Now we're in Nara, where this guy had hid his deer biscuits in his backpack. A tactical way to give a deer a little smooch.

I put everything into art. I have done okay with it. Art is immensely rewarding in that I can make people smile with seemingly little effort. When I draw something, people think it's magic. They will exclaim, “It would take me an entire day to draw what you did in five minutes!” Or they will say they can't even draw a stick figure, let alone a straight line.

It's not magic. It's just years upon years of drawing, observing, then drawing some more. Every picture I create isn't effortless. Even if it only takes ten minutes to whip something up, it still drains my batteries. I have an upper limit to my daily art output, and it's surprisingly small.

It's worse these days. I've been dealing with severe art block, and digging deep inside my emotions, I think I'm actually afraid of creating art now. There's no single reason for why I feel this way. The world feels like a fundamentally different place, and I've changed as well—not for the better.

I'm wondering what role or purpose art is going to serve in the future. Art theft is now occurring on a mass scale, fully automated, with no current legal recourse to combat it. It's being pushed by a group of total bastards who claim this tech will help artists if they would only jump on the bandwagon, but who then show their true feelings about artists once you say, “No thanks.”

There is no backup for me. I wasn't a stellar math student, nor did I pay much attention in my programming classes. It wasn't like I detested or feared those subjects; I felt I didn't need them. I was an artist!

But now it's eating at me. I can't stop thinking about how stupid I am. I cried in bed this morning. My spouse thought there was something really wrong with me, but it was just because I was freaking out over not knowing Calculus. How sad is that?

I'm reluctant to make any bold goal-setting announcement of conquering this deficiency. I'm poking around with Rust, a decidedly noob-unfriendly programming language because I'm stupid and I figured all of it is going to be difficult for my tiny sergal brain to understand anyway, so why not shoot for Mars, but it's not written in the stars that I will learn much of anything to be useful. I don't think I will get all that far anyway without a solid background in math, so what am I even doing here?

Maybe none of it matters. We all get a limited time to learn a few things, and then it's over. There's nothing wrong with that. It's how life goes. Still, I feel shame, sadness, and fear in the face of a confusing technological future that I have no control over. I look at mathematicians and programmers do their own magic, and wonder how they do what they do, even when it's just silly little CSS tricks in cohost posts. I wish I had another lifetime or two to learn everything I really want to learn.