Once more I find myself contemplating just leaving the ums and ahs and stutters and y’knows in my videos and just posting them raw.
After all, that’s what the internet likes, right? Raw, uncut, unfiltered opinions that they already agree with.
I can do that.
Anyhow, I am contemplating the raw life again because of how much work went into editing this video and I still ended up leaving a whole bunch of verbal dross in.
I just ran out of energy to keep editing.
Here it is :
Then again, if I stammer that much, maybe my videos would be terrible raw. Maybe the sweat equity I put into editing these things is the price I pay for being able to do everything in one take, with just me talking.
I mean, what else am I going to do? Write a script? Rehearse? DO MORE THEN ONE TAKE? Now you’re just talking crazy.
Still, I am slowly building up my videos to look a little more professional. I am adding my “like and subscribe” bit to the end, plus I usually have a little blooper for after, and this time I even had a very brief opening slate.
Still not decided on that. I think I’ll need something less… crude.
And I will probably make a short end credits sequence too. I will do what I can to restrain my urge to put every funny credit idea I’ve had over the years into it.
I will save those for when I make things that are a tad longer.
I am currently pretty tired because not only did I have Wound Care and the lab to deal with today, my good friend Ross Archer called me out of the blue and we had a nice chat about politics as he traveled through Nevada.
And that was very nice. I loved hearing from him and we had a great talk. We talked for a little over an hour and I loved every minute of it.
It’s so nice to talk with people, like Ross and my friends, who can actually understand my thoughts and ideas when I express them.
Coming from a small town like I do, I did not grow up with that luxury. I was way, way beyond most people there.
Even my family could only follow me so far before getting utterly lost.
I guess having a vlog and a blog is my solution to that problem. I can express myself without worrying about being understood. And I do so as honestly and as well as I know how every single day.
And I want more of that. More outlet for all the stuff whirling around in my head like a dictionary in a tornado. More ways to express my ambitions to make something truly special and new and extraordinary. More production value in my works.
Some vague sort of chance of making money.
Though honestly, for me, the audience is more important. I would rather have a million followers and no money than 10,000 followers and a nice paycheck.
I want to be heard, I want to be listened to, I want to transmit my knowledge and understanding and unique point of view to the world in the hopes of contributing to people’s understanding of the world and playing a part in public discourse.
It’s hard to see from the ground level but arguing with strangers online does serve a purpose. Public discussion is how a society thinks about itself. And the truly excellent commenters add value to that discourse.
And I want to be one of them.
That seems doable to me.
More after the break.
Another Friday night
OK. Deep breaths. Repeat my mantra : the fact that it feels like time is going faster is an illusion. I am still getting just as many minutes in a day as ever. I can relax about time.
I have to talk myself down that way from time to time because the feeling of acceleration can really freak me out sometimes.
I remember it starting in my late 30s. Back then, it was less about time and more about every day being the same, but I would get this horrible feeling like all my days were collapsing into one never-ending meta-day that I was doomed to repeat forever like a very dull version of Groundhog Day.
And that freaked me the fuck out. It made me feel trapped and oppressed by the sheer weight of it all and made me feel claustrophobic. Claustrophobic about time.
And that’s very not good.
Luckily that went away with age. I think I just learned to deal with it both by not letting the panic set in and by subtly shifting how I remember things from my life so that the ways days differed were emphasized.
But that made way for this new kind of time panic. Like right now. It’s Friday night. And to my aging brain, it feels like the previous Friday night was like… two days ago.
And I know a lot of things happened in the previous week. I can remember them all. And if I couldn’t I could just watch the videos I made.
So these two kinds of memory are in conflict with one another. Clearly the malfunction lies in how I “feel” time. The fact that it feels like the previous Friday was two days ago has to be an illusion because I have a whole week’s worth of memories.
Heck, I have a week’s worth of blog entries as well.
So clearly I need a way to recalibrate how I “feel” time. Perhaps the secret is to try to take in more information from my environment in order to give my mind a greater variety and density of things to remember.
And maybe, just maybe, I need to do more different things with my days. Including one-off non-repeating things that can act as anchors in time.
So basically, I need to get a life already.
So what else is new?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.