fire ball

i've been working long hours the past few days getting ready for two events later this month: halloween and the white river indie film festival. i'm doing the graphics for both of them. last night i was up until 2am tapping my foot to WXND, our groovy radio station, making my knee sore. i'm not supposed to tap my foot. it aggravates knee inflammation. but, tap away i do.

while tapping i created some postcards for our annual halloween party. before that, i spent the whole day working on the poster, not shown, making revision after revision until i had about fifteen flavors of more or less the same thing. it seem that i need to see a lot of options before i'm convinced of a single path. my process rolls in waves. i'll think i'm onto something and then when i sit back and look at it after many hours work on it, i'll think, this is crap. then i slip into a funk wondering what i'm doing with my life. this sort of thinking leads usually to some kind of pacifying behavior, like eating chocolate. finally, when i give up, think that nothing is ever going to happen, a new idea will arrive, like a good salesman, and convince me to bite again. so, i stay another hour or two making yet another attempt.

deleting things is the best way i find to shake things up. brian eno is reported to have said that removing the most important thing can show you how to break through obstacles. i think this is a form of ego control. when one associates oneself with the center of one's project what better way to counter the ego than by removing its infatuation: the center? very clever man, brian eno.

so after about fourteen hours of banging my head against a wall, these postcards popped out in a matter of minutes. the stress of working the poster made creating the postcards a piece of cake. now, if i had tried to create the postcards first, i'm sure it would have been the other way around. there's no escaping.