Thursday Threesome: The Three Ridiculous Things That I Wanted to be When I “Grew Up”!

Life is filled with crushing disappointments. As children we have all sorts of unrealistic hopes and aspirations because, at those tender ages, we’re partially educated, gullible, and act like we’re always drunk.

So - seeing as how it’s my turn to invite you (and a friend) into the tousled sheets of the Thursday Threesome - today I’m going to share the three ridiculous things that I aspired to be as a youngster. I will take you on a turbulent journey, backwards through the time stream as we see what I wanted to be as a teenager, a pre-teen and a tubby lil’ toddler.

Come on! It’ll be fun! Hold my hand (both of you) and we’ll go back in time... after the jump!

Did I mention that this is the Terminator style of time travel where you have to be naked. It’s fine. I’ll wait while you disrobe. And no, don’t worry. Everybody vomits their first time.

Okay, Mists of Time! What did I want to be when I was a...

TEENAGER
From about the age of thirteen I desperately wanted to be a comic book artist and writer. Now, I have achieved this multiple times across the years on an independent, small-scale level, but that’s not at all what I wanted as a precocious teen. This was the era where Kevin and Eastman - two regular guys from New Jersey - made a black and white comic about Ninja Turtles in their kitchen and became multi-bazillionaires. By the time I was 16 or so the comic industry was absolutely booming and Marvel and Image Comics were selling in the millions. I wanted the big time! I wanted movies, action figures and cereal.

But the key ridiculousness here is that I 100% believed that being a comic creator was akin to being a rockstar. It never occurred to me that one of the creators of TMNT looked like George Constanza and the other one had a Lionel Richie perm. Or that the Image guys were a bunch of dorks. 

I genuinely thought that the fairer sex would be attracted to my ability to scrawl derivative action heroics on the page. That this fledgling talent would somehow boil over into unbridled lust, even though the majority of the girls at my school didn’t know or care what a comic was. “Brad’s so dreamy! He plays the guitar!” “Oh yeah, but did you know that Luke... draws comics?” SWOOON. And it’s not that the girls at my school were incapable of admiring talent, it’s more that I was too dumb to understand that this had no correlation to anything else. You can respect Einstein as a genius without wanting a moustache rash. This was all even more problematic in my case as the work I was producing was crap. 

And, of course, we now live in a world where sadly fewer people read comics than ever. When even Batman is lucky to sell 100,000 copies you know that your dreams of comics stardom are crushed. And the few people that do succeed spend long hours working alone hunched over a desk - not exactly the rockstar life I’d envisioned. Although indie comics giant Dan Clowes has often suggested that it’s just a matter of image...

PRE-TEEN
This one is similar but more ignorant. I wanted to be an “animator”. A fancy word for a little man, and I did not really comprehend that it was mostly a poorly-paid sweatshop job, drawing the same frigging thing over and over and over and over again. Instead I assumed that I would apply to be some kind of marvelous Walt Disney figure and given my own film and television empire where I would call all the shots. I might knock out a full length feature film one week and embark on a new television series the next. If I whimsically scribbled a cartoon pig on a piece of scrap paper then I was convinced it was an instant rival for Mickey Mouse.

You know, I think the Internet has been particularly efficient at crushing artistic dreams. When you grow up in a small city in the eighties and you’re in a primary school class of 25, you really are the absolute best artist that you know, and thereby the absolute best artist in the world. When you go to high school there are suddenly a 150 people your age and you’re suddenly one of the five best artists. At university all the artists converge and you’re 1 in 100. Now, thanks to the Internet, you can see that there are a million people better than you, and none of them are making any money, and you stay in bed.

Ironically though, advances in technology mean that I could now independently learn Flash, produce some short animations, and share them on youtube. But it’s too much hard work.

TODDLER
I saved the best until last, patient reader. This is by far the most practical of all my dreams and would definitely result in the most easy lifestyle. As a very young child I wanted to be a raccoon.

Now we don’t have raccoons here in Australia so I didn’t associate them with disease-ridden scavengers. My idea of what the life of a raccoon consisted of was entirely derived from a set of Lego Fabuland which led me to believe that raccoons were dapper fellows who owned red motorcycles...

This guy had it made in the shade. He lived in the Fabuland Town Hall and his girlfriend was an extremely attractive orange cat. I could not wait to grow up enough to sprout black fur around my eyes, get on my bike and go. Ironically enough, this is just about as realistic and attainable as my other two aspirations.

Since leaving high school I: had an independent comic printed and distributed in Australian newsagents and comic stores, worked in a fast food restaurant, got an honours degree, wrote/directed/designed independent and professional theatre, was the project manager for an arts festival, and now work in a library. I have never owned a red motorcycle and have no desire to.

What are the stupid things you wanted to be? And what stupid thing have you become?