Steve Gadlin's piece of the Internet

Today, at about noon, I drew the 5,000th cat for I Want To Draw a Cat For You. It hasn’t posted to the site yet… they release to the site and to Twitter on an automated timer… but if you click the thumb to the right you can have a sneak peek!

Every thousandth cat is a gift I draw to myself… a little check-in with me to mark my mental and emotional state as this project continues.

When I drew cat #1,000, I was congratulating myself on what I thought was the tail end of a project. At that point, that I had even reached 1,000 cat drawings was blowing my mind. The ridiculous influx of orders I received from my Groupon deal had taken quite a toll on me – late nights rushing through as many orders as I could had left me sleepless and anxious. So that thousandth cat was my way of patting myself on the back, and also a reminder that I should strongly consider all possible outcomes before rapping publicly about what I want to do for people.

My Shark Tank appearance happened right around cat #1,450, so by cat #2,000 the crush I felt from the Groupon surge looked like a walk in the park. I had at least another 1,000 cats in my backlog. I was back full time at my day job, and putting in late and exhausting nights after work every day. I was a complete mental and emotional wreck. I think the drawing captures that pretty well.

Cat #3,000 posted just 3 weeks later, on my 36th birthday. I was sick, I was tired… but cool and promising things were happening with the project. I was working with a toy designer and a literary agent on concepts to grow the brand, and all of my hard work seemed to be serving some greater purpose. So I mustered up a Happy Birthday, and kept plodding along through my queue.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I drew cat #4,000. I’m sure there’s a cry for help encoded in there somewhere, as the thousand cats immediately following were pretty rough. More than once I cursed myself for having started this silly project, and strongly lamented the time I was spending away from my family. The hardest part was seeing the effect of my absence manifest in my kids.

Which brings me to the cat I drew today, the 5,000th in the series. It came up in the queue as I was hitting my low. The weight and stress of adding this work to my life, and how it has eaten away at my day job and parenthood, was absolutely crushing me. But sometimes when you’re at the bottom, you can touch the roots. As I put pen to paper, I was struck with the reason for this, and all of my other silly projects… and remembered why it’s all worth it.

I draw stick figure cats for people to combat loneliness in myself and others.

In times when I have been down, finding a kindred spirit out there in the universe has always made a big difference. Weird people need to be noisy some times so that other weird people can find them. So while I can’t sustain this pace forever, I have to have a little faith that I can push through this rough spot and turn this project into something that eats a little less of my time. And while I do that, I take comfort knowing that each cat drawing is a personal note between me and a customer – and every once in a while that tiny gesture of connection will put a smile on my face, or on theirs. And that is pretty important. So important, in fact, that I drew myself a bonus pig to boot.

Only time can tell us if the sacrifices we make in the name of silly dreams are worth it in the end.

Cheers, weirdos. There are still a few of us kicking around in this crowded, empty universe.

I’m usually super cool when it comes to customer service. Even in the face of severe complaints and harsh feedback, I try to respond calmly, coolly, and with the demeanor of a saint. It may have been my ornery mood today, but responding with snark bit me in the butt today… in a way I think you may enjoy. So here’s the unedited conversation I had with a very special customer this afternoon.

From Rachel, in response to my latest Blewt! newsletter:

steve i dont like you leve me olone

My response:

You are now unsubscribed from my mailing list. Take care!

Rachel’s response:

thanks i never liked you and you suck at drawing btw

My response (and here’s where I get a little ornery):

Rachel -

Thanks for your comments. I hope you go on to create wonderful things in life.

I am also very sorry that you couldn’t find the very simple “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of my mailing list emails. If you had, you could have solved your problem yourself. And I bet that would have felt real great – doing something all by yourself like that.

Stay in school,
Steve

Rachel’s response:

dont tell me what to do u booger

My response:

I would never tell you what to do.

I would suggest that you attend some sort of class in spelling or grammar, so that your emails come across more professionally. It’s hard to take someone seriously who writes like a 9-year old.

Best,
Steve

Rachel’s response:

i am 9 stupid

Point Rachel.

The lesson here? When you’re performing customer service, just grin and bear it. The customer is always right. Or nine.

Tonight my Shark Tank episode will re-run on ABC at 8/7 Central. But that’s hardly the exciting news.

It’s a boy! Oliver Samuel Gadlin has joined us a couple of weeks early – no doubt because he wanted to watch his Pops score a deal with Mark Cuban on ABC tonight. Becky and I headed to the hospital for what we were both sure was a false alarm early Monday evening… but once we got there, Oliver took over, and at 2:29am on Tuesday morning, 3/27, our family grew again.

Oliver joined his big brother Jackson (2) and his big sister Izzie (almost 5!) at home on Thursday evening. I had been in denial about this pregnancy until the very last minute. Even while we were at the hospital, it felt like we were just going through the motions of some silly game. Surprise, Steve! You get a baby!

My body is slowly waking up to the sense memory of having a newborn in the house. I’m taking some time off from my day job, but I’m still trying to pump out at least 50 cat drawings every day while I’m home with the family. Some days it has been easier than others.

Becky has been an absolute champ. I’m pretty grumpy when I’m sleep deprived, and doubly so when I feel the weight of several non-family responsibilities pulling me in every direction. But she and Oliver have maintained a very quiet dignity to offset my tantrums.

Welcoming Oliver into our little family will be a slow and awesome process. And thanks to all of this cat drawing business, my monthly payment on the inevitable (really!) mini-van will be a little smaller. We’re living the American Dream in the Gadlin household. Some twisted version of it, at least.

Whoopy! Hooray for babies! I am so proud and enamored of my little growing brood.

Kevin Smith and his cat drawing.

I’ve started about 7 or 8 blog posts trying to sum up the last year… the Don’t Spit the Water pilot, my Shark Tank experience, working with Mark Cuban, etc.

The more I have to write about, the more difficult it is for me to write.

A few days before my 35th birthday, I stubbornly planted a few seeds. I set lofty goals for 35. I was going to take one last crack at turning Don’t Spit the Water! into a television show. I was going to make one last trip to New York and try for the Andy Kaufman award. I was basically giving myself permission to bust my hump for one more year to try and make my mark in the world of comedy. Success would be black or white – there would be no confusion. Things were either going to click, or I was going to look myself in the mirror and come to term with the fact that I’m a guy who builds websites – albeit a pretty weird one.

There was no black or white. My successes were failures, my failures were successes – and as I should have been able to predict, the future is still a little fuzzy and unsure.

So with just over an hour to go of 35, I’m wishing I had just a little more time, or a little more clarity.

I’m not sure which of my universes to focus on this year. Hopefully this is the year I can squeeze them all into one.

A preview of my Shark Tank appearance… posted to YouTube by ABC!

It’s amazing how social networking diminishes the drive to blog. Which is fine – blogging is a pretty self-indulgent and obnoxious practice, and less is always more. But blogging does have a nifty byproduct – years and years of drivel that I can hopefully enjoy when I’m very, very old. And my kids might get a kick out of this stuff some day, too.

Lately I’ve been puzzling over Blewt!, and how to define it. The first project to wear the logo was a video I created called Silly Faces, probably about 10 years ago. It featured 30 people, each making silly faces for 120 seconds, set to nauseatingly obnoxious music. All sixty minutes of it can be watched in order on YouTube. A byproduct of this silly project – check out what improvisors looked like 10 years ago.

Silly Faces is awful, and impossible to watch. It takes silliness and beats you across the face with it in tedious 2-minute chunks. The point, obviously, was not to be a watchable film. It was the first crack at a common Blewt! objective – to create the “found footage” of tomorrow. Thirty years from now, someone will stumble upon someone’s old Silly Faces DVD and scratch their head… and hopefully continue to share it with others. The same way that things like this and this breathe second lives out of context.

Silly Faces was followed by Silly Dances, Silly Horse Whispering, and the never-quite-finished Silly Lickin’ Pickles. These are all worth a peek, but I wouldn’t spend more than thirty seconds on them. Especially if there are other people around.

Now in between these “Silly Sessions,” Blewt! launched several stage shows, and a handful of online video things (like this, and this, and oh yeah, this). And as the collective grew, that became our primary focus – creating comedy for people to watch in a theater, or sitting at their computer, that would both delight and confuse them.

Recently, Blewt! has gone through another evolution. In addition to our strange videos and ridiculous stage shows, we now sell things. Like stick figure cat drawings, T-shirts with two film titles printed on them, and soon, custom theme songs. For a while, I struggled to figure out how this all fit together. In a way, we’re using e-commerce as a performance art – trying to accomplish the same ends, head-scratching delight, through an unexpected means.

When I was a kid, I remember coming home from Trick or Treating with a bag full of crazy candy. Every piece was different. The wrappers were colorful. There were candies I had never heard of. Nowadays, every house hands out the same thing – special Halloween-sized versions of the same 10 candies, in their bland orange and brown wrappers.

Blewt!’s mission is to bring back the excitement of unpredictability to your daily life – to pepper your existence with unexpected discoveries. We want to be that crazy bag of random Halloween treats, that you couldn’t wait to tear into.

I think it’s an important mission. I’m struggling with the right words to explain why. Everyone feels weird or strange at certain points in life. Even normal people. When you stumble upon something weird or strange and can connect with it, it diminishes loneliness. So by scattering Blewt!’s artifacts, the hope is that we’ll diminish loneliness in others, the same way similar discoveries have diminished it in us.

We’ll do it on a stage, we’ll do it on YouTube, we’ll do it on TV, we’ll do it by selling you something stupid on an e-commerce website. And it’s a sure bet we’ll continue to find strange and new ways to get your attention, in ways that hopefully continue to surprise.

While by all rights the airing of the Don’t Spit the Water! pilot should have been the banner event of my 2011, it was overshadowed. In July, on a whim (that will be the title of my autobiography), I shot a quick email to the Shark Tank casting department. Shark Tank is an ABC reality show where entrepreneurs pitch their inventions or business ideas to a panel of sharks – millionaire and billionaire business-folks – with the hopes of receiving financial backing. I had seen the show a few times – it almost always consisted of some clueless entrepreneur defending their legitimate business while the sharks degraded them with a fierce line of questioning.

Here’s the text of my email to Shark Tank casting:

Hey there.

I draw stick figure cats for people at $9.95/pop.

http://iwanttodrawacatforyou.com

I believe with some investment, I can turn this into a bazillion dollar company.

In just 6 months, I’ve sold and drawn over 1,000 cats!

I need some money to invest in marketing and advertising. Also, for a giant swimming pool to hold all of my incoming bucks.

Thanks for your time, please let me pitch this to the sharks!!

This was actually the second time I had emailed Shark Tank casting. I had sent a similar message the year before, and it was ignored. So I expected the same result. But one night, while pacing, getting ready to hop on stage for Impress These Apes, I noticed a missed call from California. Shark Tank casting had reached out to me, and they wanted to talk.

Without completely giving up their complicated casting procedure, I’ll say that I spent the next two months speaking with them a couple of times a week. They had me create a couple of videos, write up several versions of my pitch to the Sharks… and at each step I was told that nothing was guaranteed. In fact, I was pretty certain I’d be dropped from the process, and I’d chalk this up to another one of those cool experience I almost got to have. But they kept calling back. And we kept moving forward. And then one day, they sent me my plane tickets and itinerary for a 5-day trip to Los Angeles.

I flew out to LA on September 5th, two days after the airing of the DSTW pilot. It was one of the greatest weeks I’ve ever had – and at some point I’ll write about it in depth. It felt great to disappear for a week and re-connect with some LA friends. Watching Shark Tank be produced was such an awesome experience. I’ve had some exposure to TV behind the scenes, but none of it measured up to this scale. I was in awe the whole time.

On September 8th, I got to walk down the shark-infested hallway and deliver my pitch to Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, and Robert Herjavec. To say it was surreal would be a gross understatement. And while the outcome is a secret until the episode airs on January 27th, it’s pretty irrelevant to the great feeling I had flying home the next morning.

2011 closed in a grand fashion – the DSTW pilot airing, the Shark Tank taping… and the airing on 2012 promises to kick off this year in a ridiculous and special way.

But the real highlights of 2012 all come after January. In February, Jackson turns 2. A couple of months later, a new baby boy joins the family. And on April 24th, my Izzie turns 5-years old.

The one thing I’ve learned to count on is that, hard as I try, I have no idea what surprises await me this year. I’m growing to love the mystery of it all.

I don’t have a good memory for years. I remember 2010 as being a bit of a downer. Hope for any success moving Don’t Spit the Water! to television had been fizzling out fast. Then I hit my lowest point at the top of November, when Paul Luikart and I took 2nd place in the Andy Kaufman Awards. We had just given what I think was our best performance ever… and came so close to the prize… so when we walked away with 2nd, I was just about ready to throw in the towel.

I had peaked! It was over! The universe had given me a pat on the back and a 2nd place certificate, and said, “now get back to work.”

And then, as 2010 was coming to a close, Groupon ran a deal for my silly cat drawing project, and the world opened up again. Suddenly, over the course of a week, I was in the Huffington Post, Chicago Public Radio, all sorts of blogs and podcasts, and had appearances on WGN Radio and NBC News. That boost gave me the life and drive to turn 2011 into one of the best years of my life, and as it comes to a close, 2012 is looking mighty fine.

In 2011, I decided to take the fate of Don’t Spit the Water! into my own hands. Since its exciting peak in 2008, where we performed for Comedy Central and got to pitch the show out in LA, I had been leaning on other people to make something out of this show. We had an option deal with Syd Vinnedge productions for a while. Then with some guy named Jeff. Then with a guy in New Zealand. And as that dried up, I came to a realization that I come to often:

Nobody gives a shit about your shit but you.

Maybe that’s something I made up. Or maybe that’s something Don Hall told me one time. Either way, it’s a far more optimistic maxim than it sounds. And it gave me the energy and impetus to look at things differently. I schemed. I cooked up a plan. And just days before my 35th birthday, I put it into action.

I stayed late and hung around my boss’s door on a Friday, and luckily caught him as he walked from one office to another. In one of my more gutsy moments, I asked him to make me a deal. I asked him if he would guarantee me that if I raised enough money to finance my own pilot shoot, that he would give it at least one airing on one of Weigel’s stations. I caught him on a good day. He said yes – and with that guarantee, the Don’t Spit the Water! Kickstarter project was launched. 101 backers later, we raised the money we needed… and on September 3rd, at midnight, on WCIU, The U, Don’t Spit the Water! had its television debut.

It was a fine, fine moment, watching that show on television surrounded by people who’ve contributed to its success. The whole experience was great – from the months of preparation, to the day long shoot, to the actual airing… that was my 2011, right there.

It’s almost a shame that an experience that was years in the making would be so quickly overshadowed. DSTW aired on a Saturday. Two days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles for what would be one of the coolest experiences of my life…

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

Jackson sits down for a roll.

My son, Jackson, is now almost two years old. And while most of that time has been spent running from me and into the arms of his mother, it seems we’ve finally found some common ground. Jack likes to roll. He’ll grab one of his cars or trucks and wave it in my face – just waiting for the magic words, “Jack, you wanna roll that?” When he hears them, he smiles broadly and runs to assume the position at one end of the hallway. He’ll plop down and motion for me to take a seat at the opposite end.

And then we’ll engage in a game as old as the wheel – pushing something back and forth until we get tired of it. There’s no pretend involved. There’s little sound, no talking – just rolling.

This is the exact opposite of the games that his sister, Izzie, enjoys. Games with Izzie involve running from one room to another, chasing, singing, dancing, screaming… they are frantic and seemingly without plot or purpose. And I love those games. But sitting and rolling with Jack is calming, almost relaxing. And there’s a real connection to be made being involved in such a singular, focused purpose – passing something back and forth and back and forth.

I find myself initiating these games from time to time, now. In the middle of the standard family-of-four chaos, I’ll reach for Lightning McQueen, or a book he has that’s also a firetruck, and I’ll motion toward the hallway. The games will only last a minute or three, usually until Becky walks by, and he’s screaming for his mother. But I’ll take ‘em.