fame++

So the other day I was at the art store looking for a stretched canvas large enough to be hung in front of the part of the closet my projector’s beam covers, which would thus become my Magic Painting (as one does), when I ended up having something happen that made me realize I’ve gone up a notch in Notability.

A woman who works at the store came by and noticed me staring contemplatively at the rolled canvas and frames, trying to calculate how much I’d need and why it comes in different weights and… when she asked if she could help me, I made the rare choice of saying “yes, you can,” because honestly I know I know fuck-all about the ins and outs of most real media after being a CYBER ARTIST for the past sixteen years.

I told her what I was trying to do, she told me I’d probably want the cheapest weight because I wouldn’t be asking it to hold sixty layers of paint or anything, helped figure out the proper size, told me what equipment I’d need to put it together (a staple gun and not much else apparently), and then realized that they don’t even sell pre-made stretcher bars in the length of the longer side of my screen, at which her advice was “maybe just get some 2x4s for the frame”. Which is starting to sound like Serious Work or something.

I thanked her for the advice. Then she asked if I sold stuff at the comics cons. Turned out I’d sold her a copy of Rita 1 at last ECCC, and she loved it. I gave her the proper Twitter accounts to follow. (And hi, if you did follow it and hit the link to this post. I forgot your name already because I am terrible at that, even when I’m not observing 4/20 for the entire week following it…)

I am now at the level of notability where complete strangers recognize me around town every once in a while. And, holy shit. That is kind of the level of fame I aspired to as a young artist groping their way towards the animation industry, way back in the late nineties.

I guess the next level is ‘published nationally in a modest edition, out of print twenty years later, but a cherished book of a select set of people that informed something of who they are’. I guess that’s my new Realistic Career Goal. (Unrealistic Dream Goal is currently ‘Parallax is to Millenials’ kids as Star Wars was to GenX and beyond’. Which I just realized might require producing a Parallax pre/sequel of similar scale a generation later, am I gonna be alive that long, I dunno, we’ll see.)

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