For those of you not familiar with the Poster saga, please see:
The Limited Edition E2 "Participate" Poster
The Definitive E2 "Participate" Poster Info Superdoc
Update: "Participate" Poster in time for Christmas
The Limited Edition "Participate in Your Own Manipulation" Poster
I'm tired of all this, I just wanted the damned E2 Poster
(not necessarily in chronological order)
Also, please note this is a very longwinded rather pointless tale. Of no import whatsoever to the actual "business end" of the posters. In fact, it is almost a GTKY write-up, but one directed at those who may be hating me right now. Thanks - Bluebear
I'll not bore you with the conception of the poster or the reasons for my deciding to undertake this quite large project, all that can be found in the Nodes and Superdocs above. Rather I'd like to tell the story of where it went wrong. Not extremely wrong, just not as well as I had originally intended. And finally, I'd like to stress that I have never at any point regretted getting these printed, nor have I regretted agreeing to send them out. In fact, thank you to those who purchased for helping me to get these printed.
In the past 18 months I've been trying valiantly to be more organized. Even going so far as to hire an organizational counselor to the tune of $50 an hour. This project was going to be one of my first real success stories in my quest. It started out well. Real well. I had charts and checklists and packaging supplies and even a plan. As many of you can attest I gave every effort to get out those posters desired for Christmas presents in a timely manner. I believe I was mostly successful in this. I was excited. I was doing something right. What a relief. And then, as I've stated countless times in many of your msg inbox's, in late December my computer took a fall. A hard fall. I lost all sorts of important material. While we managed to salvage much of it (excepting for a few short stories, poems, invoices and the like), my MS Outlook and Outlook Express was not recoverable. Problem there being that these two programs were integral to my aforementioned "plan" (in retrospect it was an extremely flimsy plan, still though, had I not lost the information on these programs, I think it just may have worked. i.e. "I love it when a plan comes together").
Meanwhile, my wife and I found out we were pregnant in October. No big deal, as I took on the poster project after this knowledge. Due to this pregnancy we began looking for a little bigger house, in a safer neighborhood, mostly I think, so that I could accelerate my descent into middle age and deafening boredom. We figured it would take until about May, 2002 to find the right house (a dump) in the right neighborhood (high resale). It didn't. We found it mid-December and closed on it on the December 28. Due to its being the right house (a dump), the house needed an astronomical amount of work to be made livable for my then 3 months pregnant wife (a bit of a snob, pregnancy or no). I figured this would all be fine. We weren't going to be selling the 2 family home we were currently living in, and I hadn't given any effort to renting out the unit we were occupying, so we had plenty of time. But women think differently. She was excited and wanted to move in "now". This being the case my 77 year old Grandpa and myself began working literally almost non-stop. He wakes up at about 5 in the morning, gets "brefast" (he's many times told me "I could eat brefast 3 times a day. It's my favorite meal." I think this has more to do with the significantly low cost of a restaurant breakfast, being that my grandpa, while quite wealthy, is a classic dutchmen when it comes to spending for himself) and would show up at the house to begin around 7:30 am. I, do not wake up around 5 a.m. I go to sleep around 4 a.m. usually. And so we kind of split the shifts. Him from 7 or so till 5 p.m. Me from 10 a.m. until 2 or 3 am. We kept this up for 5 weeks. Spattered among us was an incredible show of support from my mother painting and nightly homemade dinners, my step-dad electrical, plumbing, heating/cooling, my pregnant wife a little bit of everything, and a large contingent of friends. All in all we totaled approximately 850 hours of labor in the first 5 weeks. During this time I did nothing else. Nothing. And so the posters were pushed further back. Burnt out and ornery we moved into the house mid-January. Spent another week finishing up odd ends, unpacking, and laying on the couch. After this week it became apparent I should check in on my businesses to see if I still had a means of income to help support this house. So for two weeks I reconcentrated on these businesses, making sure everything was good and right with them. Everything was livable. This then, would have been a great time to rededicate myself to the poster project. However, I am driven day and night by a desire to actually make a living as an artist, and by early February I had gone over 2 months without so much as a foot placed into my studio. I found the time away was actually quite beneficial. My head was swarming with new ideas, concepts, curiosities and the like. And so I've been there ever since. Till now...now I want to finish this poster project. I want you each to have your posters in hand before my baby is born (God willingly, healthy and without my big head) sometime mid to late June. Yesterday (April 16) I managed to send out all the outstanding (paid) domestic orders (excepting for JayBonci's which for some inexplicable reason didn't make it into the car). The International orders will hopefully follow shortly. And, if you who haven't yet paid, pay, yours will follow in kind.