished, it has a kind of resonance, whether you drive a hack, hawk wares to the tourists, or keep little kids amused for 22 minutes at a stretch with your funny pictures.
Its been nearly a year since I started this show...just a trickle of freelance oddjobs at first, then a downpour, then a relentless torrent of work that never seemed to go away, day after day, shift after shift, and while drawing is my greatest joy, drawing at the whim of others can be just as tedious a grind as any other job, at times.
Then it stops.