I'm Only 1 Fucking Guy

There seems to be this strange belief that if somebody is capable of doing several things, then they must somehow have unlimited time, unlimited energy, and six invisible employees hiding behind the curtain. I run Angry Archie, write music, work on the website, create blogs, record videos, develop podcast ideas, engrave artwork, photograph products, list them in the store, answer messages, deal with social media, troubleshoot whatever piece of technology has decided not to cooperate that day, handle problems around the house, and still work a full-time job driving a tow truck. Somehow, when one thing takes longer than expected, people act surprised. Let me clear that up right now: I’m only one fucking guy.

And when I say I work a full-time job, I don’t mean I sit behind a desk for eight predictable hours and then come home at the exact same time every night. I drive a tow truck. My workday depends on where the calls take me, how bad traffic is, what kind of vehicle I’m dealing with, how far it needs to go, and whatever other disaster happens to be waiting on the side of the road. Some days are quiet. Other days, I can spend hours sitting in traffic just trying to finish one call. By the time I get home, there are days when I’ve already spent most of my energy working, but everything I’m trying to build for myself is still sitting there waiting for me.

That’s the part people don’t necessarily see. Angry Archie doesn’t magically operate while I’m at work. The website doesn’t update itself because I’m driving down Route 80. A canvas doesn’t engrave itself while I’m loading a disabled vehicle onto the flatbed. Songs don’t mix themselves, blogs don’t write themselves, products don’t photograph themselves, and social media certainly doesn’t stop moving because I happen to be busy doing the job that currently pays the bills. All of that stuff waits until I have the time to get back to it.

There isn’t a marketing department sitting in another room. There isn’t a shipping team waiting for orders. There isn’t a web developer on payroll fixing every problem while I sleep. There isn’t somebody managing inventory, somebody else editing videos, another person writing product descriptions, and some poor bastard in customer service answering messages. Every one of those imaginary employees is me.

When the website breaks, I’m the one trying to figure out why. That can mean spending hours reading instructions, talking to customer service, changing settings, testing things, and trying to understand why something that should be simple suddenly isn’t. Sometimes I’ll sit down intending to spend an hour adding products to the store, and four hours later I’m still trying to solve a shipping problem, fix a page layout, or figure out why some setting buried three menus deep is preventing something from working correctly.

When a canvas doesn’t engrave correctly, I’m the one repainting it, testing new settings, adjusting the laser, and starting over. The finished piece somebody eventually sees might look like it came out perfectly the first time, but they didn’t see the test pieces that went into the garbage. They didn’t see me standing there staring at something that came out too dark, too light, burned through, or just looked like shit and deciding whether I could fix it or had to start from scratch. Creating one finished product can sometimes mean ruining two others while figuring out how to make the third one right.

Music works the same way. When a song doesn’t sound right, I’m the one listening to twenty different versions until every word starts sounding like complete nonsense. I’ll change something, listen again, decide I liked the previous version better, change it back, hear another problem, and start screwing with that instead. Eventually, you reach a point where you’ve heard the same song so many times that you don’t even know whether it sounds good anymore. Then, somehow, another song idea pops into my head while I’m still trying to finish the one in front of me.

The blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media all have their own versions of the same problem. An idea might take five minutes to come up with, but turning that idea into something people can actually watch, read, or listen to can take hours. A video has to be recorded and edited. A blog has to be written, cleaned up, formatted, and posted. A podcast idea has to become an actual conversation or episode. A product needs to be created before I can photograph it, and then those photographs need to become a listing before anybody can actually buy the damn thing.

That doesn’t mean I’m complaining about creating. I love building things. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t keep doing all of this. There’s something satisfying about starting with absolutely nothing except an idea in my head and eventually being able to look at something real that exists because I made it. It could be a song, a horror engraving, a piece of artwork, a podcast, a video, a story from the tow truck, or an entire website. They’re completely different things, but the part I enjoy is the same: taking an idea and turning it into something that wasn’t there before.

The problem is that ideas come faster than time. My brain can invent ten new projects while my hands are still trying to finish the first one. I’ll be working on the website and suddenly think of an engraving I want to make. While I’m thinking about the engraving, I’ll get an idea for a video. While I’m planning the video, I’ll remember something that happened in the tow truck that would make a good blog. Before I know it, one project has somehow become six projects, and there are still only twenty-four hours in the day.

That’s where the frustration comes from. It’s not a lack of ambition or a lack of ideas. It’s the exact opposite. I want to do all of it, and I want all of it done properly. I don’t like throwing something together just so I can say it’s finished. If I’m engraving something, I want it to look right. If I’m putting together a website, I want it to actually work. If I’m releasing music, I want to be happy with it. If I’m writing something, I want it to sound like me instead of something copied out of a generic marketing handbook.

Unfortunately, wanting something done properly usually means it takes longer. I can obsess over details that somebody else might never even notice because I notice them. Sometimes that’s useful because it pushes me to make something better. Other times, it means I spend an hour screwing around with something that probably looked perfectly fine forty-five minutes earlier. That’s part of the battle I’m constantly having with myself: figuring out when something genuinely needs more work and when I need to leave the damn thing alone and move on to the next job.

People mostly see the finished result. They see a product appear in the store, a new song posted online, a new piece of artwork, a blog on the website, or some feature suddenly working. They don’t see the hours spent fixing some stupid technical problem that should have taken five minutes. They don’t see the failed engravings, the discarded song versions, the photographs I didn’t like, the rewritten descriptions, or the nights when I’m sitting at the computer wondering why something that worked perfectly yesterday suddenly decided to shit the bed today.

They also don’t see all the projects that are sitting half-finished because something more important jumped in front of them. Sometimes the website needs attention. Sometimes an order needs to be handled. Sometimes something around the house needs to be fixed. Sometimes work turns into a long day and whatever I planned to accomplish that night simply isn’t happening. And sometimes, believe it or not, I need to sit down and do absolutely nothing for a while because I’m still a human being and not an industrial machine.

So if something takes a little longer, understand that it hasn’t necessarily been forgotten. It’s probably sitting in a line behind fifteen other things that also need attention. There is always another idea, another project, another problem to solve, another product I want to make, another story I want to tell, and another thing I want to improve.

Angry Archie isn’t a corporation. Angry Archie Art isn’t a factory. There isn’t some giant operation hiding behind the website. It’s one guy building something piece by piece, learning as he goes, making mistakes, fixing them, changing direction when something doesn’t work, and moving forward anyway.

Will everything happen as quickly as I want it to? Probably not. Half the time, I’m the person most aggravated that it isn’t moving faster. But I’d rather keep building it myself than sit around waiting for the perfect circumstances, the perfect amount of money, the perfect equipment, or the perfect moment when I suddenly have unlimited free time.

That moment probably isn’t coming.

So I’ll keep doing it the way I’ve been doing it: one song, one canvas, one video, one blog, one product, one problem, and one idea at a time. It may not always happen quickly, and it definitely won’t always happen smoothly, but when something finally gets finished, I know exactly what went into it.

It’s real, and I built the damn thing myself.