Don't Blow A Gasket

The drummer in my band told me not to blow a gasket today. Later, I got to thinking about it, and “blowing a gasket” pretty much describes my reaction to something that he wrote. I blew a gasket. I’m more than a little embarrassed about it, too.
For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to work up a logo for the band. We need one in order to start getting out press kit together so we can start marketing the band to area clubs. We started out with a basic premise. The drummer wanted something that he could put on a drum head, and a ring of fire was mentioned. Various ideas flew back and forth, and I started rendering them as best as I could.
I won’t go into details no one cares about. But to sum up why I blew a gasket, consider that there are 94 files involved in this particular project, with a total combined size of 504 megabytes, and including over 30 individual renders of variations on the themes we started with. I spent over about three weeks on this, going over every suggestion and rendering every possibility so that we could eventually wind up with something that everyone could be happy with. A couple of days ago, we finally arrived at something that everyone seemed to like, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, thinking that we had, at long last, reached the end of this particular epic adventure.
Well…
This morning the drummer wrote an e-mail in which he said “the fire may need to come back to earth, so to say” and pointed out that his wife “doesn’t like the circular flames too much, reminds her too much of an afterburner and not just fire”. He went on to suggest that, essentially, we might start over, using one of the original ideas that I came up with instead. I started thinking about how many hoops I’d jumped through in the past couple of weeks to try to make everyone happy, only to wind up back at square one. And… I…
Well… I blew a gasket.
I told Victoria that if she’d been standing behind me, she would have gotten to see a cartoon nuclear cloud go off over my head. For me, it was kind of like getting the football to within five yards of the goal line in a play-off game with 20 seconds on the clock and you were about to win, and suddenly they tell you that you’re going to have to play the entire game over again. I don’t think anything sums up that feeling better than the cartoon image of Yosemite Sam that I’ve included with this post.
All this said, I felt really bad about losing my cool. For one thing, I doubt it helped my standing with the guys any. But I can’t help the way I feel. I’ve worked my ass off trying to get this logo done, and I’ve put aside a lot of projects that I really, really need to be working on. We need to find ways to make money so that we don’t wind up on the street, and one of the many solutions to our problems might be the series of faeries that I’m going to be drawing. I was about to finish my first one when I got side-lined by the whole logo thing. I need to get back to that. I don’t know. Maybe the guys think that because I work out of my home that I sit around in my underwear and watch television all day. But there is a limit to how much time I can commit to any given project.
I just wish I’d waited until the cloud had died down a bit before I commented on this issue. I only came off sounding like an asshole. Who knows? Maybe I am an asshole. What’s the old saying?
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”