As I've been mentioning throughout the past few weeks, this will be the final post on My Owls Are Better. I'm concluding the blog only because one year seems to be a sufficient amount of time to keep something like this going. The header that has always been at the top of this website has never and will never describe exactly how bizarre it is that what started as a prank turned into a year long project that has attracted the stares of thousands. I myself am still speechless at the sheer magnitude of the absurdity of this blog, and I must admit that there is a small part of me that wanted to close up shop months ago after the lunacy dissolved into what I felt was banality. As to whether or not an outside observer could stroll past this website and not smirk at how outlandish it is to devote a year of one's life to creating owl related greeting cards, I cannot say. In fact, one thing that kept me going was the knowledge that each new card added another brick into the temple of frivolous obsession that I was constructing and that I would not be content until I felt secure that someone like me would, someday, hack his way into the jungle, even if it was only once, to visit it to see if it was really as big as the locals said. As to whether or not the explorer agreed with or believed what was written on the walls doesn't matter as long as he saw that the men who built it cared enough to make it as grand as they could.
So many of my favorite TV episodes are series finales. The strange thing about me, though, is that I am far too sentimental to watch the last episode from any TV series without being properly emotionally prepared, which I find I never am. I wind up never seeing them out of fear that they would remind me simply that a TV show that I loved is gone. I don't want to live out a series finale here, even though I know I have no choice. As such, I'll simply discuss a thought that I've been entertaining lately, one formed throughout the year that I've posted to this blog.
Creative products are always reflective of what the creator was feeling at the time. This is a no-brainer. Everybody knows about the tormented mind of Beethoven and the broken heart of Van Gogh. I'm only now starting to realize that this carries over to every content creator. Things like children's books and sitcom scripts appear to be completely one dimensional at first blush, but I'm starting to realize that even things as base as these have to be inspired by something, and these inspirations likely spring from the same wells that the famous composers and painters of history probably drank from. I first noticed this after viewing a documentary about the fans and creator of the Rock-afire Explosion (the animatronic band that played at Showbiz Pizza until its dissolution into Chuck E. Cheese in the 90's.) The moment I'm thinking of came close to the end of the movie, before the creator of the group gives a tour of the workshop that he had frequented every day, long after the collapse of Rock-afire, yet nonetheless still had tools and benches that had not been touched since his workers left 20 years prior. He was reminiscing about the songs that he wrote for the robot musicians, still remembering many note-for-note. He thought of one that had particular significance to him; a birthday song. He wrote a birthday song that described, in its lyrics, the candles on a cake, and how each represented a year that had passed. The song itself could not be simpler, and the lyrics were, of course, basic and unambiguous enough to be performed by furry robots at a four year old's birthday party in a pizza parlor. But when he thought about the song, and (especially) when he thought about the friends that he sang it with, he began to cry. He thought about what the candles from the song meant to him, and how many candles he had lit since his workshop grew silent, and the feeling made him cry. Twenty years after Showbiz Pizza disappeared, that song; that short, simple song still spoke to its creator and, frankly, to me as well. The song was written for a pizza chain and was about nothing more than birthday candles, but had a depth and a message to it that rivaled any piece of high art that I've ever encountered. It's humbling to think that every piece of art that we may or may not recognize as art has a story like that behind it. Every creative product has within it a journal of the creator's feelings or passions or fears or loves. Every cartoon, every commercial, every Big Time Rush song was created by a human being and fueled by passion. Even things as silly as pre-recorded pizza parlor tunes come from emotional places sometimes.
Thoughts like that often make me think about the Tootsie Roll Pop commercial. It's one of the most well known commercials in America and is still on the air countless years after its debut, and I see it nearly every day. But I wonder how I would feel if I was April Winchell, the daughter of Paul Winchell, the man who did the voice of Mr. Owl and who passed away in 2005. I wonder what it must be like to be April, and to see that commercial. I wonder what it's like to have something so ordinary, something that is used to sell Tootsie Roll Pops, be a living time capsule of someone I love. And I wonder if April knows how I feel when I watch Pepper Ann, a show in which she was one of the stars (providing the voice of Lydia Pearson.) Pepper Ann was one of the shows that defined my bringing-up, and when I watch it today it makes me feel like I'm home again. There aren't a lot of things in this universe that make me as happy as that TV show does. I wonder if she knows that what she did to get a paycheck 15 years ago was a major contribution to one of the biggest influences on my young life. I guess what I'm scratching at is that every creative endeavor touches at least one person. It can touch the creator, the observer, or both. And it doesn't matter if the endeavor was a Disney cartoon or a Tootsie Roll Pop commercial or a song from the Showbiz Pizza jukebox. Frankly, it doesn't even matter if it's owl related greeting cards. Every piece of content is a piece of someone's heart. I remind myself of that constantly, and it makes the world infinitely more humbling than it was before.
I guess I just felt like mentioning that to reassure myself that I didn't waste a year. It is surreal, though, to see my cards now. Each holiday and each sentiment sentenced to paper now serves as a painfully personal timeline of May 2011 to May 2012 from my life. It isn't that I have any regrets or that I had a bad time, but it is a little scary to see how an entire year can fly by so rapidly and then be neatly stacked and put in a shoebox. But I'm not scared, and this really isn't the end of anything. Summer vacation starts soon, I'm going to be buying a new computer sometime this week (hopefully) and I'm praying that I get Sunday off so that I can go get drunk at a soccer game with my friends. I'm going to leave it at that. There isn't going to be a final card tonight. Maybe someday I'll draw one, and I'll probably revise some old ones, but I've got too much on my plate right now. I've got a busy day tomorrow, and you probably do to. I'll probably see you around.
