well well well... its been a little while, i hope everyone is doing well. this time of year can feel like such a bitch what with the cold weather and general feelings of doom and gloom. i've been better but oh well who cares about that! lets talk business!
i almost quit doing kitty cat a few months ago. there wasn't any particular reason at all except for the fact that i had tried to start treating it like a "brand" which just made it feel completely pointless and unfun and uninspired and ... yeah. since then i've been organizing my thoughts and thinking about the reasons why i even do things like this. why should i post things on the internet? what's the deal with selling items to people? who even cares? i don't really know if these are relevant questions. anyways.
i think that any good internet posting requires a sort of suspension of disbelief. like ... if you were to find out that kitty cat skateboards had been a thought experiment by stanford university you would obviously be like no way thats stupid but maybe there's a little part of you that could conceive of that being the case. like if this whole thing was a psyop to influence gay skateboarders to become overly neurotic and emotional. and maybe thats the truth, but i will take that secret with me to the grave.
i don't think that hard about making skateboard art or writing captions on skateboard videos. its more like what sounds or looks cool and what doesn't. i don't mean to say this like "oh this shit is nothing to me im just an instagram gifted child." i literally just like drawing and skating and saying stuff that i think is kind of funny lol. but it's impossible to completely separate your "artistic output" (shitposting) from whatever's going on inside your head. what was i talking about again?
i was at soma skatepark yesterday and got sucked into a conversation with this guy, it began pretty innocuously about how he had seen joe pesci the other day and how big of a deal someone like joe pesci is to average joes like us. it quickly evolved into him telling me and my friend about tripping on dmt and ultimately culminated with a "have you guys ever seen cloud atlas??" that was so comically timed it could have fit into a ... funny video? standup comedy show? maybe. haha. i've never seen cloud atlas but tripping on dmt sounds too scary for me. my friend in high school told me a story about this guy who took dmt and lived an entire life within the trip, like minute for minute until he died. and then when he sobered up after the trip he killed himself cause he didn't wanna live a whole life again.
just like this dude at soma felt like a caricature of guys who are really into psychedelics or weed or another chosen drug of choice (read: kyle mooney in "smoking"), the version of myself that i put online is a caricature of my own thoughts and feelings. no matter how ridiculous something i say is, there's a grain of truth in there somewhere. in real life i'm sort of shy but i know how to talk to people and i'm depressed/maybe have some other sort of thing going on but i can mostly manage. the character of this "girl" that's present in kitty cat imagery and who narrates her thoughts in the comment section is more of a neurotic freaked out antisocial weirdo who just wants love more than anything else in the world. except maybe wanting to feel understood. just like if you rounded out the average of emo girl skaters and created the "most emo girl skater" archetype and let her run the social media page for your brand. its silly but thats kind of why i like doing it. it feels fucking stupid and pretentious to call this an art project but thats the label that fits the best i think.
now, i know wat you're wondering. you are probably thinking 1) when is this bitch going to stfu 2) i wonder what inspires her in regards to audiovisual media such as books and art and music! and you are actually so in luck because i am going to elaborate on that second thought right the eff now. i've never really been into comics But (capital B But) i was super deep into calvin and hobbes and the far side when i was younger. drawings are cool when they are paired with words because if a picture is worth 1000 words then a single comic panel is worth maybe 1023 words or so. (for reference this blog post is at roughly 1250 words at this point so i am actually one upping a single panel comic). reading this stuff made me feel emotions and feelings and i was like this is awesome! and then i never tried seriously drawing until i was like 21. i took a painting class in high school and totally sucked at it and had a bad time. i had this old guy art teacher who was super critical because harsh critique is the sculptors chisel and we were all big marble blocks waiting to be turned into visionary artists in residence. i think the coolest thing i made was an "expressionistic" (jumbled and mushy) drawing of a sunn 0))) concert. the only other time i actually tried hard at making art was making tape covers for my music, which at that point was mostly noise and dungeon synth/dark ambient type stuff because it was really easy to record at home with the stuff i had.
it's really popular to have cool spikey logos on all your gear right now. realtree hat with obituary logo gave way to the phoebe bridgers metal logo t shirt and now here we are. but i actually really like drawing "logos" and that was kind of the first time i felt semi-capable at making art cause it was kind of supposed to look fucked up and bad. i still dont really know much about typography and i dont write graff or anything but making a bunch of letters into a jumbled spiky mess that could be mistaken for a pile of tree branches or a decomposing corpse is super fun and everybody should try it once. i feel like i kinda lucked out and shot myself in the foot with that at the same time. everybody wants a cool shirt with an indecipherable logo on it right? but every time i draw something like that the voices creep in and whisper "you're a poser... you only do this shit cuz its trendy you fuck." and maybe they're right. in 5 years let's all look back at this post and we can see if im still doing this shit cause maybe i'll have moved onto more serious artistic endeavors instead, like realism portraits of basketball players or famous actors.
this takes me by the hand and drags me across the room to my next point. do you see the point im making? is it stabbing at you drawing blood yet? i guess what im trying to say is that . shit im stoned. one sec.
so on the one hand we have caricature, on the other hand we have months worth of missed therapy sessions, and then over here is shitposting. how does this all fit together with skateboarding? i think its because being a girl or gay or trans or really anyone whos not a jock asshole and skateboarding is a classically "emotional" combination. and not emo in the "waller local who wears a cadet hat and dickies" way, but in a way where you love something but you feel like you can't relate to it at the same time. ive had so many times sitting at the skatepark just feeling so sad and questioning if doing this thing is even worth it, feeling weird cause you're the only gay person at the park, hating the way you look in clips, being almost unable to talk to other people who like the same thing as you because you're a nervous wreck. i feel a lot of difficult stuff around this and its gotten so much better cause now i have other people who i can actually relate to that i skate with. kitty cat is about that also, some greeting card find the silver lining crap. like that one song on the first flipper album about how "life is the only thing worth living for." its so tongue in cheek that it starts to feel kinda sincere and sweet. skating is like that too, and so is mental health and art and all this other crap. its really really easy to feel all the negative emotions that are out there and get sucked into hating yourself and just being a massive downer, and its even easier to just hate on everything and act like you're above it cause you're too cool to care. but its even cooler to BE YOURSELF and DO WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY because otherwise you will be MISERABLE!!! and being miserable is so 2024 anyway...
im going to shut up before i write something even cornier than what i just said up there ^ but if you read this far you rock and also maybe you should go and get a clip or get laid or something cause why are you wasting your life reading me talk about my fake internet skateboard company for 1700 words?? anywho see you next time and don't forget to drop a like and comment XD (see that was me being done being sincere and going back into character)
today i was at the corner store and i finally got to pet the cat who lives there (her name is cheetah) and for about 1 minute i was totally happy.
