ocean boulevard | 5sos | michael clifford

xi.

[chapter dedication: @klname | thank you for the wonderful cover!]

chapter eleven.

The thing about aspiring to be a comic book artist-cum-writer is that you are constantly learning new things about the world and about yourself. People get bored of hackneyed plotlines and the same sun-dried, roasted character dimensions, so you have to be on your feet if you want to get juice from a barren fruit tree. That's how you stand out, how you appeal to people. You roll your sleeves up, buckle your teeth, and get to work. Research, research, research. Be innovative, not just creative, but Google-worthy creative. Don't just think out of the box; make the goddamn box a Möbius strip and find a way out of it. That's how it's done, or at least the principle I've been living by since I was a kid. Picture a mouse of an eight-year-old with too many crayons for her own good scribbling on sketchbooks to illustrate tales of "fiery dragons" and "pretty princesses" saved by "brave knights". I epitomized cliché when I was a child. Then my mom brought me to the library one day to pick up some cookbooks and I chanced upon H.P. Lovecraft and that was that; weird fiction left a pungent, half-decomposed aftertaste in my mouth and I hated the oddly-tinted writing premise of the entire genre, but still I kept begging for more, and my imagination grew with every tale. Which is why I guess it's no surprise that by the time I turned fifteen, I'd figured out how to staple my fingers to the pages of encyclopedias and non-fiction books (figuratively, of course), all of which I'd used to avoid as best as I could. (Because, let's face it: How appealing were facts to us as children? Einstein's Theory of General Relativity? I have a migraine already. What the hell are !Kung Bushmen? Molecular genetics? I'll unzip your pants if you're hot, not your double helix, or whatever.)

The most research I'd ever done was when I was working on a story arc for Battle Royale – which, by the way, is a manga series adapted from the original novel of the same name, and is pretty much a more brutal, twisted, savage, and therefore mega awesome version of the Hunger Games, published years before. I'd been questioning the ethics of the entire kill-or-be-killed concept, because come on, having to decide between selling your mortality and selling your morality is pretty sticky a dilemma.

So there I was, doing some major Internet-surfing (basically the only form of exercise I've ever gotten in the whole of my existence) and suddenly I thought, hey, what would happen if I added religion to the arena? Since Christianity was too personal for my comfort, I settled on the next religion I could think of: Buddhism.

Now the interesting thing about Buddhism is that it's a nontheistic religion, which pretty much means that they don't believe in a One-Above-All God. You see, the core of the religion is based on a set of radical beliefs, and it started off like this:

There was once a prince in India named Siddhartha Gautama. He was born into a life of luxury, his father being the King. Siddhartha's mother died a week after giving birth to him, and to keep his son from witnessing the darkness of Man and the injustice of the world, Siddhartha's father ordered a palace to be built just for his son, and kept him from finding out about religion and hardship. When he was older, however, he left the palace for the first time and came across an old man, a sick man and a rotting corpse. This was all new to his eyes and he was completely shocked, but also disillusioned, for he now understood the brutal inevitably of age, illness and death.

Yet, Siddhartha had also seen a man who, though homeless, seemed to be at peace; inspired by his contentment, Siddhartha left the palace for good in pursuit of understanding the doubts he had. He spent the next six years of his life following the rules of extreme asceticism, decided that that wasn't going to help him get the answers he sought, and derived a Middle Way – a balance between a life of luxury and poverty. It was around this time that he finally achieved Enlightenment, as he sat under what is referred to as the Bodhi Tree (the Tree of Awakening) in deep meditation. He became the Buddha.