Back in junior high and high school, I ended up in a few art classes. Not that I paid much attention. They required only a minimal effort to just barely pass, and that’s all I brought to the table. I just didn’t care.

But there’s a few ways not to care about things like that. Some kids were offended that their brilliant artistic skills were being ignored by the teacher, who of course had a duty to educate all the people in the room, rather than simply lavishing attention on those who were the most talented (those whose parents were convinced they were, anyway). Then there were the kids who were convinced that it was all bullshit, a dodge or a game. This blank canvas is a statement, you know? It’s art — how can you say I did it wrong?

I was one of those who simply couldn’t believe that any of this stuff had much to do with me. I had decided that I certainly wasn’t any kind of artist, and therefore had no real need to retain anything the teacher said after the semester ended. I just wasn’t a creative person. Lacking ideas, I let the mechanics of art slip through my fingers because I thought I would never need them.

I even took a creative writing class (laugh if you want to — I did). Sure, why not? I was doing all right in my English class, why not get an easy mark in what, I figured, would basically be another one. I was reading for fun almost all the time, but the thought of being a writer was horrifying to me. Creating  coherent written material was something I found grueling, at best. I liked school essays and papers, though, because my teachers presented us with a strict set of rules about how to do them. Topic sentence, supporting sentence, reword your sources until you met the page/paragraph minimum, and then wrap it all up and be done with it.

Things got really easy once I learned how to type.

I regret all of that not paying attention, now. It didn’t occur to me, as time went on, that I would change. Over time, a couple of developments occurred that made me reconsider my failure to work at developing any sort of artistic skill.

I admit, it was mostly hormonal. Most teenagers have trouble dealing with the newfound intensity of their emotions, and I was no different. Searching for an outlet, I started taking guitar lessons, and spent most of my weekly sessions talking about my life with my instructor, who was kind enough to realize that, really, I needed a sympathetic ear more than a musical mentor. (I imagine how difficult it must be to be a guitar teacher, when you have to do double duty as some kid’s therapist.)

The lessons lasted about a year, but everyone involved kind of realized that they were going nowhere. I plateaued pretty early on, and I wasn’t doing the work needed to improve. I got what I wanted from physically bashing away, but the subtleties of the instrument were beyond me. Also, the money ran out. I eventually grew up and learned to deal, mostly.

Later in life, two things happened to me that I did not expect.I began to experience the first of a series of sudden realizations that I was getting older, and that we all have a limited amount of time to work with. Everybody has those moments. Eighteen, twenty-five, thirty — you wake up in the night, thinking that time is running out. Some nights, when I misbehaved a little too badly, I was quite sure I was going to die, and had no accomplishments to point at to make myself feel a little better.

The other thing that happened to me was that I began to react to things more than I’d used to. I’d been listening to the news for years, but I had almost nobody I could to talk to about what was going on in the world. I had a lot I wanted to say, and these things stacked up. I felt like I had a pile of smoldering embers in my head that I needed to get out. So I started a website, so I could have a place to dump the stuff in my head.

I soon realized that I just didn’t have the skills necessary to make sense out of what I was thinking. I was grinding my brain into paste, just to produce some 500 words or so. I couldn’t organize my thoughts, and I couldn’t make the words line up in a sensible way. But I couldn’t stop. I kept at it for years. I’m still terrible at it, but at least it’s gotten easier. I’ve written more than a thousand posts, between my various ventures, and some of them are kind of all right. Maybe five or six of them.

The moral of the story is that I should have paid better attention to the mechanical aspects of the craft — any crafts, really. I had mistakenly assumed that artists are full of ideas, all of the time, which is not something that’s true for everybody. The problem was that I assumed I would never have an idea that I needed to express, so I never got good at using the tools. Eventually, when I started feeling a powerful urge to get to work, I went out to the shed to find what might have been alien artifacts, for all I knew about using them.

Well, now I know better. But I am old, and so, so tired.