"Make haste slowly."
While thinking about a title for this blog entry, I remembered this English phrase, and when I Googled it, I got a number of hits, many relating to the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, as well as the Latin version of the phrase, "Festina Lente". The meaning of the phrase is basically that things in life should be done "with a proper balance of urgency and diligence", to quote Wikipedia.
I've been giving a lot of thought to this concept recently, and trying to stick to it. With the major changes in my life begun by the realizations described in "Things Change" Part One, I have been re-evaluating many aspects of my life, and trying to keep the good ones, ditch the bad ones, and forge a new way forward that will be better for me and for my loved ones, especially my wife.
I have this great sense of urgency to do the right things, while also trying to make up for my past errors. It is a useful motivating force, and I am glad it is there, but I am finding that it is leading me to become a bit too impatient with seeing those necessary changes made, and their effects to be felt. What I am discovering is that there are things that can be changed within days (and I have done some of those), some within weeks (and I've done a few of those too), but some of these changes will take months and maybe even years. I need to relax and take things at the proper pace. It's difficult, and occasionally painful and frustrating, but I really do want -- and need -- to do this right. -- PL
All artwork, photos and text © 2010 Peter Laird, unless otherwise noted.
Showing posts with label things change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label things change. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
"Things Change…" Part Four: Out of the woods
Change continues.
Over the last couple of days, with the helpful and timely encouragement of my wife, I have gone through my clothes closet, which -- for many years now -- has been another of my "disaster area" rooms. Jumbles of shirts on hangers… piles of used and new clothes on the floor, waiting in vain for an organizing hand… hats purchased years ago with an eye toward a more "sophisticated" look, and abandoned when I realized I didn't like the way they felt on my head… lumpy heaps of TMNT t-shirt samples from various licensees… shoes worn once, perhaps twice… and so on.
I have a lot of "spring cleaning" of this sort to do in the house and in my old studio, and Jeannine wisely suggested I start here. It made sense -- it's the smallest room, and she saw that it would be quite possibly the easiest, for at least one big reason -- anything I decided to divest myself of could simply be tossed into a bag and brought to the local Goodwill Industries drop box.
So I tore into it, with somewhat ruthless -- but practical -- abandon. About half of the stuff I put into bags for Goodwill was brand new, never been worn… some of it never even out of plastic bags or off the original hangars. For example, I have over the last ten years bought many a four-pocket shirt -- guayaberas they're called, and also known as the "Mexican wedding shirt". Jeannine bought me my first one about ten years or so ago, in Portsmouth, NH. She'd seen it in a funky little clothing shop and -- knowing my fondness for pockets -- thought I might like it.
And she was right.
Little did she know that she was starting a fashion trend for me which would last up until about a month ago. Really, with the exception of a few formal occasions, I'm pretty sure that for the last decade I have worn four-pocket shirts exclusively -- light cotton ones in the summer, heavier linen or hemp ones in the winter. And they were extremely practical, as I tend to carry around a bunch of stuff with me that conveniently fit into those four pockets. They also didn't need to be tucked in, which -- given the weight I'd put on over those years -- was another plus.
But the four-pocket shirts are now fading from my life. I'm keeping a few -- they're comfortable, and I've discovered that with a few of them at least they actually look okay when tucked in. (You can't use the lower tier of two pockets, but that's okay). However, I suspect that over the next year or so those will disappear as well. They're just not me anymore.
And that's because in so many ways, I'm not me anymore. At least, not the me from before my "epiphany". Yes, I do retain much of my previous self, my long-established personality quirks, good and bad, my basic nature… but so much has changed. I am seeing life in such a fresh way. It's not entirely easy, although I see it as being very nearly entirely good -- I'm struggling with a lot of emotions that have been bottled up, throttled down, covered in dust for a long time. I've told Jeannine a few times that I feel like some kind of animal which has molted, abandoning its old, worn, dead shell for a new one, one which is raw and new and open to lots of feelings, both good and bad.
The new shell will toughen up over time, and this phase will go away. But my goal -- and I have pledged to Jeannine that I will stick to it (I mean, yesterday I literally got down on one knee, took her hands, and made this pledge) -- is that I will never let that shell get between us again.
My therapist (who I wish I had started seeing a long time ago, as he has helped me a great deal over the last two years) cautions me that these kinds of evolutions are not linear, that they can be more of a spiral path, and that I may from time to time come close to or even temporarily enter that foggy realm from which I have escaped. I believe he's right, and I will be on the lookout for those missteps. It's possible that I will make them.
But I now have great motivation to avoid them… and that, I think, will help me a lot.
So back to the clothes closet… into more than a dozen thirteen-gallon plastic drawstring bags went piles of shirts, pants, shoes, hats, and t-shirts. I even tossed in all except one of the "Signature Series" TMNT shirts that had been produced using artwork I'd done specifically for them. I did keep a few of the old glow-in-the-dark TMNT t-shirts from the early years, though I suspect they may not stay too long.
And the sense of freedom after completing this task was wonderful. I still have a long way to go -- there's a lot more stuff to go through and get rid of. But this was a great start, and I thank Jeannine once again for gently pushing me to do it. -- PL
P.S. The "Out of the Woods" title for this blog entry comes from two sources -- one, my great sense of relief that I have somehow managed to stumble "out of the woods" of depression and unhappiness; and two, for the beautiful creature in the photo I took yesterday while Jeannine and I were bicycling on our new favorite bike path. Jeannine spotted the deer, and alerted me to its presence… and the deer was nice enough to stay in one spot while I unlimbered my camera and got a couple of shots with the zoom lens.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
"Things Change…" Part Three: Falling away
I picked up a new MacBook Pro laptop yesterday, and have spent a few hours copying old files onto it, re-installing some key programs, and generally trying to get things back to the way they were -- or at least close to it. So far, it seems to be going pretty well. AOL is working, I can get on the Internet, and I don't think I have lost anything vital (of course, that estimation could change as things progress).
I have made one big decision, though, which I was not expecting… but which I can see now is connected to the continuing series of changes going on in my life.
I have not -- and won't -- copy my "TMNT Stuff" folder to the new computer.
"TMNT Stuff" was a folder I'd maintained across several laptops -- in fact, I think it started on my G4 desktop Mac. I put just about everything and anything TMNT-related into it -- art that I'd scanned, some of which I'd colored in Photoshop; all of the art files for the 2K3 TMNT animated series that Lloyd and his crew sent me for approval; plots and notes for the stories I created for the TMNT Volume 4 comics, as well as the Quark (and later InDesign) files for the comics themselves; various interesting emails and web clippings related to TMNT; some important contracts, various drafts of movie scripts and treatments and outlines; and so on. The last time I checked (about a minute ago) this folder was slightly over ten gigabytes.
(I am not deleting this folder full of files -- I will be keeping it on a back-up external hard drive in case i ever need to refer to it again.)
Lately, I have been feeling the sense that the Turtles are "falling away" from me -- I know that is imprecise and very subjective, but it is the closest I can get to articulating how it feels. After the sale of the TMNT property to Viacom in October of 2009, I felt some immediate relief, some significant lessening of my sense of responsibility to and for the Turtles. But I didn't experience the real -- you know, I'm not even sure how to describe it, but I had this kind of anticipation of a feeling of liberation or something. And it wasn't there.
But now it is.
In the last week or two I have actually found myself breathing more easily, and feeling like my shoulders and neck aren't as tight as they once were. I find myself thinking of the Turtles as something from my past, not something of my future… which is a little freaky, given how long they'd been part of my present, but even as a freaky feeling it isn't unpleasant. It feels… relaxing.
I'm not eradicating the Turtles from my life. That would be foolish -- they are a huge part of my personal and creative history. And someday, maybe I will play with them again. But right now, that day seems very, very far away.
Those of you who were/are fans of my TMNT Volume 4 comics may wonder what this means for the continuation/conclusion of that series. I have been doing some soul-searching about that, and at the risk of disappointing some of those fans, I have to say that I don't think the series will ever be finished as I had originally intended it to be. I just don't have any desire to leap back into it, and in fact, I am a little afraid of trying to do so, given my sense of of trepidation about getting sucked back into the world of the TMNT at a time when I finally feel like I am getting free from it.
So this is my current thinking: The art, scripting and lettering for issue #31 is done, and the inking on the art for #32 is just about finished. I may finish up the final details of these two issues, and publish them not in print form but on the Web.
Following that, I will take the plots that I have written out for what would have been the concluding six or seven issues of the comic book, beef them up a little bit, and post them online, either at the Mirage Licensing site or on this blog, so as to give readers of Volume 4 a clear look at how I intended to conclude that series.
I'll have to double-check to make sure I'm within my rights to do this, but I think it will be okay. And in all honesty, at this point I think it's probably the only way this series will get anything close to its intended conclusion. I apologize in advance to anyone who will be disappointed by this approach, but I sincerely see it as the only reasonable way to go forward, all things considered. -- PL
I have made one big decision, though, which I was not expecting… but which I can see now is connected to the continuing series of changes going on in my life.
I have not -- and won't -- copy my "TMNT Stuff" folder to the new computer.
"TMNT Stuff" was a folder I'd maintained across several laptops -- in fact, I think it started on my G4 desktop Mac. I put just about everything and anything TMNT-related into it -- art that I'd scanned, some of which I'd colored in Photoshop; all of the art files for the 2K3 TMNT animated series that Lloyd and his crew sent me for approval; plots and notes for the stories I created for the TMNT Volume 4 comics, as well as the Quark (and later InDesign) files for the comics themselves; various interesting emails and web clippings related to TMNT; some important contracts, various drafts of movie scripts and treatments and outlines; and so on. The last time I checked (about a minute ago) this folder was slightly over ten gigabytes.
(I am not deleting this folder full of files -- I will be keeping it on a back-up external hard drive in case i ever need to refer to it again.)
Lately, I have been feeling the sense that the Turtles are "falling away" from me -- I know that is imprecise and very subjective, but it is the closest I can get to articulating how it feels. After the sale of the TMNT property to Viacom in October of 2009, I felt some immediate relief, some significant lessening of my sense of responsibility to and for the Turtles. But I didn't experience the real -- you know, I'm not even sure how to describe it, but I had this kind of anticipation of a feeling of liberation or something. And it wasn't there.
But now it is.
In the last week or two I have actually found myself breathing more easily, and feeling like my shoulders and neck aren't as tight as they once were. I find myself thinking of the Turtles as something from my past, not something of my future… which is a little freaky, given how long they'd been part of my present, but even as a freaky feeling it isn't unpleasant. It feels… relaxing.
I'm not eradicating the Turtles from my life. That would be foolish -- they are a huge part of my personal and creative history. And someday, maybe I will play with them again. But right now, that day seems very, very far away.
Those of you who were/are fans of my TMNT Volume 4 comics may wonder what this means for the continuation/conclusion of that series. I have been doing some soul-searching about that, and at the risk of disappointing some of those fans, I have to say that I don't think the series will ever be finished as I had originally intended it to be. I just don't have any desire to leap back into it, and in fact, I am a little afraid of trying to do so, given my sense of of trepidation about getting sucked back into the world of the TMNT at a time when I finally feel like I am getting free from it.
So this is my current thinking: The art, scripting and lettering for issue #31 is done, and the inking on the art for #32 is just about finished. I may finish up the final details of these two issues, and publish them not in print form but on the Web.
Following that, I will take the plots that I have written out for what would have been the concluding six or seven issues of the comic book, beef them up a little bit, and post them online, either at the Mirage Licensing site or on this blog, so as to give readers of Volume 4 a clear look at how I intended to conclude that series.
I'll have to double-check to make sure I'm within my rights to do this, but I think it will be okay. And in all honesty, at this point I think it's probably the only way this series will get anything close to its intended conclusion. I apologize in advance to anyone who will be disappointed by this approach, but I sincerely see it as the only reasonable way to go forward, all things considered. -- PL
Friday, June 4, 2010
"Things Change…" Part Two: Changing things...
Following up on my previous long personal post…
Things have changed, and continue to change.
I seem to have experienced a sort of "personal seismic shift" as regards my relationship to the "stuff" that I talked about last time. I was walking with my good friend Len last week and discussing this very issue, when I suddenly said to him something like this: "With the exception of most of the artwork I own, both by me and by others, a few objects and artifacts which hold sentimental value, my tools and a few motorcycles, and the stuff I need on a day-to-day basis (clothes, computer, etc.), I feel like I could just take the rest, heap it in a big pile, and ship it to the nearest Goodwill or recycling center."
It's pretty strange to feel this way, after so many years of feeling the exact opposite. But it is also quite liberating. I spent some time over the last few days walking around my old studio, looking at all the stuff in the storage space underneath it. A significant portion of that lump of stuff is a set of shelves of boxes of multiple copies of old Turtle comics… and as I looked at them, I started to think, "Why am I keeping all of these?" I couldn't think of a very good answer.
So beginning soon, I think I will be selling most of this collection. I will probably keep most if not all of the limited numbers of first printings of the early issues (don't have many of those anyway), and maybe five copes of each of the rest of them. But the rest will go. I plan to discuss with Katie how to sell these through the Mirage Licensing web site. Some of them will likely be offered for prices higher than the cover price, as they are legitimate collectibles now.
I am also considering offering for sale most of my collection of TMNT toys from the first big licensing/merchandising era, but I haven't reached a conclusion on that idea yet. -- PL
Things have changed, and continue to change.
I seem to have experienced a sort of "personal seismic shift" as regards my relationship to the "stuff" that I talked about last time. I was walking with my good friend Len last week and discussing this very issue, when I suddenly said to him something like this: "With the exception of most of the artwork I own, both by me and by others, a few objects and artifacts which hold sentimental value, my tools and a few motorcycles, and the stuff I need on a day-to-day basis (clothes, computer, etc.), I feel like I could just take the rest, heap it in a big pile, and ship it to the nearest Goodwill or recycling center."
It's pretty strange to feel this way, after so many years of feeling the exact opposite. But it is also quite liberating. I spent some time over the last few days walking around my old studio, looking at all the stuff in the storage space underneath it. A significant portion of that lump of stuff is a set of shelves of boxes of multiple copies of old Turtle comics… and as I looked at them, I started to think, "Why am I keeping all of these?" I couldn't think of a very good answer.
So beginning soon, I think I will be selling most of this collection. I will probably keep most if not all of the limited numbers of first printings of the early issues (don't have many of those anyway), and maybe five copes of each of the rest of them. But the rest will go. I plan to discuss with Katie how to sell these through the Mirage Licensing web site. Some of them will likely be offered for prices higher than the cover price, as they are legitimate collectibles now.
I am also considering offering for sale most of my collection of TMNT toys from the first big licensing/merchandising era, but I haven't reached a conclusion on that idea yet. -- PL
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
"Things Change…" Part One
(Note: This is a bit of a long one… and it's one I have debated with myself about posting. It's very personal, has nothing much to do with Turtles or comics or artwork, and thus will likely be of little interest to many of the readers of this blog. But… it means a lot to me, and who knows -- it might help someone else in a similar situation.)
"Close your sleepy eyes, my little buckaroo
While the light of the westerns skies
Is shining down on you
Don't you know it's time for bed
Another day is through
So go to sleep, my little buckaroo"
Back in high school, I bought my first record album (you know, one of
those big floppy vinyl things you scratched with a needle to get sound out of), and it was, I believe, the first one released by Michael Parks, then starring in the short-lived (one season) "Then Came Bronson" TV series on NBC. I loved that show, and I loved the theme song, "Long Lonesome Highway", which Parks sang. He had a nice voice, and though many repeated playings I wore out that album, and his next one as well. The songs on the albums were mostly old favorites -- a lot of country/western as I recall.
"Don't you realize, my little buckaroo
It was from a little acorn
That the oak tree grew
Just remember that your dad
Was once a kid like you
So go to sleep, my little buckaroo"
"Little Buckaroo" was, according to Wikipedia, written by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl. I can't recall which of Michael Parks' first two albums featured this tune, but it made a big impression on me, and even this many years later, I can still recall most of the lyrics.
Why am I mentioning this? Well, I've been searching around for a pithy phrase to sum up something that recently (about a week ago) happened to me (and in many ways is CONTINUING to happen to me), something that I believe has literally changed my life, for the better -- to say the least. And I kept coming back to those lines in the second verse:
It was from a little acorn
That the oak tree grew
Sometimes, big things spring unexpectedly from small beginnings, when you least expect them. So it was for me this past week, when I was about a month and a half into a project that I had been meaning to do for a number of years.
My wife Jeannine has, over the years since we got together (about twenty-eight so far), made some very nice photo albums covering our early years as a couple, and many from the days when our daughter was an infant, up until she was in high school. I'm glad she did, as -- at least in the pre-digital days -- I took very few photos. It's a wonderful memory archive to have, but for some time I have been thinking it would be a good idea -- and useful. to boot -- to make a digital archive of all of these photos by scanning each of them.
I'd held off for a long time, because I was reluctant to commit myself to the laborious, tedious process of scanning batches of photos at a time on my large flatbed scanner, then going through the hassle of extracting each individual photo from that group scan and saving it as an individual file. I knew it would be a great deal of boring grunt work.
About a year ago, I saw a small photo scanner in one of the many catalogs I get in the mail. It was the "Pandigital SCN02 PhotoLink One Touch Scanner". I was intrigued, because it seemed like it might provide an elegant solution to my problem -- it featured quick scanning of individual photos, each saved to an SD memory card slotted into the back of the scanner. It even purported to have software built in that would rotate the scans into perfect orientation.
However, I didn't buy it. I'm not sure why… I guess I just wasn't ready to start the project.
But a couple of months ago, I did finally buy one of those scanners -- I just really wanted to see what it could do. So I got it out of the box, hooked it up to a power source (no computer connection required), and tried it out. I was initially disappointed because it didn't work very well with most of the dozen or so photos that I had randomly selected for this test. Admittedly, the instructions DID warn that photos with lots of dark areas, especially near the edges, could confuse the scanner's software and cause errors. And that was exactly true -- the bad part being that MOST of the photos I was going to scan fell into that category.
So I started thinking. The scanner came with a sleeve with a clear front and a black background, into which you were supposed to slip the photo to be scanned. When inserted into the scanner, the sleeve would allegedly protect the photo and the black background would work with the software to allow it to rotate the finished scan into alignment. I wondered -- what would happen if the photo was set against a WHITE background instead? So I cut a piece of white index stock to the same size as that black background, set a photo on top of it, and ran it through the scanner.
The result was much better, though not perfect. The white background prevented the scanner software from rotating the scanned image into perfect alignment, so I would need to do that myself in Photoshop. BUT… practically all of the scans came out beautifully, dark areas near the edges or not. And I was very pleased with the resolution and color fidelity of the scans -- as far as I could see, they were about equal to what I could have gotten with my big scanner. And the speed was amazing -- about two or three seconds per photo.
So I'd picked a winner! Now all I needed to do was start taking all of the photos out of the old photo albums and then start running them through this cute little scanner. As I did so, I realized that the albums Jeannine had used contained what are somewhat laughingly called "magnetic" pages -- these are actually stiff paper coated with some kind of sticky waxy substance, with a clear plastic overlay on each side. This type of album page has it's advantages, chief among them being that you can orient your photos in any direction, and even overlap photos if desired. But one of the big downsides (apart from them often being a real pain to extract photos from, given the tendency of that sticky stuff to REALLY stick, especially after a long time has passed) is that they don't age well. About half of these pages had already yellowed or browned in an unsightly way.
I consulted with Jeannine and we decided to go with new, archival-quality plastic photo sleeve inserts to replace the "magnetic" pages. I found some through amazon.com which would fit nicely into the three-ring binders that Jeannine had originally used. The downside of these is that you are limited to the orientation of the individual pockets, but as it turned out, that didn't bother Jeannine (or me), so I decided to go with it.
I dove into the project, scanning on average one album per day. As I completed scanning an album, I would put the photos into the new pages, then spend some time rotating and cropping the scans in Photoshop. That takes a lot longer than the actual scanning -- in fact, I've only finished that work on about five of twelve albums.
So that's all the technical stuff. It's not really what this entry is all about.
I was expecting that I would feel some nostalgia as I looked at all these photos, and I would be looking at them a lot -- as I took them out of the old album pages, as I scanned them, as I put them into the new pages, and as I looked at them on the screen of my computer. After all, I'd be seeing scenes from the days of falling head-over-heels in love with Jeannine, the wedding photos from our back yard in Dover, scenes of friends and family, some sadly no longer with us, and many scenes of our daughter Emily as she grew up. I mean, come on -- how could I look at all that and NOT get nostalgic? I'd have to be a stone or something.
And I did get nostalgic.
But what COMPLETELY blindsided me -- what I've been calling my "epiphany" -- was the rush of feeling, of clarity, that hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks one night about two weeks into the project. I suddenly realized how emotionally blocked I had been for many years, especially the last five or six.
There are many reasons for this, as I have realized through further thinking and analysis. A great deal, perhaps the largest chunk of it, comes from the Turtle years. I have often said to Jeannine that through those years, I very often felt like a square peg in a round hole, at least as far as the business end of things. It wasn't so bad when it was just me and Kev putting together our little comics and self-publishing them out of our living rooms -- that I could handle without many problems. But when the major licensing stuff hit in 1987… that was a whole different story.
We went from being two guys having fun with our comics to those same two guys trying to hold onto the reins of a runaway licensing and merchandising success. Piles of contracts, meetings with lawyers, hiring new people to make our business work -- this was all new to us, and we were learning as we went. And in short order, we discovered the wonderful world of parasites.
It is a sad fact of life that money can make people do weird things. I will freely admit that it's made me do some not-terribly-well-advised things over the years. I think Kevin would probably say the same. That's bad enough, when YOU are doing something dumb with YOUR money. But when creeps and jerks start coming out of the woodwork wanting to do THEIR dumb things with YOUR money, the crap level goes up precipitously. From a local politician blithely saying publicly that we should just donate six million dollars to the local schools, to the total stranger asking me for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars so that he could buy a local general store… it got pretty weird and disconcerting.
It was weird and disconcerting enough that I started making moves to protect myself and my privacy. Some of the things I did were common sense -- unlisted phone numbers, not advertising Mirage's street address, things like that. And they made a difference… they helped. But the other stuff…
What was the other stuff? Well, in short, it amounted to me slowly but surely, bit by bit, tiny increment by tiny increment, starting to draw away from people close to me, and from enjoyment of life itself. It was not intentional -- or at least, if there was any intention on my part, it was instinctive and unconscious. Slowly I built up emotional walls around me, distancing myself from many of those closest to me. Now, I'm not going to say I wasn't still close to these people -- I was. But there was a thickening, protective skin coming between us. (I'm tempted, somewhat, to say "a shell", but that might be too corny… and I'm not feeling particularly corny right now.)
There was -- and still is -- a physical manifestation of this protective covering, and I name it "stuff". What is this "stuff"? It's all -- or at least most -- of the things the Turtle money allowed me to buy. Toys, books, magazines, motorcycles, Segways, gadgets, computers, and on and on. It makes no rational sense that this "stuff" would protect me from anything… but humans are not always rational beings, no matter how much we desire to be. I continued to pile up this stuff around me, often literally -- anyone who has seen the two rooms in our house which I have taken over for my use has seen the truth of this. (This must change -- in fact, IS changing… but that's getting a little ahead of myself.)
The thing that really nailed me to the floor with my "epiphany", the thing that has made me feel like a total heel, the thing that has reduced me to a sobbing wreck on more than one occasion in the last week, was the realization of just how much this walling off of myself emotionally had affected my relationship with my wife, Jeannine. It crushed me. I am starting to come to grips with it now, but… it is very difficult.
The especially aggravating, insidious aspect of this situation is that I didn't even realize it was happening… and it's been happening for at least the last five years, and probably even longer than that -- more like ten or twenty years, I'd say. In fact, if someone had asked me the day before I experienced my "epiphany" if I loved my wife, I would have said "Yes, of course!" And it would have been true -- I love my wife. I've loved her since long before she became my wife, in fact in a remarkably short time after we'd started dating. She is a beautiful, kind, generous, funny, creative person. (And she makes GREAT raspberry muffins.) Like any couple, we've had times over the course of our relationship which have not been as rosy as other times. But I can state unequivocally that I have always loved her.
The big problem is that, until this past week, I had no idea just how much of that protective barrier I had let grow between us, and how much that had dulled and reduced my ability to let her know how I felt about her. It galls me to see now exactly how much time has gone by with this barrier in place.
I have spent much of this last week talking with Jeannine and spending more time with her on a daily basis than I have in a long time, trying to let her know exactly what kind of change has occurred in me. And it is an enormous change. One sign of it -- and this is going to perhaps sound a little mundane to some of you -- is that for the last five days, we have gone to bed at the same time. Or, to be more precise, I have adjusted my sleep schedule to hers. This comes after many years of a staggered schedule, wherein Jeannine would go to bed around 9:30 or 10, and I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning. (For a few years, it was even more extreme -- I'd stay up until four or five AM.) Originally, it was a vital ingredient to my staying sane and getting my work done -- the quiet of that time at night helped defray the angst of those crazy Turtle days back in the late 1980's and 1990's. I could work without having to take phone calls about this deal or that.
But… for a long time, it
hasn't
been
necessary.
And yet, I stuck with it. I honestly could not, at this point, tell you exactly why I did -- except that perhaps it was a combination of ingrained habit, mixed with some of that unconscious self-protective impulse -- as if by having this time with no one around, no calls coming in, no demands on me, then nothing bad could happen. Perhaps at some time in the future I will fully comprehend why I did this and some other things.
At the moment, what matters to me is that I feel as if a great, previously- unknown (but still present and heavy) weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Just getting up at the same time as Jeannine this past week has given me a tantalizing glimpse of what I have been missing.
Things are changing.
This doesn't mean I'm going to start doing comics again, or finish Volume 4 of the TMNT series, or jump into any particular new art project any time soon. (Actually, I hope that last thing DOES happen, but I'll have to wait and see.) But the important thing to me is that -- to use the old Biblical phrase -- the scales have fallen from my eyes. I feel recommitted to my marriage, to Jeannine, in a way which I haven't consciously felt in a long time. The strength of these feelings is almost scary.
But I think I can deal with it.
Because for the first time in a long time, when I go to sleep at night, I am actually looking forward to the coming day. -- PL
"Close your sleepy eyes, my little buckaroo
While the light of the westerns skies
Is shining down on you
Don't you know it's time for bed
Another day is through
So go to sleep, my little buckaroo"
Back in high school, I bought my first record album (you know, one of
those big floppy vinyl things you scratched with a needle to get sound out of), and it was, I believe, the first one released by Michael Parks, then starring in the short-lived (one season) "Then Came Bronson" TV series on NBC. I loved that show, and I loved the theme song, "Long Lonesome Highway", which Parks sang. He had a nice voice, and though many repeated playings I wore out that album, and his next one as well. The songs on the albums were mostly old favorites -- a lot of country/western as I recall.
"Don't you realize, my little buckaroo
It was from a little acorn
That the oak tree grew
Just remember that your dad
Was once a kid like you
So go to sleep, my little buckaroo"
"Little Buckaroo" was, according to Wikipedia, written by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl. I can't recall which of Michael Parks' first two albums featured this tune, but it made a big impression on me, and even this many years later, I can still recall most of the lyrics.
Why am I mentioning this? Well, I've been searching around for a pithy phrase to sum up something that recently (about a week ago) happened to me (and in many ways is CONTINUING to happen to me), something that I believe has literally changed my life, for the better -- to say the least. And I kept coming back to those lines in the second verse:
It was from a little acorn
That the oak tree grew
Sometimes, big things spring unexpectedly from small beginnings, when you least expect them. So it was for me this past week, when I was about a month and a half into a project that I had been meaning to do for a number of years.
My wife Jeannine has, over the years since we got together (about twenty-eight so far), made some very nice photo albums covering our early years as a couple, and many from the days when our daughter was an infant, up until she was in high school. I'm glad she did, as -- at least in the pre-digital days -- I took very few photos. It's a wonderful memory archive to have, but for some time I have been thinking it would be a good idea -- and useful. to boot -- to make a digital archive of all of these photos by scanning each of them.
I'd held off for a long time, because I was reluctant to commit myself to the laborious, tedious process of scanning batches of photos at a time on my large flatbed scanner, then going through the hassle of extracting each individual photo from that group scan and saving it as an individual file. I knew it would be a great deal of boring grunt work.
About a year ago, I saw a small photo scanner in one of the many catalogs I get in the mail. It was the "Pandigital SCN02 PhotoLink One Touch Scanner". I was intrigued, because it seemed like it might provide an elegant solution to my problem -- it featured quick scanning of individual photos, each saved to an SD memory card slotted into the back of the scanner. It even purported to have software built in that would rotate the scans into perfect orientation.
However, I didn't buy it. I'm not sure why… I guess I just wasn't ready to start the project.
But a couple of months ago, I did finally buy one of those scanners -- I just really wanted to see what it could do. So I got it out of the box, hooked it up to a power source (no computer connection required), and tried it out. I was initially disappointed because it didn't work very well with most of the dozen or so photos that I had randomly selected for this test. Admittedly, the instructions DID warn that photos with lots of dark areas, especially near the edges, could confuse the scanner's software and cause errors. And that was exactly true -- the bad part being that MOST of the photos I was going to scan fell into that category.
So I started thinking. The scanner came with a sleeve with a clear front and a black background, into which you were supposed to slip the photo to be scanned. When inserted into the scanner, the sleeve would allegedly protect the photo and the black background would work with the software to allow it to rotate the finished scan into alignment. I wondered -- what would happen if the photo was set against a WHITE background instead? So I cut a piece of white index stock to the same size as that black background, set a photo on top of it, and ran it through the scanner.
The result was much better, though not perfect. The white background prevented the scanner software from rotating the scanned image into perfect alignment, so I would need to do that myself in Photoshop. BUT… practically all of the scans came out beautifully, dark areas near the edges or not. And I was very pleased with the resolution and color fidelity of the scans -- as far as I could see, they were about equal to what I could have gotten with my big scanner. And the speed was amazing -- about two or three seconds per photo.
So I'd picked a winner! Now all I needed to do was start taking all of the photos out of the old photo albums and then start running them through this cute little scanner. As I did so, I realized that the albums Jeannine had used contained what are somewhat laughingly called "magnetic" pages -- these are actually stiff paper coated with some kind of sticky waxy substance, with a clear plastic overlay on each side. This type of album page has it's advantages, chief among them being that you can orient your photos in any direction, and even overlap photos if desired. But one of the big downsides (apart from them often being a real pain to extract photos from, given the tendency of that sticky stuff to REALLY stick, especially after a long time has passed) is that they don't age well. About half of these pages had already yellowed or browned in an unsightly way.
I consulted with Jeannine and we decided to go with new, archival-quality plastic photo sleeve inserts to replace the "magnetic" pages. I found some through amazon.com which would fit nicely into the three-ring binders that Jeannine had originally used. The downside of these is that you are limited to the orientation of the individual pockets, but as it turned out, that didn't bother Jeannine (or me), so I decided to go with it.
I dove into the project, scanning on average one album per day. As I completed scanning an album, I would put the photos into the new pages, then spend some time rotating and cropping the scans in Photoshop. That takes a lot longer than the actual scanning -- in fact, I've only finished that work on about five of twelve albums.
So that's all the technical stuff. It's not really what this entry is all about.
I was expecting that I would feel some nostalgia as I looked at all these photos, and I would be looking at them a lot -- as I took them out of the old album pages, as I scanned them, as I put them into the new pages, and as I looked at them on the screen of my computer. After all, I'd be seeing scenes from the days of falling head-over-heels in love with Jeannine, the wedding photos from our back yard in Dover, scenes of friends and family, some sadly no longer with us, and many scenes of our daughter Emily as she grew up. I mean, come on -- how could I look at all that and NOT get nostalgic? I'd have to be a stone or something.
And I did get nostalgic.
But what COMPLETELY blindsided me -- what I've been calling my "epiphany" -- was the rush of feeling, of clarity, that hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks one night about two weeks into the project. I suddenly realized how emotionally blocked I had been for many years, especially the last five or six.
There are many reasons for this, as I have realized through further thinking and analysis. A great deal, perhaps the largest chunk of it, comes from the Turtle years. I have often said to Jeannine that through those years, I very often felt like a square peg in a round hole, at least as far as the business end of things. It wasn't so bad when it was just me and Kev putting together our little comics and self-publishing them out of our living rooms -- that I could handle without many problems. But when the major licensing stuff hit in 1987… that was a whole different story.
We went from being two guys having fun with our comics to those same two guys trying to hold onto the reins of a runaway licensing and merchandising success. Piles of contracts, meetings with lawyers, hiring new people to make our business work -- this was all new to us, and we were learning as we went. And in short order, we discovered the wonderful world of parasites.
It is a sad fact of life that money can make people do weird things. I will freely admit that it's made me do some not-terribly-well-advised things over the years. I think Kevin would probably say the same. That's bad enough, when YOU are doing something dumb with YOUR money. But when creeps and jerks start coming out of the woodwork wanting to do THEIR dumb things with YOUR money, the crap level goes up precipitously. From a local politician blithely saying publicly that we should just donate six million dollars to the local schools, to the total stranger asking me for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars so that he could buy a local general store… it got pretty weird and disconcerting.
It was weird and disconcerting enough that I started making moves to protect myself and my privacy. Some of the things I did were common sense -- unlisted phone numbers, not advertising Mirage's street address, things like that. And they made a difference… they helped. But the other stuff…
What was the other stuff? Well, in short, it amounted to me slowly but surely, bit by bit, tiny increment by tiny increment, starting to draw away from people close to me, and from enjoyment of life itself. It was not intentional -- or at least, if there was any intention on my part, it was instinctive and unconscious. Slowly I built up emotional walls around me, distancing myself from many of those closest to me. Now, I'm not going to say I wasn't still close to these people -- I was. But there was a thickening, protective skin coming between us. (I'm tempted, somewhat, to say "a shell", but that might be too corny… and I'm not feeling particularly corny right now.)
There was -- and still is -- a physical manifestation of this protective covering, and I name it "stuff". What is this "stuff"? It's all -- or at least most -- of the things the Turtle money allowed me to buy. Toys, books, magazines, motorcycles, Segways, gadgets, computers, and on and on. It makes no rational sense that this "stuff" would protect me from anything… but humans are not always rational beings, no matter how much we desire to be. I continued to pile up this stuff around me, often literally -- anyone who has seen the two rooms in our house which I have taken over for my use has seen the truth of this. (This must change -- in fact, IS changing… but that's getting a little ahead of myself.)
The thing that really nailed me to the floor with my "epiphany", the thing that has made me feel like a total heel, the thing that has reduced me to a sobbing wreck on more than one occasion in the last week, was the realization of just how much this walling off of myself emotionally had affected my relationship with my wife, Jeannine. It crushed me. I am starting to come to grips with it now, but… it is very difficult.
The especially aggravating, insidious aspect of this situation is that I didn't even realize it was happening… and it's been happening for at least the last five years, and probably even longer than that -- more like ten or twenty years, I'd say. In fact, if someone had asked me the day before I experienced my "epiphany" if I loved my wife, I would have said "Yes, of course!" And it would have been true -- I love my wife. I've loved her since long before she became my wife, in fact in a remarkably short time after we'd started dating. She is a beautiful, kind, generous, funny, creative person. (And she makes GREAT raspberry muffins.) Like any couple, we've had times over the course of our relationship which have not been as rosy as other times. But I can state unequivocally that I have always loved her.
The big problem is that, until this past week, I had no idea just how much of that protective barrier I had let grow between us, and how much that had dulled and reduced my ability to let her know how I felt about her. It galls me to see now exactly how much time has gone by with this barrier in place.
I have spent much of this last week talking with Jeannine and spending more time with her on a daily basis than I have in a long time, trying to let her know exactly what kind of change has occurred in me. And it is an enormous change. One sign of it -- and this is going to perhaps sound a little mundane to some of you -- is that for the last five days, we have gone to bed at the same time. Or, to be more precise, I have adjusted my sleep schedule to hers. This comes after many years of a staggered schedule, wherein Jeannine would go to bed around 9:30 or 10, and I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning. (For a few years, it was even more extreme -- I'd stay up until four or five AM.) Originally, it was a vital ingredient to my staying sane and getting my work done -- the quiet of that time at night helped defray the angst of those crazy Turtle days back in the late 1980's and 1990's. I could work without having to take phone calls about this deal or that.
But… for a long time, it
hasn't
been
necessary.
And yet, I stuck with it. I honestly could not, at this point, tell you exactly why I did -- except that perhaps it was a combination of ingrained habit, mixed with some of that unconscious self-protective impulse -- as if by having this time with no one around, no calls coming in, no demands on me, then nothing bad could happen. Perhaps at some time in the future I will fully comprehend why I did this and some other things.
At the moment, what matters to me is that I feel as if a great, previously- unknown (but still present and heavy) weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Just getting up at the same time as Jeannine this past week has given me a tantalizing glimpse of what I have been missing.
Things are changing.
This doesn't mean I'm going to start doing comics again, or finish Volume 4 of the TMNT series, or jump into any particular new art project any time soon. (Actually, I hope that last thing DOES happen, but I'll have to wait and see.) But the important thing to me is that -- to use the old Biblical phrase -- the scales have fallen from my eyes. I feel recommitted to my marriage, to Jeannine, in a way which I haven't consciously felt in a long time. The strength of these feelings is almost scary.
But I think I can deal with it.
Because for the first time in a long time, when I go to sleep at night, I am actually looking forward to the coming day. -- PL
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