There had been a time when I was throwing back cups of stale coffee at the diner thinking that I would one day become an artist. I mean I had already thought I was one but I what I was imagining was one day being somebody who got paid a good amount to do it. The class of people who worked on art 9-5.

There was something romantic about the notion of a

9-5

artist. I'm not talking about the type of celebrity artists who's work go for millions, but just a person who gets to make a career out of expressing themselves through craft rather than having to do other things like teaching or waiting tables or whatever other occupation society might throw out. Those late nights dreaming at the diner I'd want for nothing else out of life. It was a humble ambition... maybe you couldn't call it ambition at all... maybe it was me settling from the jump... and so maybe... maybe that's why I never made it as an artist.

To not dream big of making great things, but instead to dream of wanting to not have to go to a career job so that I could wake up, jump straight into the art rather than be one of the millions who had to squeeze it in here and there between the different moving parts of life. if I were to go back in time to this version of myself at the diner and tell them what he'd become in a few years I can guarantee that he would be left unhappy. But the thing is I'm incredibly happy with my job. I find myself happier than I ever was back in those days.

It gets me thinking that perhaps I wasn't meant to be an artist after all. Maybe my obsession with becoming one had been more about my allure to the artists themselves rather than an ambition to become one myself.

Within a week of visiting

John Zabka

, I found myself going to that diner twice already. And these were the thoughts that had been swimming in my head as I looked around at the place that had not changed much at all since the days where I spent my nights there. Yet the person experiencing it -- me -- had changed a lot.