there's only so much failure one can take, and when you start out with low self esteem, there's only so much farther down you can go before you just have to focus your attention on something else and give up certain dreams or risk psychological self destruction or death. you can write and write and write until the cows come home (and i don't even own any cows) and that won't make anyone read any of it. hell, it won't even make any of it worth reading. all the product will just get filed away with all the rest, to linger in memories of dreams of publication that need to stop meaning something

thing is, i actually think i can write, when i bother to try (which isn't often enough anymore). but, it doesn't matter cause no matter how much i write, be it in comic form or blog form or prose fiction, i haven't a clue how to convince anyone else to care outside of my wife

it occurs to me, though, that i'm doing something that i've complained about others--notably our government and the scott peterson haters--doing. there isn't actually any evidence that my writing isn't worth anyone's time. the fault is all my own in my lack of ability to "sell" it. but, i don't "sell" it to people, i don't have an audience, so i get to thinking my material must be horrible because otherwise wouldn't an audience magically show up? like, if we can't find evidence of weapons of mass destruction, then we must assume they are hidden, if we can't prove scott peterson didn't do it, we must assume he is still hiding the evidence of his guilt, if i can't prove that there are people out there who might read my stuff if they'd ever even get the chance to read it, then those people must not exist and i must give up completely and devote all my time to what i do best... which, apparently, is watching television and cooking, not a good combination when i've been wanting to lose more weight of late

it doesn't have to be logical to get an obsessive like me to latch onto it and live by it, you know...