2005-11-15 � Crimped

Decompression

You know how when you're working on a BIG project and you've been working on it since dinosaurs roamed the Earth and then there is a big push at the end where you work on nothing else for like 32 days straight or something... and you know how the pressure just mounts and mounts to get it DONE already until you feel less like a human being and more like Mount Vesuvius, roiling lava and all... And you know how as you are toiling away, churning out the illos, (and consuming far too much coffee which wakes you with the "jimmy legs" at 3:30 on the dot every a.m. and you cannot get back to sleep no matter how exhausted you are because all you can think about is the project that won't finish itself no matter how much you wish it would do just that) and all you think about as you are toiling, toiling, toiling is how good it will feel to finally be done?... How you are certain the moment it is FINISHED and you send it off to the printer, that clouds will part and the sun will shine and little birds will deliver you champagne in crystal flutes and stuff decadent chocolate truffles down your gullet and you will feel immediately cleansed and relaxed as if you'd been soaked like a tea bag in transformative oils and massaged with hot stones and stepped on by geishas?

You know how you are certain the last part will absolutely be true in spite of the fact that you have counselled fellow illustrators thru the "post-partum" depression that always, without fail, arrives the moment a project like this is finally finished dozens and dozens of times in the monastic voice of She Who Speaks From Experience, cautioning them repeatedly not to give rise to the expectation that once the project is delivered, life will be perfect and joyous and stuff?

Yeah. Um... well, yeah. So, here i sit, having birthed a big 'un, and I'm feeling all puzzled because I still feel completely knotted and crimped, like Wile. E. Coyote after being "accordioned to the ground" (phrase borrowed from my gifted friend, K.) by an enormous ACME anvil.

Slowly, though, my vertabrae are beginning to decompress. Slowly my blood pressure is dipping toward normal. Slowly the colour is returning to my white knuckles and I'm able to let go.

But it's never as easy as I imagine it will be, want it to be.

Regular programming will resume around here shortly. It really, really will. but right now, the thought of trying to transcribe all the the things that occurred to me during the Great Blogging Absence of 2005 just exhausts me and makes my lower lip all wobbly. Time to refill the well.


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