I looked at my life a few years ago and thought about something. I was sitting at a coffee house thinking about starting a new zine. I was trying to rack my brain trying to figure out what I could personally publish that would be interesting for people to read. I was thinking of the zines that I had read recently. There was nothing that I was reading at the time that really excited me. Most of it was pretty meaning less.
I had read a decent number of zines. I have even published about a half dozen issues. I looked at what other people were writing. I found something incredibly personal in zines. They were a place where people could try to construct some kind of story about their lives. The zines I was reading at the time where unlike any of the other stories I was finding in the rest of the world.
Being 23 years old there was something really empowering about zines. I was right out of college and I seemed to be going nowhere in the world. All of my friends were facing the same situations. We were working at bookstores and restaurants. We were clerks and temps. We spent our time watching clocks and find ways to slack off. Zines seemed to be the best way to work out our artistic frustrations. Using the office copy machine to cut the cost of a zine was a natural thing to do.
I was sitting at this coffee shop and I was not 23 years any more. I was 27 years old and my friends were starting to find their way into careers. They were becoming teachers, designers, and engineers. It was my day off from a dot.com start up. The way my life was happening was slowly sinking in for me.
For most of my life, my friends have been the artist type. Growing up we would tell stories, dream up comic books, and talk about the kinds of movies we wanted to make. We were all writers at heart. As I went through my life, these were always the kinds of people that I became friends with. We were people who dreamt about making our impression on the world. We thought about big ideas and big ways to express them. The problem was that we were becoming regular people.
There is a whole generation of people that are just like me. People that in their heart see themselves as writers and artists, but their job does not reflect that. We are sitting around playing in bands for recreation. We write zines and web sites as an artist outlet. We keep on thinking that someday we will be able to break out and become a true artist.
In this light, writing a zine is Sad Salvation. It is not only our artistic salvation, but it is also salvation because it is what we value most in this world. I am not speaking about everyone. I am just talking about a type of person I seem to be close with. We are not starting families, we are not growing roots in a community, we are not working toward building specific lives for ourselves. I wonder if we will ever find that Salvation we are looking for.
(I have the feeling this needs a re-write)....
Labels: age, comic, sadsalvation, self, story, zine
