(no subject)
I was thinking today about how there are at least four different levels of grief: there's existential grief, where the loss of something changes the fabric of your existence, and that absence is something that defines the path of your life from then on out; there's personal grief, where the connection is personal and intense but eventually you move on; there's situational grief, where reminders of the specific circumstances will make you sad, but it doesn't enter into your life aside from that; and there's tangential grief, where it doesn't affect you directly, but the loss does affect people you do care about, and their unhappiness makes you unhappy. It's roughly analogous to the levels of attachment you'd expect of family, friends, co-workers and strangers if you died.
However, those levels basically only exist for death. They don't really exist for failure or other things that you might mourn in your own personal life. If you were to go to jail, or lose your job or get divorced, the sympathy level becomes a lot more binary: either people care or they don't. They see your suffering as something that matters to them, or they have enough distance to be immune. With those losses it's a lot easier to rationalize not caring; it's a lot easier to say "well, maybe that sucked for them, but it's hard to feel that sad, because they also fucked it up. They kind of deserved it."
The hard part about the death of El Kiablo is that it has occurred more or less in a vacuum. I spent eight years, thousands of man hours, and thousands of dollars building that site, and hoping it would become something. It was, for better or worse, part of my identity. I always get mad whenever people who don't ever sit down to write, or who have never published anything, call themselves "writers" - it seems pretentious to me. It's an indication that someone wants the image of being an artist for ego-reasons, but they don't care about doing the work, and work matters to me. There was a basic level on which I felt like I could describe myself as a cartoonist. I wasn't a professional - far, far from it - but by God, I cartooned. That was a title that I didn't claim in public much, but I earned it.
That part of me has died, more or less, but so far, no one's realized it aside from the people I've told directly, meaning that basically no one was aware that the site was still there and thus in a position to realize that it had gone away. And of the handful of people who did know, I don't think many of them are really saying "oh, yeah, that's sad." I think a lot are basically saying that it's just desserts; that it was crazy for me to spend so much time and energy and money on something so obviously futile, and now that it's dead I feel like the response is basically "I can't believe he didn't quit years ago."
And I get it. It's not that I don't get it. You can be sad that you lost your job and still know that it was you that fucked it up.
When I was younger, I always kind of wanted people to throw me a surprise birthday party, but nobody ever did. Every year I was stuck throwing my own birthday party because if I didn't then it wasn't going to happen. Most years that I did throw a party myself only a small handful of people wanted to come and sometimes it was good but a lot of the time it sucked anyway, with peak suckage happening in 2003 - the year my dad died - when exactly four people remembered to call me (my mom, sister, grandmother, and my sister's friend Dina.) You want to say "aw guys you shouldn't have" while really you feel that they should have, but you can't feel that if they don't. After awhile, you just have to get over it. It's not necessarily anything personal; people are busy, they have their own problems, etc. But that hope that people would care, and be connected to you, and notice you - that's still there, all the time. You just have to shove that hope back into Pandora's box where it belongs, because otherwise it's just too painful.
El Kiablo feels like one of those birthday parties. I wanted somebody to say, hey you're funny, let's discover you, or if I was going to have to do the leg work first, that they would say that sounds fun, let's get on the bandwagon! But instead, it was a bunch of me saying hey guys, look, this is cool! and mostly people being like, yeah, ok, whatever, and then moving on. It was meant to be a party, and it was like a party in that sometimes it was kind of fun, but a lot of it was me feeling self conscious and then ending the night by staring at the ceiling and thinking about how I'm getting older for sure and after I die I'm not going to have amounted to much. (This attitude to parties is probably why my parties aren't widely attended.) There's a part of me that would feel more comfortable about the whole thing if someone was saying "oh, don't quit! You should keep going!" so I could be humble and say, aw shucks, guys, but it sure is a lot of work. But they aren't saying that, and it is a lot of work, so maybe it really is time to pull the plug on the party. And if I'm the only one saddened by that, so be it.