Polished Scrawl Productions: The Blog

While toweling off today, I bent down to dry my shins and promptly proceeded to whack the top of my head directly into the corner of the bathroom counter. Some blood was drawn, and there was much profanity.

It wasn’t actually all that bad. Just really painful for a little bit. The worst part about the whole thing was that I did not, immediately thereafter, sit down and invent the flux capacitor.

Dangit.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death Saturday afternoon television, and Hell followed with him.

- Revelation 6:8…ish

Or any daytime/afternoon TV for that matter. Admittedly, I usually have the TV on in a background noise capacity, but for the past couple weeks I have been forced to confront this scourge head on - - applied directly to my forehead! - - as I have been unable to buffer myself with work, due to the unfortunate absence of young Penfold.

A very wise man once wrote:

“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”

- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul. This is where I am, at present, firmly ensconced. One could posit that when I once again have a fully-functional computer, that I might be able to watch the hands move to five, maybe even six o’clock, knowing that more entertaining and enlightening hours are shortly to arrive. Truth be told, though: it’s been teatime for a long time. I know that until I can find a job with other real, live Homo sapiens sapiens (or, heck, even Homo sapiens superior; I have no mutant bias), that it will more than likely continue to remain time for NBC Sports coverage of the Professional Bull Riding 2007 “Built Ford Tough” Series, Presented by Wrangler.

Time to play catch-up:

Employee-ment

I have come to the conclusion that I would really enjoy having a steady paycheck and maybe some health insurance, which my freelance design venture has, ultimately, failed to provide. With that in mind, I have begun the search for a real-life, capital-J Job. Now, I know… I’ve been down this road before, with mixed results. This time, however, I am limiting my search to actual established businesses, so I’m thinking things might work out a little better this go-around. So, if you happen to be a nice, respectable establishment in need of a full-time graphic designer, I invite you to look in my direction for an uncluttered view of yourself making a wise, Samuel Adams-caliber, hiring decision.

Happy Hollandaise

The Season (or “The Sizzy,” as the kids [probably don’t] call it) has come and gone, and has left me with an actual, lingering sensation of having eaten too much. Which I did. On numerous occasions. I am speaking, though, in a more metaphorical sense. I speak of a fullness of spirit, of family, and of life. I speak, also, of a fullness of presents, for I cleaned up like a villain this year. I am ripe with sweaters and DVDs. The might of my accumulated swag emits an odor–nay, a pheromone–of awesomeness, and attracts small planetoids into its graviton well.

New Year’s Eve was high on the Scale of Excellence as well, pictorial evidence of which can be found here. It was nice to put 2006 to bed, and begin to get to know its replacement, who has the potential to be everything the predecessors weren’t.

Holy Macanoly… it appears that I have been quite neglectful of my little blog. Well, no longer!

My oh my oh my… what has happened since last we met? I suppose the largest slab of news is that I have finally arrived at a date for my return to the Land of Corn, The Northern Realm of Iowa. In just under two weeks (June 23rd) I will be leaving Dallas and pointing myself north. My experiment in self-employment has proved itself a general success, and will, in the end, I believe, afford me the ability to maintain myself in a manner befitting a human being.

While I am excited about the move back home, I also realize the truth that it will involve leaving behind a few very important elements here in Dallas, without which my daily routine will seem… skewed, if only slightly. There will be an adjustment period… to be sure. After spending three years in the trenches, those with whom you fought along side with become irreplaceable. I have been lucky in my life to aquire surrogate family members along the way, and I will leave here with a sister I didn’t have three years ago. After everything is said and done from all this, that will be the greatest result. So, gone is certainly not forgotten, and this World of Tomorrow, with its phones and emails and Internet(s), will keep it that way.

I am looking forward to being back home. I am looking forward to the feeling of relaxation that I hope I will find there. I am looking forward to actual seasons; storms, Fall, snow, and breezes. I am looking forward to smiling faces that don’t conceal hidden intents. I am looking forward to not having to spend my nearly every waking moment concerned with bills and money. I am looking forward to seeing the big white “Welcome to Iowa” sign as I cross the border from Missouri, and knowing that I’m there to stay. I am looking forward to breathing deeply. I am looking forward to knowing where I am, and where I fit. I am looking forward to increased simplicity, in all things. I am looking forward to being back home.

I went to see A Prairie Home Companion with Mere and Ivan last night, the radio version of which I am an unapologetic fan. The movie version is awesome as well. Simple messages are, invariably, the best. All things must end. All things will, in time. Enjoy them while you can, learn what you are able to, and take the memories with you when you go.

I have, I did, and I will.

Make ye ready, Iowa. I will be among you soon.

My AC seems to not want to do it’s job… It runs constantly, and yet produces the same result as if I had somebody blowling gently onto me through a sock. Which is to say, no result at all except the continuation of my apartment being annoyingly muggy and warm. I went and told the folks at the office about it today, and supposedly somebody’s coming tomorrow to fix it. I surely hope so. The alternative is to open up my front door, and the sliding glass door to my balcony and get a cross-breeze going through, which is all well and good until giant Texas-sized wasps come hovering around and get themselves stuck between the panes of glass in the sliding door. My only recourse, then, is to spray an ungodly amount of multi-purpose cleanser into the space in an attempt to kill it by a.) drowning or b.) inducing brain damage via cleanser fumes.

I eventually lost track of it, so I’m assuming he found his way out and droned on his way to another gig of being a wasp and, therefore, an evil blight on the world. That’s what I choose to believe… I do not choose to believe that, in closing the sliding door, I enabled his escape into the confines of my shoebox of an apartment, and that I will find him later on, hovering around my bathroom sink, or circling ’round my bed just as I have snuggled myself in for what I thought was to be a pleasant, terror-free sleep.

P.S. First Choice Studios is now live and in glorious color! Mostly blue. This is the site I made for Stan, so he can sell more design work for me to do… soon to be seen by Hollywood big-wigs… or, their marketing departments at least, who also, I assume, are sporting rather large wigs themselves.

Well kids, it’s that time on the show where all the various elements in my life are currently spinning, amorphously out in the middle of space, and all I can do is wait until they align their heat-tile-covered underbellies back towards Earth, begin their decent, and cross my fingers they don’t burn up on re-entry. It’s like that feeling you get when you drive over a steep hill too quickly, and your stomach and your… “undercarriage”… find their way northward and make friends with your spleen. Only it’s all the time, so it loses its luster pretty quickly, and you might think twice next time about begging the bus driver to hit the gas as he goes under that poorly-surveyed underpass on your way home from school.

It amounts to this: on Monday, Stan will be flying to Los Angeles with Jean Marc (see previous posts for background info on these two gentlemen), and they’ll be meeting with people from The Weinstein Company in L.A. to discuss the possibility of us doing design work for them…

This is what we like to call a VERY BIG DEAL.

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a web site for Stan, so that he’ll have a portfolio of sorts to use as a marketing tool for this, and future business opportunities. If he can work his salesman magic, they could turn out to be the ultimate “backbone” client; something that could ensure the success of my whole freelance idea, and all points thereafter.

But, again, I won’t find anything out for another few days, and in the meantime am left to fidget, tap pencils rapidly upon objects, bounce my knees in a succession of staccato patterns, and wonder why I only get voicemail…

More to come on or around Tuesday… Stay tuned.

Oh, money. You are a wicked, and vile mistress. And yet, what would I ever do without you? Oh, wait… that’s right. I am already all too familiar with the answer to that question. The reason I bring this up is that my rent is due tomorrow… or “tomorrow” if you like (they have a bit of a grace period). But, “Hark! Hark!” harkened I… tomorrow is also when I am supposedly going to get my first big fat deposit for my work for the French. So, assuming everything goes the way it’s supposed to tomorrow, I’ll be dandy. Bob will be my uncle and whatnot. Even though my uncles are named Fred and Larry… Bob will somehow sneak in there for the time being.

In other news, it’s Fat Tuesday! So… “Heureux Mardi Gras, mes amis!” To celebrate, I am currently on my… 5th Newcastle… so I do apologize for any typos or incoherence you may happen upon during the reading of this post. One of these days, I figure me and whoever wants to go with me, will have to make our way to N’aw’l'ans for the festivities. Kinda’ one fo those things it seems like a person should do at least once… like going to Vegas. Speaking of which, we should all go to Vegas sometime…

Good gravy… how long have I been typing this? Mostly, I’ve been trying to find Zydeco music clips to link to… but they all want me to pay money in order to access them. Aaaand… we come back around to where we started.

I hate nights like this. One of those nights when my mind won’t shut up and let me sleep. Thinking about everything and nothing at the same time… rapid-fire thoughts, one leading into another, without so much as a pause or a chance to bring any one of them to a conclusion. Snippets of songs, random thoughts, images, nonsense… all on a loop in my mind. As if my subconcious is deliberately trying to keep me awake. As if it knows that if I sleep, I’ll miss something important. As if I should be doing something constructive, or at least something that will help ensure… something… everything… Hell if I know.

I guess I worry that I don’t do enough. That there’s always something more I could do or say… that I could make everything fine if I’d just do this or that, and that the one little thing I’ve overlooked is ultimately going to prove to be what brings it all crashing down…

I hate the fact that it’s dark. Everything feels too small when it’s dark… too enclosed and limited. Things are so much more active during the day. Things are possible when it’s light out. Things can be taken care of or fixed. At night, the world stops, and all you can do is wait for morning… and think. And when the thinking finally stops, sleep…

Which, now that I’ve been typing and re-typing for an hour or so… sleep sounds like a better, and more attainable, idea. Morning will get here soon enough, I suppose.

Tomorrow begins my first full week of self-employment. I am currently sitting at my trusty drafting table, typing on my “new” (as of August of last year) Tablet PC… old meets new, and all that jazz. I’ve cleared a good majority of the debris off the desk and moved the internet connection over, in an attempt to create some sort of “office” for myself.

What you are looking at, by the way, is a good full 1/3 of my entire living room. I live in a space classified in some circles as a “cubicle.”

At any rate, it’s cool to have my office in my home. Now I just need to get my home moved, which I hope to be doing in the very near future. Things still look good for me getting some kind of a retainer from Ever Elusive. But I can’t help but have that lingering doubt in the back of my mind that says “What if you don’t?” I guess I’m just being a little paranoid because things seem to be going a little too well lately, and I am reminded all too well of past experience, when things that seemed to good to be true… actually were. I’m hoping and praying that this whole endeavour isn’t one of those.

Don’t get me wrong though… by far, this is the best I’ve felt in a long time. And that little voice of doubt isn’t really all that loud… but he does have a tendency for biting every once in a while. I’m just excited about the idea of moving back home. I want it all to happen now, dangit! Now that I’ve actually made the leap, I guess I’m expecting immediate results. Honestly, though, I really only see it being another couple months, if things go according to plan.

Oh, in case anyone’s wondering, here’s the link to The Ever Elusive Productions web site, which I just got done with the other day: http://www.everelusive.biz. This company is a big part of the “plan” that things are hopefully going to go according to.

GAH… ants in my pants dance!

Okay, so I don’t actually feel like recounting the entire story of how I quit my job. Suffice it to say, it was not the greatest experience ever, and I’m pretty sure they think I was lying when I told them I didn’t have a choice but to quit without giving a two week notice. Truth is, when all is said and done, I did have a choice, and I chose to quit. I chose to jump on an opportunity that presented itself without warning. I chose to finally move on with my life.

And, yeah, I am sorry that I had to leave them in a lurch… but when you really think about it, two weeks wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. There’s no earthly way they would have been able to find another designer who would be willing to work in the same environment, for the same salary that I had been for a year and a half… be it right now, or two weeks from now.

They are in a pickle, to be sure, but it’s a pickle of their own design. For my part, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to give them two week’s notice, but I am not sorry for leaving. And I think that’s the real reason they’re upset with me: because I left. Because I didn’t choose to stay and be part of the team and continue to be miserable. One question that I knew would be asked, but that I was hoping wouldn’t be was: “Wouldn’t you rather bring your freelance projects into the company?” It was asked. And I knew what my answer would be, and that it wouldn’t be looked upon kindly. But that didn’t change my response.

And so, that chapter ends somewhat unfortunately. I feel sad that it seems that they are unable to separate business from friendship, that they continue to view anyone who doesn’t conform exactly to their plans as an outsider. I have been weighing the options of whether I should try and salvage some kind of friendship with them out of this. Right now, I’m still not sure. I’m not sure if there is even a real friendship to maintain. If there was, I don’t think this would have gone as poorly.

At any rate, I’m done dwelling on it. Officially. As of right now. I’m finally doing what I’ve wanted to do for years, and there’s no room for petty drama here.