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.