Credit: Nicholas LeeIt is done.
Although the first workblog was written roughly 300 days before PCN, the official PCN day count ended at 348, just short of a year. But if I want to be honest with myself, planning for PCN began in the very back parts of my brainspace two years ago. Back when I was attending script meetings to figure out what PCN 2008 was going to be, ideas kept trickling in that would later become PCN 2009. I wrote them in my notebook. I fleshed them out on the drive home. I transferred them to a notepad file.
Then later it was there, on stage, in costume and awash in a light special. It's a strange process. From incubation to fertilization to the violent birth pangs until eventually and finally, it is done. Something so introverted, so personal, is outside of my heart. It exploded out of my chest like so many alien parasites and has hopefully burrowed into yours.
I prided myself on my organization and getting-shit-done track record in regards to producing PCN. That all fell apart in the last week or so, when I didn't accomplish some of the more minor, but long-planned tasks like inviting the chancellor personally or notifying the Press-Telegram or, you know, making any sponsorship money at all.
I was so consumed by this, mind, body and soul, that I didn't even have time to write a post here about the night before. At best, I wrote this paragraph, in my numb state of being:
i'm not nervous. i'm not anticipating or anxious or worried. I'm just here. I was the same I was yesterday, same I as last month, same as I was the day I took this task on. Maybe It's become an institution of my life to the point where I can't even register it.
And that's the truth of it. I still don't know why. I don't know why I didn't have a heart attack, why I didn't come down with a case of the tears, or why my shoulders didn't feel any less unburdened. I heard a lot of ideas. Is it because everything isn't last minute and we're pretty prepared? Perhaps I had lived with it for so long that I don't even feel it anymore. Maybe I had invested so much of myself into it that I had nothing left in me to get emotional. It could also be that this was all just work; purely mechanical labor.
I hope I figure it out one day.
That's not to say it wasn't a great experience; a pride and joy full of wonderful anecdotes and bonds and friends. But on some level I think I may have given up having fun myself in order to facilitate the playground for everyone else. I had no nervouseness, no nerves wracked, and a general disconnection from the work that did not fall directly under my wing.
You know what I miss the most? I mean, I liked a lot of it. I enjoyed every practice, every person, every laugh. But when I look back at my workblogs, I miss writing it the most. I miss not knowing what PCN was going to say, and what the stories were going to lead to, and freaking out about a 30-scene PCN in 80 pages. I miss the darkness of my old room, typing away and building worlds.
Now that world is built and so familiar. As with all things novel, the oddness withers away. But the beauty of that is that now it belongs to everyone. It might not be new and exciting to me anymore, but I managed to make it new and exciting for a bunch of other people. No regrets.
That's the gist of my post-PCN blues. I did it, and I don't know how to feel. But everyone else does, so what do I matter?
I just wish I was nervous. I wish that my knees shook and I couldn't sleep the night before. I wish it felt like the world was pushed to the brink of the apocalypse and then pulled back to safety. But I'll settle for some incremental change to the PCN tradition, a continued legacy, and being the builder of a home that others populate with unforgettable memories.
Can't wait to see it on DVD, though.