Too Stupid to Quit.

I am an exceptionally stubborn man.

Sicario, which is still very much a work in progress, is a story I have worked on for years. My best friend and I came up with the idea back in high school. I had just been cheated on by my girlfriend and he was finally ending a short lived but very toxic relationship of his own. We were newly liberated singles out to make villains of our exes. He and I drafted G-Brothers, a title that to this day I haven’t the slightest idea what it meant but it would be our first foray into creating a comic book. At its core, the story centered around our fictional personas and took on several versions, with some being funny and others carrying a much more serious tone. We added characters, mainly girls we liked and as it progressed from its laughable beginning, I grew to like my little characters.

Then my best friend decides to up and die. Cunt.

I was left with these tiny people in my head who could steal away my thoughts and lead me down the broken paths of their sordid little world. They grew beside me, maturing into three-dimensional characters with their own strengths and weaknesses. I was always working on them, even when I didn’t write a word. This cast of five characters became my darlings. Developing their life story, figuring out the nuances of their personalities and trying to pin down what motivates them has been a deeply rewarding process and I’m proud of how far they’ve come.

I’ve often said, I’m just too stupid to know when to quit. It’s the truth. When presented with a circumstance in which any other rational human being would throw their arms up in the air in sensible surrender, I simply squint my eyes, grit my teeth and attack it from a different angle. Obstacles are an affront to my sovereignty. That’s a highly arrogant statement but it is one I believe. Had I not this single-minded, dogged determination to trample all opposition underfoot, I would have abandoned my dream of becoming an author long ago but I cannot forsake my darlings.

I often wonder if this resolve is actually helping or hurting.

One could argue that I’m beating a dead horse. That I should cut my losses and take whatever sliver of dignity I have left to my grave and call it a lie lived well enough. Even if I finished their story, there is no guarantee those tiny people tumbling around my head will be read by anyone. Maybe this is as far as I get. Perhaps that grand divide is too wide. It could be insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome.

But my sovereignty.

Read me out here because this might be as beneficial to you as it is to me. I say, fight on. Fight because, at the end of it all, you are going to die. And all those people whose life you’ve touched, they will also die. And there will come a day when the fact that you existed at all will be ground up in the endless churning of time. Fight on and take solace in the fact that one day the sun’s corona will consume the Earth in fire and its gravity will rip each atom in two. Understand that the universe is tumbling toward entropy and all which it contained throughout the ages will dissipate into cold nothingness.

I’ll end with this.

There are no alternatives for me. I must continue. If I can beat down that wall, my pigheaded obstinacy was a blessing of a sickly mind. If I cannot, then it will have been a curse. I look forward to the challenge and patiently await the day when I will know which it was.