No big pile of links to share today, so I will start off with today’s vid.

Hey look, I managed to make something that had one thing to say, said it in a high density way, and then ended it. It’s still not up to the standard of professionalism that I desire, but it’s a promising start.

And let me tell you, I could have gone into so much more detail. It took a real act of will to just explain the thing in a reasonable efficient manner instead of pouring every thought I have about the subject into the vid.

As is, I think I sort of ended it abruptly. But this is my first time attempting such concision. As I practice it over and over, I will no doubt get better at it.

Ideally, I would love to be able to condense all these “the deal” type things into a really lean, muscular ten second sound bite, and do six per episode, bang bang bang. One minute, six questions you have always wondered about answered. Smokin’.

That would be some pretty Internet-friendly content, and I think I might be able to pull it off. It was very interesting taking my original three minutes of video and paring it down to around half that minus the credits. There were large sections I clipped out because I realized they were unnecessary. I hope to further develop this ability.

Plus, it’s a fun way to share my zillions of theories with the world. I know that the format sort of implies I am giving people facts, and I am definitely going to give a lot of thought to how to remove that without causing the format to lose its appeal.

Maybe I should sign off with “And as far as I am concerned, that’s the deal with that.” Or something along those lines, but more compact and pithy.

Or I suppose I could just put a disclaimer on the end that says “Michael Bertrand, while amazingly intelligent, is not an expert in any field and the views expressed on this show are his alone, and not endorsed by science, culture, or God. ”

That should cover it, I think.

Other than making the vid, it was a pretty quiet day here at Casa Del Mio. In fact, today’s vid took so little time to make, even with the pictures and text, that I was left adrift and purposeless for a couple of hours. So what did I do?

I took a stupid fucking nap. That shit has to end. There must be all kinds of things I could do, real value added meaningful things, that might even lead to opportunities and shit, that I could do for myself when I find myself at loose ends.

Taking a random nap when I do not even feel sleepy, just for something to do to make the time pass faster and to reset my anxiety clock, should be the absolute last resort. I am forty years old now and the last thing I should want is to make my slide to the grave any faster.

I want to reach out and grab life, devour it like the feast it is, and get the most out of my life. I have spent two decades wasting my life by trying to get the least out of it.

Hell, just trying to get out of it period. Living like I am in the world’s most piss-poor version of the Witness Protection Program, hiding out, afraid to be recognized, only going out into the world when it is absolutely necessary and even then, never alone.

But nobody is looking for me. Trust me on that. I am not hiding out from anything but reality, and frankly, I am getting sick of it.

And it is hard, sometimes, to take things step by step. There is a big part of me that wants to do something big and crazy and then just dare the world to ignore me.

But of course, the world is not ignoring me. In order to ignore something, you have to know it exists. That is what divides ignoring from ignorance.

After all, there are billions of people in this world that you know absolutely nothing about. That does not mean you are ignoring them. You just don’t know. You couldn’t know.

I think one of those unintended side-effects of mass media culture is the deep down feeling in many people that if you are not famous, you don’t exist. The people you see on TV or in movies, and heck even the people you see on YouTube (hi there!), seem so much more real and important than your completely ordinary and unrecognized life that I think people start to feel like that reality, the world of fame and exposure, is the only truly real world and that the rest of us are somehow entirely real, or at best, just extras in a crowd scene of life.

After all, part of media saturation is that you see far, far more people via media than you ever do in real life. Each individual exposure is very weak, being many places removed from being as stimulating as a real world encounter, but the sheer volume of them overwhelms the boundaries of our personal realities and create this zeitgeist world where things we know definitely are not real (they’re fictional) still have some of the effects of real things on us.

I mean, it’s hardly genius cultural analysis to talk about how characters in people’s favorite show begin to seem like members of the family to them over time. But I wonder if we really understand just how much that means in terms of the public consciousness and how it relates to each and every one of us.

We are all swimming in the media ocean, one we increasingly contribute to ourselves as well.

I don’t think we have even begun to understand just what that means.

Hmmm. Interesting theory. Maybe it will be a Deal some day!

Did a vlog today. I will link it later. I wish I had the energy to spice it up a little, but nope. It’s pretty much just me talking. Damn.

But first, some neat stuff to share.

Like the sad yet amusing tale of the poor fellow who accidentally broadcast ten minutes of hardcore porn on the Jumbotron in a train station in China.

He had been hired to fix said Jumbotron, and in doing so, had connected his laptop to it. One thing led to another and he decided to watch some porn on his laptop, forgetting it was still plugged in.

And he got away with it for ten minutes before someone called him and told him what he was doing. One can only imagine the acute onset of shame and humiliation that poor fellow must have felt at that moment. I can picture him getting the call, getting the news, spending a few moments frozen in horror while staring at the connection between his laptop and the Jumbotron, then lunging at said connection and yanking it out like he was yanking his own nuts out of a fire.

The damage is done, though. I can only assume he is fired. Very very fired. But he has also be taken into custody by the police. I am not sure how criminal law works in China, but I can only imagine that the authorities are currently busy figuring what, exactly, to charge him with.

Public mischief? Disorderly conduct? Corruption of minors? Illegal downloading? There are a lot of possible choices here. Odds are they will charge him with something minor, give him a slap on the wrist, and let the public humiliation be punishment enough.

If it was entirely up to me, I wouldn’t charge him at all. That is exactly the sort of prank I would love to pull on purpose. People need to relax about sex and realize that seeing people fuck does not actual scramble your brain cells.

Even if a few kids saw it, it will not hurt them. Their parents being all weird and upset about it, that might hurt them. But the porn will have no effect. They filter out what they do not understand.

Another news story : the fellow who sold the “sure to be the next big thing” social networking site Bebo (heard of it? Me neither. ) to AOL for 850 million dollars (where the hell do they get these huge gobs of cash, anyhow?) has now bought it back, on a whim, for a million bucks.

According to the Bebo wiki entry, Bebo was a Facebook clone and buying it from its founders for so much was “one of the worst decisions of the dotcom era”, which is saying something.

I can only assume that the sales pitch was something like “it will be like Facebook, but you will own it!” and that made dollar signs pop up in AOL CEO Randy Falco’s eyeballs, completely missing that all important “getting people to sign up for and use a site that only does what their Facebook account does” step.

Classic business catastrophe caused by irrational exuberance. I can only imagine the people who got that nearly a billion dollars, Bebo co-founders Michael and Xochi Birch, were insanely happy with the deal. They must have felt pretty freaking smug about it.

And so for one of them, Michael, to buy back the company for around 0.12 percent of the what he got for it, and to do it pretty much just for the hell of it, is downright hilarious.

Next, we have this performance from America’s Got Talent.

Amazing, electrifying stuff. Got a standing O from the judges, which has to be encouraging. Blew the audience away. That young man’s act is pure dynamite, and I hope he goes far, though to be honest, I can’t even imagine what he could add to that act.

Take that, Shields and Yarnell!

Finally, we have my vid du jour, which is just me talking.

When I was done recording, I was quite surprised to realize that I had talked for around ten minutes. It didn’t feel like that long when I was doing it. I am not sure if I should be worried about that or what.

And yeah, today it’s just a philosophical vlog entry. I suppose I shouldn’t beat myself up over that. Lots of people have successful YouTube lives based entirely on talking to the camera.

I thought about trying to dig up a lot of pictures to use to illustrate the points I was making. It would not have been too hard, I am talking about pretty concrete things in this talk.

But I just do not have the energy needed to go hunt up enough pictures to cover a ten minute talk. That would be a hell of a lot of pictures. Even if the picture only changed every 20 seconds (way too slow), that would be thirty images right off the top.

And if it was at a more reasonable and watchable speed, like say changing every three seconds, then we are talking 200 images and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Of course, the argument could be made that I would not need so many pictures if I just got to the point faster, with no digressions, no ums and uhs, and with a single clear target in mind.

Certainly, a lot of the most successful web video content is short and extremely high density, and I do not know how to do that yet. I am not the sort of person who focuses down their thoughts like that very easily, and what’s more, when I try, I tend to lost interest in it.

A single target high speed high density video just seems boring to me, even though I quite enjoy other people’s examples of such.

I guess us thinkers prefer the broad and rambling plains of the realm of ideas instead of the narrow constraints of the delivery of information.

Still, I could learn to be a bit quicker about it.

Well, here’s the latest video product of my fevered imagination.

The writing is great and my acting is decent, but really, this idea required a much higher level of production than I could spare it on this hot day.

I must confess, doing this project of mine in the heat of the summer was, in retrospect, not the greatest of ideas, especially because as it works out, the logical time of day for me to do a video is the afternoon, when it is hottest.

As a result, my videos are increasingly done under highly adverse conditions. The heat really fries the old noodle and makes it hard for me to concentrate and put logical sequences of actions together, let alone produce a complex creative product.

Not that I think today’s product sucks or anything. I quite like the content. I just wonder..if I had been doing it when it was nice and cool out, would I have had the energy and focus to find something appropriate to wear (and been willing to wear it!), and done a title sequence for my fictional show (I thought about it but had a catastrophic collapsed of my confidence in my graphic design skills), and added a few more other things to make the thing look more professional?

That’s more or less where I am at in this long-term creative process now, I think. I have enjoyed a lot of exploration of method and technique, but now I seek refinement. I want to make things which are better looking, so to speak. Things that look more slick and professional and less like what they are, which is just some dude fucking around with a webcam and a video editing program.

I have faced this sort of problem before, and it always boils down to what I think of as the key issue of creative works : when you know something is wrong, but have no idea how to fix it. You can’t even describe the problem in concrete terms. I can say that I want my work to look more professional, but what does that mean, precisely? I don’t know. If I had a precise idea of what I meant, I suppose I would know how to fix it, or at least where to start.

And that is often where I get bogged down. Previously, in the throes of deep depression, I would reach this point of crisis where I can’t figure out how to make what I am doing better, and feel trapped in a no-win scenario, and instead of powering through the conflict I would just shut down the machine.

But I have developed a lot more persistence lately, largely due to playing Facebook puzzle games and developing my ability to keep flinging myself at a problem and trying different angles in that safe space.

And so I will continue to cogitate and dwell on this issues of making things look better. I know that I am a brilliant comedy writer and a decent performer.

I just need to refine the product more in order to make it less crappy looking. Right now, the unprofessional appearance of the vids is a huge barrier to them being accepted by people who are not my friends or family.

That reminds me, I should record a video letter for my Mom sometime soon. I bet she would love it. She will get to see me and hear me!

Don’t quite feel up to Skype yet, but I am getting there. I am slowly peeling back my intense feelings of self-consciousness about how I look and how I come across.

After all, you don’t learn anything by staying on the sidelines. You have to go out there and play the game and get hurt and learn from it.

That’s the only way to be free to join life instead of hiding from it. You have to overcome your animal instincts to avoid scary or painful situations and take yourself firmly in hand and say “Yes, this will be a scary and potential painful situation, but the growth makes it worth it. ”

That’s how normal people do it. Ironically, their lack of vision helps them a lot. They don’t grasp that they can escape any situation and so they have no choice but to stay in the game and learn social skills and find some way to cope with it all.

But we clever types, we can see how arbitrary the rules are and how the world outside the straight and narrow corridors of normalcy is so much bigger and brighter than the one inside. So those corridors do not bind us. We can walk right through those imaginary walls. In a very real way, it is like our minds have three dimensions and theirs only two.

No wonder they don’t trust us.

And because those walls don’t bind us, we know that it is always possible to escape anything. What others have no choice but to endure we merely sidestep, or go around, or climb over.

And from an existentialist point of view, that sounds fantastic. Total freedom, right? But it also means that we completely miss out on learning opportunities that the mainstream people get without even knowing, or without even knowing there was an alternative.

Those corridors bind them but they also support them. Us broad-minded clever types can see further but it comes at a cost in terms of lack of internal structure.

We are all eyes and no skeleton.

It is totally possible to be too smart for your own good. I honestly think that programs for gifted children could keep a lot of us from falling through the cracks, especially if they are designed with both a gifted child’s special intellectual and emotional needs in mind.

Being able to cut your own strings and go anywhere your mind can conceive is a wonderful gift. It is from people like us that we get the new ideas and new directions that enable progress.

But it is damned dangerous, and a lot of us pay the price.

Yup. I did another comedy re-dub of a foreign language film.

It turned out okay.

It was supposed to be longer than that, but the video editing program I prefer, Ulead Video Studio, was crapping out at 86 percent rendered every time I tried to render it today and I finally just gave up.

You are really only missing about thirty seconds of gags. The rest was credits. So it’s no big deal really. But it pisses me off, because every time I tried to render the vid, it took around ten minutes to get to the point where it was going to crash, and so I spent around 45 minutes trying to get the goddamned thing to work before giving up the ghost.

Admittedly, the original credits were much funnier. Oh well, c’est la vie. It’s very important in life to be able to just give up on the current thing and move on to the next.

The first part is easy. Giving up is super easy. I’m excellent at it. But moving on to the next thing is the hard part. Giving up on the current thing without losing all hope and motivation, that’s the tricky bit. Giving up but keeping going.

And “going on to the next thing” can mean whatever it needs to mean. Trying the same thing again, trying something similar but not the same, trying something completely different, trying the next thing on your list, trying the next thing that pops into your head and seems like a good idea, or at least fun…it can be any or all of those, or something completely different.

The key thing is just to keep on trying. To give up because the first thing you tried did not work out is to make an extremely large generalization (this will never work) based on a single data point (it did not work one time), and that is just plain madness.

You have to keep plugging away, and do it with all your heart, as opposed to doing it while mentally counting down the times you have to try again before you are allowed to give up. If you go into something with that attitude (I can’t wait to stop), then you will not invest more than the minimum effort and focus on it, and hence doom yourself to the failure you were rooting for all along.

And then you can pat yourself on the back for being right all along, and glory in your self-defeat.

That is the sort of thing that prompts me to ask “Would you rather be right, or happy?”. What if your happiness lies on the other side of realizing that you have been wrong to feel so bad for so long? That is was totally unnecessary because with just a small adjustment in your attitude towards life?

Would you have the courage to make that realization, or would you decide that you would rather be miserable for the rest of your life if the alternative requires such a blow to your ego?

Another way of putting it : would you rather feel smart and miserable, or stupid and happy? After all, the realization that you have been stupid should not be such a big deal. You already have low self-esteem, so accepting that you have been stupid about one more thing shouldn’t be a big deal, right?

Oh, but this is different. That chilly pride you take in constantly proving to yourself and the world that you were right about the world sucking and you sucking and life being nothing but misery is the only bit of pride that you absolutely will not abandon.

I mean, sure, your life is constant suffering, but that’s better than having to admit that some person who told you something about having a better attitude that one time was actually right!

It’s like they are trying to take your pain away, those bastards.

But shouldn’t you want someone to take your pain away? Shouldn’t you be ready to hand that pain off to the first person who will have it like it’s a baby with a full diaper?

After all, if you are not willing to part with it, then you are choosing to stay miserable and why would someone do a thing like that?

Seriously. Ask yourself that. Why do I cling so hard to this pain, this thing that I keep saying I would do anything to erase?

It is not necessarily as illogical as it seems. The pain you carry demands a voice. All emotions, even traumatic ones, are information. Something inside you is crying out and the depression and suffering is the voice it uses.

It does not good to try to silence it. The only way to rid yourself of it is to find a way to express all that pain and rage and trauma, and then, its voice heard, it will fade away.

But first, you will have to face yourself, and people do many crazy things trying to avoid doing just that. I spend decades avoiding looking at myself in the mirror because it would just unleashed a massive torrent of self-loathing if I did.

I literally could not face myself. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

But if you want out of your pain bad enough, you will focus your rage on the depression first and smash the cage you have been using to constrain yourself, stand up tall and proud, work the kinks out of your muscles, and breathe deeply of the air of freedom.

Of course, you don’t have to do it. You could just keep waiting for someone to rescue you, or keep waiting for a way out that involves no risk, sacrifice, fear, or pain to come along.

After all, that’s been working well for you so far, right? If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

But you are broken, or so you say.

And what kind of broken does not want to be fixed?

The kind that is happy where it is.

So you must be happy…. right?