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30 June 2005: I'm still in my null zone, so this entry will be at what I consider my cocktail party level. Not quite bullshit, but not profound or original--and sometimes pretty naive. Probably also a rerun of thoughts from previous entries. The topic is why some artists seem to find a niche early in their careers, and stay in it. I think often of Charles Schultz, the cartoonist. I loved his early work, but tired of his daily strip after a few years. He dropped a few characters, including my favorite, Shroeder, and added a few I didn't care all that much for, particularly Snoopy's little bird friend. He did push out into the animated cartoon, and he tried his hand at a strip with teen-agers that didn't get off the ground. It seems apparent that he knew his limits and stayed within them. Nothing wrong with that, but something I apparently could never do.
I wanted to be a cartoonist more than anything else, I think. In my late teens and twenties, I sent out a few one-panel cartoons to magazines, and tried my hand a four-panel strips I never sent anywhere. I made birthday cards, too, that I couldn't sell to Hallmark. I eventually made three or four comic books, one of which I tried to get published in San Francisco by the people putting out underground comix there at the time that Robert Crumb's stuff was in. Perhaps if I'd had commercial success with any of this, I'd never have done anything else. I doubt that. Gary Larson and Bill Watterson both retired early. Larson did at least one fairly sophisticated children's book afterwards. I don't know what Watterson has done. I'd love it if he found a way to make a full length novel about Calvin and his tiger. I think I would have quit after ten or fifteen years, and used my name to do a feature-length animated cartoon. I know from having written ten or more full-length plays that I could have done this. After that, who knows? I'm pretty sure poetry would have played an important role in both my comic strip and my animated cartoons. I would have done visual poetry, too, but whether I would have pushed that to the lengths I have, I'm not sure. Probably not.
I can't see how I would not have developed the theory of psychology I have. I have an insatiable need to understand existence, which means understanding the largest thing in my own existence, Me. I'd almost certainly have been the dilettante I've become in all the other subjects I have, too--like political science, economics, music, history, archaeology, and so forth. As I've said before, I think nothing could have prevented me from scattering my energies, and that would have prevented me from bigtime success in any particular field. Considering how over-extended I am without ever having had any bigWorld success, that's probably a blessing. It's quite possible that kind of success would have been too much for me. I completely don't believe I've consciously or unconsciously tried to avoid such a success, though. I've simply followed the destiny laid out for me by my genes. My good genes, that is. When they've been able to outshout my bad genes, as they haven't lately been able to do, possibly because they've kicked the bucket.
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