Sometimes my favorite drawings come from a simple equation:
picture + surreal twist = a pretty rad thing to draw.
You can’t quite look at it and say it’s not realistic, because it’s not meant to be. That alone relaxes the expectations of my own illustration skills. But you also can’t deny the concept at hand. It’s right there, waiting for you to connect the dots. And when you do? You’re looking at the piece for what it makes you think of far more than what went into pulling it off. That, to me, is the dream. The drawings I love the most aren’t something to admire, but to make you feel something. To think. To leave you to digesting everything long after your eyes leave the page.
When you’re a new parent, working full-time, and trying to finish one of many writing projects, the tick can be shark-like, moving slowly, yet menacingly through the water. If you ever watch the seconds hand in a public school classroom, you know where this is going. The way the hand moves without any ticking – just one steady, ongoing wave around the clock. It’s a predator in motion, waiting for its prey to make a mistake.
But anyone who’s ever seen a sundial knows it can be misread. If you’re looking at the shadows in the wrong way, from the wrong direction, you can easily be fooled. All of which is to say: the ticking of time is often an illusion that speeds up our heartrate, that compacts stress an extra few degrees beyond what we feel we can handle. It creates a sensation I can only describe as a crunch. Perhaps it’s the sundial shark’s jaws sinking into you, meeting the weariness of your bones. Perhaps it’s a shadow you’ve misread. Perhaps it’s both.
My dad showed me Jaws too early. I only knew it from the famous poster, the one with a giant shark’s mouth open wide, ready to consume a flailing, floating woman at the surface. I knew the theme song before I knew the movie, as my dad hummed it often, each time with a little twinkle of gentle menace in his eyes. I needed the repetition because the theme song notes were often too low for me to truly hear.
What I remembered about Jaws far more than anything in the movie itself is how it changed me. Specifically, how it made me terrified to be anywhere near water I could not clearly see all the way to the bottom. When we went to California a short time after seeing this terrifying film, my new fear presented itself in two key ways. The first came when we walked into a dimly-lit section of Seaworld with tanks of black water. I was so sure a shark would drag me to the depths if I ever put in an inch of my body near it. It didn’t matter if it was far too small a tank for such a shark to fit – let alone thrive – in. The imagination filled in the gaps. The second came shortly after at the beach when I dragged my feet into the ocean as the waves crashed and swirled around. At one point, something grabbed me and I screamed something, “It’s got me!” and sprinted out of the water as fast as my 4th-grade heart could pump. The laughter from my parents clued me in. It was no shark. It was fucking seaweed. That’s how badly Jaws had scarred me.
From then on, the fear become more subtle and more gripping all at once. Whenever we’d go out in the boat at Long Lake, we’d have a ritual of anchoring the boat somewhere not too far from the coastline and then hop out and swim around before eating our homemade lunches. It didn’t matter how many times I assured myself sharks were saltwater animals and we were at least 300 miles from anything approaching that kind of water. It didn’t matter if I knew alligators or piranhas or orcas were not native to Spokane. Whenever I’d swim out from the boat, I’d always, always swim back as if I was being chased. The feeling, even as I eased into my 30s, never left me. Something, somewhere was just waiting for me to relax. Just like the unsuspecting woman on the Jaws movie poster.
I think about that feeling a lot when I think about time. The way it feels you’re being chased by something that’s not quite tangible or easy to explain, that carries a heat of danger you cannot cool. Time can be like that. The way the seconds pivot in one continuous, unerring motion, around and around and around again. But like the fear of a saltwater shark chasing you in a freshwater lake, it’s not quite real. Time doesn’t have to be so compressed. The crunch doesn’t have to have any bite. The seconds can transform from an unrelenting shark to a natural, steady rhythm of life. It can be what we make it. We can find other things to make us tick.
