It’s 2026. At this point a month and one week into the new year. I’ve been off of social media, instagram, bluesky, tumblr, etc. for about a year now and I only just got back into watching youtube videos a month ago after taking a six month break.
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| a watercolor illustration of Smaug, based on the very weird description of him in The Hobbit. Done as an art exercise prompted by the Shelved by Genre Podcast. |
I mostly did all of this because for the last 6 years I had been working as a full time uber eats delivery driver. Eight hours a day 6 to 7 days a week. It almost killed my car and now it has way too many miles on it. But after six years Uber just closed my account. So, there I was jobless and I couldn’t even retreat to art because my tablet monitor had died around May of 2024. So, all of 2025 I was trying to pay bills and save enough money to buy a new tablet monitor. And it wasn’t working.
Uber eats isn’t a good job to have if you need to save money. It gobbles up everything extra because you have to do maintenance on your car (oil changes, tires, gas) and that’s what kept happening to me. So, all of 2025 had rushed by or most of it, then near my birthday Uber messages me that my account was being deactivated. I had only just read an article talking about people’s accounts all over the country being randomly deactivated and here it was right in front of me, happening to me. Jobless.
I found myself becoming more and more miserable as each day and each week passed and I hadn’t found a new job. I didn’t even know what I was good at other than art, and art has never paid the bills. Here I am in my 40s and having to start over. I had already moved away from all social media because I didn’t want to keep giving those companies my time and my data and not get anything in return. Why don’t we get paid for our data? I let my girlfriend keep me updated on news stuff and texted with my family members.
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| a watercolor done for the TRPL 5 blog/site |
By Mid October I had a new job. Working for a service team that worked for Avis rental cars. I drove the cars to the parking spots so people could just walk up to them and get in and go. A sort of pseudo valet, but you don’t usually see me. It’s a weird job that I had done once before almost 10 years ago exactly. It didn’t pay well, but it gave me time to think about my life, my art, and my future.
I decided since I didn’t have that much time left on earth since I was rapidly approaching 50. Yes, FIFTY. I wanted to just concentrate on animation. But I was mostly going to concentrate on movies. A single narrative movie is a harder thing to do than a series; it takes a lot of focus and understanding how to condense a story into the right beats to not only get from point A to B to point C, but to also entertain and convey a good story to the person watching. It’s hard to not meander, and I’m notorious in my storytelling for doing just that. I guess it’s because I mostly grew up watching serialized television in the 80s and 90s and reading comics and manga that were crafted to keep going with no real ending in sight. The goal for them was to make money, I didn’t know that they were basically taking me through the jungle without a map. I was a kid.
Eventually I worked my way back into drawing on paper and watercoloring again.
I had a hard time there because I realized I had spent a full decade working on that tablet monitor. Working almost exclusively digitally. And it had made it difficult to work otherwise. I had this part of my brain that either only thought in terms of making art with intentionality; as in I’m only drawing to create stories for the world or I couldn’t work analog because it felt too permanent to put pencil to paper. I couldn’t believe I had let myself get to this place. A similar place to where I was within social media. It had made me distant from the other places of the internet. Here we were all concentrated in the few digital spaces, a mall for us all to walk around see and be seen. But, we had all nearly forgotten that we used to make the digital spaces ourselves; we used to have streets laced with digital shops, each one unique and interesting. We used to all make websites and make forums and do all the little things on the internet that made the internet.
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| a watercolor I did for a friend's birthday. |
I’m not saying the old ways were better, but the old ways gave us more room to play in. it gave us more room for innovation. And if I have learned anything about the brutally shrinking consolidation space that is social media it is that innovation isn’t wanted. Not really.
And now, we’re at a decade or more of social media and really… It looks like nothing new , nothing innovative is coming next. Which is a byproduct of the consolidation of everything. But it’s an illusion. We can step outside of those walled gardens and go back out into the wilderness. I know this isn’t anything new and I’m not the first to say it. But I just wanted to keep an abbreviated journal of my journey.
Me reaching out a hand across time and space to a younger me shaking hands and deciding to have fun together.