Bison Crossing

This will probably be the last painting I do for the foreseeable future. It’s been the most difficult picture for me to get through in all my years of painting and illustrating not just because it was technically difficult but because of everything that has happened in my life while working on it. I came close one day not long ago to just deleting it completely because I couldn’t bear working on it or looking at it. I persisted, and I don’t really know why. I’d planned and documented my progress on the painting, my sketches that looked nothing like the final work, my process of getting a new graphics tablet, and I intended to write about all of that. None of that seems to matter now.

I use these complex and detailed paintings as a form of therapy, essentially. I use them to relax late in the evenings usually before bed. Sometimes I’ll work longer on them than I should because of stress or whatever is going on, but it simply doesn’t work anymore. My country is falling apart around me; my neighbors are enthusiastically cheering it on; and when I look at Mastodon or whatever else I am faced with nothing but snide remarks about it and hatred. I lost my job yet again. The company I worked for has gone bankrupt. I am being offered a life raft to the parent company, but it’s really uncertain as to how things will work out. I am thankful for at least that, but because of the way the economy is being manipulated by an orange ulcer the job seems tenuous at best. Lastly, my personal life is in shambles. My girlfriend of many years severed all communication with me quite suddenly and with no warning, and it has left me in a melancholy so severe that I can’t effectively describe it. It also put me understandably in a pensive mood.

I obtained my most recent job the same way I always have gotten a job: because I knew someone on the inside. No one at the company wanted to hire me for the position because of my resumé and likely also because of where I live. That’s always been a problem. There was an internal struggle at the company to hire me, and my eventual boss advocated heavily for me. He had only one team member at the time who built the dashboards in Tableau, and he had to work around the clock to manage everything else. I don’t blame anyone at the company for not wanting to invest in me. I was then working as a graphic designer for $17.50 an hour. Yes, you read that correctly. I was nearly broke. I branched out into doing automation work for the company I was then working for, and that caught his attention. I was hired as a data engineer managing Snowflake, AWS, and eventually also Google Cloud environments because of Google vendor lock-in on Google Analytics 4 providing reporting throughout the company. It was also my job to figure out how to retrieve any data the company needed for internal reporting, and for that I wrote a custom ETL tool in PHP to connect to many API‌s and retrieve data necessary mostly for marketing-related reporting. We also handled automation tasks for many teams throughout the company. Later, we expanded to provide reporting for 6 other sister companies, all maintained by just three people with almost no budget and none of us having a data engineering or computer science degree at all. We were overworked and definitely underpaid for our work. The one who hired me since left the company. There were internal struggles at the parent company to take my Tableau developer colleague and I on as well despite our excellent performance at the job by almost any measure. The people who did endorse us really wanted us, though, and for that I am grateful. But, as I said due to economic factors it doesn’t seem as if my tenure will be long. My current mood notwithstanding, I am still hoping for the best there. You have to or you will go crazy.

I’m 41 years old, nearing 42. I’ve restarted my career multiple times in my adult life. I’ve been a graphic designer, an illustrator, a web designer, a web developer, and lastly now a data engineer. I’ve gotten too close to being bankrupt twice in my life so far. What’s happening right now will likely be the 4th recession in my adult life, and if allowed to continue the way it is going it will likely be the worst. My father was born during the Great Depression, and my mother was born technically afterwards but the war boom never hit where they lived. I grew up listening to horror stories about what they went through to survive. I might have to live through a repeat myself. If my job doesn’t work out I don’t know if I have it in me to try to rebuild my life again. It doesn’t seem worth it. No one has really wanted to hire me for well over a decade anyway. The older I get the more my life experiences make me more cynical about things because I have come to expect the next pitch thrown my way to be a curve ball — the next setback, the next failure.

This isn’t the kind of post that I usually accompany a painting with, but it is forever what I will think about when I do look at it. I know that everyone has their own problems. Many have problems much worse than mine. Nevertheless, all of my problems would be much easier to deal with if she were here.